Duverger's Law and the Meaning of Canadian Exceptionalism

Abstract

Duverger's law is an unusually simple and specific elaboration on exactly how political institutions “matter”: It proposes that plurality rule elections result in two-party competition. Canada is commonly thought to violate the law at the national level, but to match its predictions at the district level, and thus not to constitute a genuine counterexample. In fact, analysis of a vast data set of Canadian election returns reveals that these elections are multicandidate events, district by district, year after year. An explanation for this multipartyism may lie in the complicating factor of federalism, because Canadian provinces often feature strikingly different national and provincial party systems. Generally, the Canadian case illustrates that theories relating party systems to electoral law but not to other institutions are unrealistically parsimonious.

Thinking About the Political Impacts of the Electoral College

“…21 While proponents of changing the Electoral College, like Edwards (2004: 135-142), have argued that the role of the Electoral College in reinforcing two-partyism has been greatly exaggerated, in that two-party competition at the local level may spring simply from plurality-based elections in singlemember districts (Duverger, 1959;cf. Cox, 1997), we would note that virtually the only country in the world with a true and durable two-party system at the national level is the U.S. (Gaines, 1999). And if it is not a presidential form of government in conjunction with the Electoral College that is keeping the U.S. so firmly on a two-party track nationally, it is hard to see what other plausible explanation there might be for this long-run phenomenon.…”

Strategic voting in the 2011 and 2015 Polish Senate elections: Testing Duvergerʼs Law in the second-order elections

“…Future research then should provide a more comprehensive answer on whether (or to what extent) strategic behaviour of Polish voters in Senate elections can eventually transform in following elections, as some authors claim that the expectations of Duverger's law, as an equilibrium where only two candidates receive all the votes and the votes obtained by the third and following candidates approximate zero, is reached only over a series of elections (Gaines, 1999). Similarly, only repeated elections under the same electoral system can support or refuse the Tavits and Annus' (2006) 'learning hypothesis' that strategic voting in third-wave democracies tends to increase as voters (but also political elites) become more experienced with the electoral process.…”

Duverger's Law and the Study of Electoral Systems

“…For instance, the Indian 'exception' to Duverger's Law (as a simple-majority single-member district system) is explained by the existence of deep social cleavages generating nearly four effective parties in equilibrium rather than two (Chibber and Kollman, 1998). Social divisions are often reinforced by federal institutions, permitting multipartism or even different party systems to exist at subnational levelsan explanation applied to Duvergerian exceptionalism in both India and Canada (Gaines, 1999).…”