Duverger’s Theory

What is social Cleavages?

Duverger argued that the primary engine behind the formation of political parties
can be found in social divisions—the more divisions there are, the greater the demand for
political parties to form (Afonso Da Silva 2006; Clark and Golder 2006).

What is social divisions - cleavages?

In sociology, social divisions are categories such as class, race, gender and geographic
location, that indicate differences in lifestyle and experience.

a cross-cutting cleavage exists when groups on one cleavage overlap among groups on

another cleavage. "Cleavages" may include racial, political, religious divisions in society.

The key aspect of a country’s social structure influencing the demand for the number of
parties, therefore, is not necessarily the total number of cleavages in a country but rather the
total number of cross-cutting cleavages.

most cleavages in a country

797
will not be perfectly cross-cutting or perfectly reinforcing as in our example.

Distinctive representation:

the social pressure for distinctive

representation (and a large party system) depends on the number of cleavages in a country
and increases with the degree to which these cleavages are cross-cutting rather than
reinforcing.

Cross-cutting cleavages: Political cleavages are national, ethnic, linguistic,

and religious divisions that affect political allegiances and policies.
Cleavages can be reinforcing (cumulative) or cross-cutting. For example, if
a nation was divided by cross-cutting cleavages then some people of a
certain ethnic group might be rich while other people of the same ethnic
group might be poor. In a nation divided by reinforcing cleavages, all
people of one ethnic group would be rich and all people of another ethnic
group would be poor. Cross-cutting cleavages were originally suggested as a
mechanism for political stability, as no group can align all its members
along a uniform cleavage-based platform, but rather has to appeal to
members of the group that are spread throughout the groups created by other
cleavages.
https://www.gopopro.com/vocab/2017/2/25/cross-cutting-cleavages
Why social claverages are important or why it need?

Under threat of invasion, internal disorder, or economic collapse, people

eagerly seek strong authority figures who can protect them.

Conversely, conditions of prosperity and security are conducive to tolerance

of diversity in general and democracy in particular.

This helps explain a long-established finding: rich societies are much

likelier to be democratic than poor ones.

Why people are saying that rich societies are more democratic than poor
societies?

One scnerio: One contributing factor is that the authoritarian reaction is

strongest under conditions of insecurity.

Electoral Institutions
Electoral institutions play an important role in determining whether this latent demand for
representation actually leads to the existence of new political parties.

materialist values such as economic growth and maintaining order

postmaterialists give top priority to such goals as environmental
protection, freedom of speech, and gender equality.

The postmodern shift involves an intergenerational change in a wide

variety of basic social norms, from cultural norms linked with ensuring
survival of the species to norms linked with the pursuit of individual well-
being. For example, postmaterialists and the young are markedly more
tolerant of homosexuality than are materialists and the elderly, and they
are far more permissive than materialists in their attitudes toward abortion,
divorce, extramarital affairs, prostitution, and euthanasia. There is also a
gradual shift in job motivations, from maximizing one’s income and job
security toward a growing insistence on interesting and meaningful work.
Economic accumulation for the sake of economic security was the central
goal of industrial society. 

Ironically, their attainment set in motion a process of gradual cultural

change that has made these goals less central, bringing about a rejection of
the hierarchical institutions that helped attain them.

Populist politics, following this definition, revolves around

a charismatic leader who appeals to and claims to embody the will of the
people in order to consolidate his own power. In this personalized form of
politics, political parties lose their importance, and elections serve to
confirm the leader’s authority rather than to reflect the
different allegiances of the people.

Duverger’s theory states that increasing the number of social

cleavages in a country has less of an effect on party system size if the electoral system is
nonproportional than if it is proportional.

Theory states that the size of party system is not a concern on growing number of social
cleavages unless the electroral system is proportional. If it is proportional, there will be
otherwise.

There are two reasons, commonly known as the

“mechanical” and “strategic” effects of electoral laws, for why nonproportional electoral
systems have this moderating effect. We now examine each of these effects in turn.

The Mechanical Effect of Electoral Laws

The mechanical effect of electoral laws refers to the way that votes are translated into
seats.One vote is equal to one seat. The effect of this is the small parties are suffered and
the large parties get rewards if the electoral system is highly disproportional.

Single-member district plurality voting (SMDP) is the system most commonly used for legislative
elections in the United States.

votes are translated into seats—the mechanical effect of the

SMDP system.

Now contrast the way this same distribution of votes would have been translated into
seats
if Duvergerland had used a proportional representation system in a single national district.
Given that the Green Party won 20 percent of the vote, it now obtains twenty legislative
seats.
The Green Party goes from controlling 20 percent of the
legislative seats under PR to being excluded entirely from the legislature under SMDP.
This
reductive effect in the representation of the small party, as well as the electoral bonus
given
to the two large parties, is a direct result of the mechanical effect of the majoritarian
SMDP
electoral system employed in Duvergerland.

If the type of situation that occurred in the St. Ives constituency is repeated in a large
number of constituencies, the “winner-take-all” logic of SMDP systems can lead to the
introduction of a large gap between the share of votes that a party obtains and the share of
seats that it ultimately wins.

electoral bonus,” which resulted from the mechanical way in

which the SMDP system translates votes into seats, was enough to turn an electoral
plurality into a legislative majority.9 This type of legislative majority is sometimes
referred
to as a “manufactured” majority.

The tendency for this to happen is the reason why some scholars refer to SMDP systems
as “majoritarian” systems despite the fact that only a plurality of the votes in a district,
not a majority, is needed to win a seat.

