Duverger’s Law from the Top Down

The literature on Duverger’s law has long bifurcated, with some identifying the root cause of bipartism as specific intra-district rules and processes, while others focus on national rules and processes. Duverger himself considered his “mechanical” and “psychological” effects to be largely intra-district processes. Others have highlighted the importance of national processes, such as presidential elections, in structuring the party system. In a nutshell, some theories focus on the efficient translation of votes into district-level seats, while others focus on the efficient translation of votes into national-level offices. In this paper, I consider one of Duverger’s main cases—England—arguing that what caused her to have a two-party system had much to do with how fiscal power had been concentrated in the hands of responsible ministers after the Glorious Revolution, and relatively little to do with district-level electoral incentives.