- John Louis
Introduction: Breaking Duverger's Law, or Why do Third-Party Candidates Participate in Presidential Politics?
American presidential politics has usually been analyzed as a function of two-party competition. Indeed, the first past-the-post electoral system, and electoral college's mediating influence are supposed to have discouraged third-party candidates.The French Sociologist Maurice Duverger first posited that electoral systems determined party structures. His finding that first past-the-post elections promoted two-party electoral contests has come to be called Duverger's law. In such a system, only a candidate capable of capturing a majority of the vote could win the election, and winner-take-all rules discouraged fringe players from entering the electoral game.
In an electoral system like that of the United States, Duverger's law predicted that third-party candidates were very unlikely to prevail. Nevertheless, multi-candidate elections featured prominently in the history of American presidential politics. Approximately 15% of all U.S. Presidential elections resulted in multi-party elections. What can explain America's divergence from Duveger's law?
