Abstract
I show that, contrary to Duverger’s law, three or four parties receive at least 5 per cent of the votes in most districts in British and Canadian elections. This is so because the voters and the parties are not necessarily short-term utility maximizers as the theory assumes. Still, the basic intuition that fewer parties obtain significant support under single-member district plurality elections is absolutely correct. Duverger also makes an important contribution instressing the impact of electoral formulas, a fruitful antidote to the exclusive emphasis that recent research has given to district magnitude.
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Notes
Note, however, that strictly speaking the vote distribution should be computed at the district level. But Table 1 shows that things are not that different at the district level.
Very similar findings are reported by Katz (1997, p. 147).
These two studies suggest that electoral laws interact with the socio-economic structure (measured by ethnic fragmentation), that is, the impact of ethnic fragmentation emerges only under a permissive electoral system. In fact, a close reading of Table 2 in Clark and Golder (2006) shows no significant interaction effect between ethnic fragmentation and district magnitude.
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Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Jean-François Daoust for excellent research assistance.
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Blais, A. Is Duverger’s law valid?. Fr Polit 14, 126–130 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1057/fp.2015.24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/fp.2015.24