In accord with the office-seeking theory of parties, we explore the impact of the structure of electoral competition on French parties. We speculated that the Fifth Republic's electoral structure—dual-ballot elections in single-member districts—would produce a multiparty system consisting of parties tailored to the two-ballot mode of winning. To test our proposition we devised two measures of winning for the members of the national assembly's partisan groups: the percentage of members who won the absolute majority that was needed to win on the first ballot and the average shift in the electoral margin of the groups' remaining members from the first to the second ballot. The two measures revealed four distinct ways of winning, each of which fostered a prototypical party.

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A neglected aspect of parliamentary democracies that do not conform to the British model is the relation between executive and legislative leadership. In multiparty systems with strong legislative committees, committee chairmen constitute a governing coalition comparable to the cabinet. Given the coalitional nature of each leadership group, their partisan composition may not be identical; nor need they be equally stable. These are matters of importance for the operation of government. This article examines the relations between the two coalitions in the primordial parliamentary democracy, the French Third Republic. Using correlation analysis, I found a weak partisan relation between the two coalitions during the five legislatures of the interwar years. Using two measures of stability, durability and the continuity of coalitions beyond formal tenure, I found the legislative coalition always more stable. Institutional rules and the multiparty system helped account for these differences. Nevertheless, there was enough variation from legislature to legislature to show that electoral rules and results had an impact. Variations resembled those in the American republic. Periods of greater similarity in partisan composition coincided with greater effectiveness or stability for the executive; periods of divided control coincided with lesser executive stability. This was of consequence for the making of policy.

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