Maurice Duverger

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Maurice Duverger (born June 5 in Angoulême, France, 1917) is a French jurist, sociologist and politician.

Starting his career as a jurist at the University of Bordeaux, Duverger got more and more involved in political science and in 1948 founded one of the first faculties for political science in Bordeaux, France. A emeritus professor of the Sorbonne and member of the FNSP, he has published many books and articles in newspapers, such as Corriere della Sera, la Repubblica, El Pais, and especially, Le Monde.

Duverger has studied the evolution of political systems and the institutions that operate in diverse countries, demonstrating a propensity to use empirical methods of investigation rather than philosophical reasoning.

He devised a theory which became known as Duverger's law, which identifies a correlation between a first-past-the-post election system and the formation of a two-party system. By analysing the political system of France he coined the term semi-presidential system.

From 1989 till 1994 he was a member of the Group of the Party of European Socialists in the European Parliament.

In 1981 he was elected as a member of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

[edit] Duverger on political parties

Having as a point of reference their structure, Duverger in his book Les partis politiques distinguish parties between elite-based parties and mass-based parties.

Elite-based parties rather prefer the quality of their members over their quantity, being their affiliates people of great influence on local or national scale. They have flexible and disorganized structures, in general are weakly disciplined and lack of a developed pragmatic content, allowing each of their members to benefit from an enormous freedom of action. Their funding is generally provided by a sponsor, and as their strength comes from their elected representatives, they are typical parties of parliamentarian creation, which depend on the reputation and support of their benefactors.

Mass-based parties possess a secure organization and a strong structure arranged as a pyramid, with superposed hierarchically-arranged levels. Their members identify themselves more with the party’s ideology than with its leader, so they have an abstract adhesion. Their decisions are based on the participation of each one of its members, and it’s founding is granted by their members payments, situation that leads them to get as much adherents as possible.

These parties tend to develop in par of suffrage and democracy. For instance, elite-based parties execute an often sporadic political labor, focused on elections. However, the disadvantage this implies in relation to their contestant parties (which denote permanent labor and a disciplined and organic structure), impels them to modify their organization to become mass-based parties.

[edit] Works

Les partis politiques (1951)
La participation des femmes à la vie politique (1955)
Les finances publiques (1956)
Méthodes de la science politique (1959)
De la dictadure (1961)
Méthodes de Sciences sociales (1961)
Introduction à la politique (1964)
Sociologie politique (1966)
La démocratie sens les peuple (1967)
Institutions politiques et Droit constitutionnel (1970)
De Fanus: les deux faces de l'Occident (1972)
Sociologie de la politique (1973)
L'autre côté des choses (1977)
King's Mate (1978)
Les orangers du lac Balaton (1980)
Factors in a Two-Party and Multiparty System, in Party Politics and Pressure Groups (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell,