Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Series Editors' Preface
- Preface
- PART I INTRODUCTION
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Duverger's propositions
- PART II STRATEGIC VOTING
- PART III STRATEGIC ENTRY
- PART IV ELECTORAL COORDINATION AT THE SYSTEM LEVEL
- PART V COORDINATION FAILURES AND DEMOCRATIC PERFORMANCE
- PART VI CONCLUSION
- APPENDICES
- References
- Subject Index
- Author Index
2 - Duverger's propositions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- Series Editors' Preface
- Preface
- PART I INTRODUCTION
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Duverger's propositions
- PART II STRATEGIC VOTING
- PART III STRATEGIC ENTRY
- PART IV ELECTORAL COORDINATION AT THE SYSTEM LEVEL
- PART V COORDINATION FAILURES AND DEMOCRATIC PERFORMANCE
- PART VI CONCLUSION
- APPENDICES
- References
- Subject Index
- Author Index
Summary
Students of politics have asked how electoral laws affect the formation and survival of political parties since mass elections first became common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Henry Droop, an English advocate of proportional representation (and inventor of the Droop quota), noted as early as 1869 that plurality elections promote what later scholars have called “strategic” or “tactical” voting:
As success depends upon obtaining a majority of the aggregate votes of all the electors, an election is usually reduced to a contest between the two most popular candidates.…Even if other candidates go to the poll, the electors usually find out that their votes will be thrown away, unless given in favour of one or other of the parties between whom the election really lies
(quoted in Riker 1982:756).Droop was also surely aware of the plurality system's tendency to underrepresent minority parties – a topic generally discussed today under the rubric of “disproportionality,” “big-party bias,” or the “mechanical effect.” In any event, by 1881 he had enunciated a version of what is now called Duverger's Law:
the only explanation which seems to me to account for [the two-party systems in the United States, United Kingdom, etc.] is that the two opposing parties into which we find politicians divided in each of these countries have been formed and are kept together by majority [what we now call plurality] voting
(quoted in Riker 1982:756–7).- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Making Votes CountStrategic Coordination in the World's Electoral Systems, pp. 13 - 34Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997