Maurice Duverger

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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 became more and more involved in political science and in 1948 founded one of the first faculties for political science in Bordeaux, France. An 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 until 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 the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts.

1 Scientific Work
- 1.1 Duverger on political parties
2 Works
3 External links

[edit] Scientific Work

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At the beginning of his career Duverger taught as a specialist in administrative law in Bordeaux. Thanks to his colleague Pière Maydieu, who also introduced him to the newspapers Le Monde and Libération, he began to deal with the sociology of the right and Constitutional law.

In his first publication "The Constitutions of France" (1944) he explained that the French constitution of 1940 created a "de facto government“. In Libération he also analyzed the legitimacy of the new government of France and devoted himself to social-scientific theory.

In 1946 he expanded his theses, with a special interest in the relation between electoral systems and party systems. This respect shows the heart of his most important publication: "The Political Parties" (1951). The work is one of the classics of party research, translated into several languages. After that thesis Duverger's law was created, and later on he coined the term "semi-presidentialism".

Duverger devoted his career to studing political science subjects and combining them with juridical matters. Among the rest, thus the respect occupies him between social forces and juridical basic conditions. Already shortly after the second world war he exerted himself for the fact that policy sciences flow in increasingly onto the university apprenticeship. Thus he founded in 1948 the institute of political studies in Bordeux.

[edit] Duverger on political parties

Having as a point of reference their structure, Duverger in his book Les partis politiques distinguished 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 its founding is granted by their members' payments, a situation that leads them to gain as many adherents as possible.

These parties tend to develop on a par with 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,