Plurality voting is distinguished from a majoritarian electoral system in which a winning

candidate must receive an absolute majority of votes: more votes than all other candidates
combined. Under plurality voting, the leading candidate, whether he or she has majority of
votes, is elected.

The reason for this difference is that the

size of the support for the Liberal Democrats varied across different districts. Although
the
support for the Liberal Democrats was not sufficient to produce victory in the St. Ives
constituency, it was big enough to win seats in twenty other districts. This indicates that
the extent to which the mechanical effect of the SMDP system punishes small parties is
directly related to how geographically dispersed their electoral support is.
Electoral districts are discrete, geographically bounded territories
drawn for the purpose of electing members to a legislative body.
In contrast, small regional parties, such as Plaid
Cymru in Wales, the Scottish National Party in Scotland, and Sinn Féin and the Ulster
Unionists in Northern Ireland, which garner a much smaller share of the national vote,
have experienced very little disadvantage from the way in which the UK’s SMDP system
translates votes into seats.

This is because the support for these parties is heavily

concentrated in a small number of districts.
When electoral systems are disproportional, their mechanical effect can
be expected to reward large parties and punish small parties.

The Strategic Effect of Electoral Laws

The benefits that majoritarian systems like SMDP bestow on large parties are further
enhanced by a second institutional effect called the strategic effect of electoral laws. To
this point,we have isolated the mechanical effect of electoral laws by taking the way votes
are distributed as given. The strategic effect of electoral laws refers to how the way in
which votes are translated into seats influences the “strategic” behavior of voters and
political elites.
Recognizing that this is going
to happen, voters in these systems have an incentive to engage in strategic voting, and
political elites have an incentive to engage in strategic entry. As we will see, both of
these
actions—strategic voting and strategic entry—bestow even more benefits on large parties
and further penalize small parties.

Strategic voting essentially means voting for your most preferred candidate who has a
realistic chance
of winning.
sincere voting means voting for your most preferred candidate or
party. supporters of small parties that have little realistic chance of
winning seats due to the way that votes are translated into seats have an incentive to vote
strategically. In other words, they have an incentive not to vote for their most preferred
party—a small party—and, instead, give their support to one of the larger parties that they
like.
Strategic entry refers to the decision by political elites about whether to enter the political scene
under the label of their most preferred party or under the label of their most preferred party that has
a realistic chance of winning.

On the other hand,

you could decide to run in the “lesser of two evils” from among those parties that you
estimate to have a realistic chance of winning seats.

The dilemma confronting political elites in an SMDP system can be demonstrated in

another way with the help of the following Strategic Entry Game. Suppose that there are
two left-wing parties (L1 and L2) and one right-wing party (R). Let’s assume that if both
left-wing parties compete in the election, then the right-wing party will win for sure,
because the vote of the left-wing electorate will be split between two “small” parties.
Let’s
also assume that the right-wing party will be defeated if only one left-wing party runs.
Because each left-wing party prefers that the right-wing party be defeated for ideological
reasons, its worst possible outcome occurs if both left-wing parties run. Note, though, that
if only one of the left-wing parties is going to run, then each left-wing party would prefer
that its own party be it. This is because not only would an electoral victory allow it to
implement left-wing policies, but it would also allow the party to consume the benefits
that come with holding office. Without any loss of generality, we can assign to each party
a
value of 0 for its worst outcome (both left-wing parties run and the right-wing party wins)
and a value of 1 to its most preferred outcome (the other left-wing party drops out and it,
the remaining one, wins). We can use a parameter λ (lambda) to represent the value that
each left-wing party places on seeing its fellow left-wing party run instead of it. Because
having the other left-wing party win is better than having the right-wing party win but not
as good as winning itself, it follows that 0 < λ < 1. Ultimately, the two left-wing parties
must decide whether to run or not run.

Nash equilibria: (Run; Don’t

run) and (Don’t run; Run).

The end of fusion candidates contributed quite markedly to

the evolution of a party system in which the Democratic and Republican parties were the
only viable parties outside of New York State (Argersinger 1980).
Summarizing Duverger’s Theory
To sum up, Duverger’s theory states that the size of a country’s party system depends on
the complex interplay of both social and institutional forces.

Duverger’s theory states that the size of a country’s party system depends on the complex interplay
of both social and institutional factors. Social divisions create the “demand” for political parties, and
electoral institutions then determine the extent to which this demand is translated into parties that
win votes (electoral parties) and parties that win seats (legislative parties).

Duverger’s law states that single-member district plurality systems encourage two-party systems.

Duverger’s hypothesis states that proportional representation electoral rules favor multiparty systems.

Proportional electoral systems are like an open dam in

that they permit more of these demands to be translated into parties. It is for this reason
that political scientists frequently say that proportional electoral systems are permissive
and
disproportional ones are nonpermissive.

A key implication of Duverger’s theory, then, is that there are two reasons why a party
system may have few parties. Some countries may have few parties, despite the fact that
they are socially heterogeneous, because they have a nonpermissive electoral system that
prevents this heterogeneity from being reflected in the party system. Alternatively, some
countries may have few parties regardless of how permissive their electoral system is
because
they have few social divisions. In contrast, there is only one way, according to Duverger’s
theory, to end up with many parties—you need a heterogeneous society and a permissive
electoral system.

Conclusions
Political scientists sometimes categorize democracies in terms of the type of party system
that they employ. When they do this, they tend to focus on the number and size of the
parties in a country.
why some countries have many parties and others
have few?
* the interaction between social
Heterogeneity
* the permissiveness of electoral institutions.