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Appendix 1 – Historical Commentary on the Two-Party System

Table of ContenTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1 – MAKING THE BEST OF THE SYSTEM WE HAVE
CHAPTER 2 – THE CURRENT DYNAMIC IS ‘PROGRESSIVE VERSUS CONSERVATIVE’
CHAPTER 3 – OUR CURRENT PARTY STRUCTURES ARE INEFFECTIVE
CHAPTER 4 – INDEPENDENTS CAN’T FORM EXECUTIVE GOVERNMENT
CHAPTER 5 – BREAKING INTO THE CARTEL
CHAPTER 6 – PATHWAYS TO SOMETHING NEW
CHAPTER 7 – A POTENT POLITICAL FORCE NEEDS PEOPLE
CHAPTER 8 – PRODUCING LEADERS
CHAPTER 9 – KEEPING IT SIMPLE
CHAPTER 10 – DRAFT ORGANISATIONAL MODEL
CHAPTER 11 – PEOPLE
APPENDIX 1 – HISTORICAL COMMENTARY ON THE TWO-PARTY SYSTEM
APPENDIX 2 – AUSTRALIAN COMMENTARY

Modern democracy started to become more defined in Western countries in the early- to mid-19th century. Voting became open to all adult males in the US and the UK around this time. For hundreds of years, voting had been restricted to landowners and taxpayers, a tiny fraction of the population. As electorates became larger, people started to discuss and think about how elections work. Basic plurality voting (first-past-the-post) had been around since ancient times, including in Greece and Rome. A group of different candidates stood for the election and the person with the most votes won.

With the rise of modern democracy, many new voting methods were invented. Most of these alternatives involved achieving more proportional outcomes. Much of the commentary we have is from people talking about the two-party system and the different voting methods in an effort to change them. The understanding of how to influence the electoral system emerged over the 19th and 20th centuries. American political scientist William Riker observed in the early 1980s:

Once these large electorates existed, there also existed a motive for politicians to attempt to manipulate the outcomes in elections, and hence methods other than plurality voting were discussed and adopted. Naturally proponents and opponents of alternative methods also thought deeply about the consequences of alternative methods.[1]

Some of the first commentary on the duality of the Westminster system comes from the 1850s, with arguments and proposals to change the voting system and achieve more proportional representation.

In 1859 Thomas Hare in The Election of Representatives set forth an elaborate method of proportional representation, the single transferable vote, and in 1861 John Stuart Mill popularised it in Considerations on Representative Government which contained a philosophical justification of Hare’s method. Mill believed parliament should contain “not just the two great parties alone” but representatives of me “every minority … consisting of a sufficiently large number,” which number he defined precisely as the number of votes divided by the number of seats.[2]

Thomas Hare was a British lawyer, MP, political scientist and proponent of electoral reform. His scheme was that the UK would be one electorate for the return of all 654 members of the House of Commons. Many different political minorities would get represented.

The idea of the Single Transferable Vote (STV) for how the voting system would work has lived on around the world and in Australia. It is the method of voting for the federal upper house (the Senate), and the upper houses of the Australian states. It is also part of the Hare-Clark system used in the lower house of Tasmania and the ACT.

In 1867 there was a debate in the UK Parliament about cumulative voting, another type of proportional representation. The argument was more about the types of people that would be elected to parliament than a deep examination of the new method’s effects on the two-party system. The two principles in the debate were key figures of their time: John Stuart Mill, an MP, economist and founder of the philosophy of utilitarianism; and Benjamin Disraeli, a conservative politician who twice served as Prime Minister.

Mill, early in the debate:

The right honorable gentleman said one thing that perfectly amazed me. He said that … it was wrong that the representation of any community should represent it only in a single aspect, should represent only one interest—only its Tory or Liberal opinion; and he added that, at present, this was not the case, but that such a state of things would be produced by the adoption of this proposal. I apprehend that then, even more than now, each party would desire to be represented … by those men who would be most acceptable to the general body of the constituencies fully as much, if not more, than they do now.[3]

Disraeli, at some point later:

I have always been of the opinion with respect to this cumulative voting and other schemes having for their object to represent minorities, that they are admirable schemes for bringing crochetty men into this House—an inconvenience which we have hitherto avoided, although it appears that we now have some few exceptions to the general state of things; [John Stuart Mill then sat on the other side of the House] but I do not think we ought to legislate to increase the number of specimens.[4]

The effects of plurality (first-past-the-post) voting on the number of parties was commented on by Henry Droop in 1869. Droop was an English barrister and another advocate for proportional representation. He invented the Droop quota, a commonly used formula in proportional voting. Droop is an early commentator on the strong link between plurality voting and the two-party system:

Each elector has practically only a choice between two candidates or sets of candidates. As success depends upon obtaining a majority of the aggregate votes of all the electors, an election is usually reduced to a contest between the two most popular candidates or sets of candidates. Even if other candidates go to the poll, the electors usually find out that their votes will be thrown away, unless given in favour of one or the other of the parties between whom the election really lies.[5]

Later, in 1881, he said:

These phenomena [of two-party systems] I cannot explain by any theory of a natural division between opposing tendencies of thought, and the only explanation which seems to me to account for them is that the two opposing parties into which we find politicians divided in each of these countries [including the United Kingdom] have been formed and are kept together by majority voting.[6]

I am far from imagining that the substitution of proportional representation for majority voting would prevent the bulk of the members of such a representative assembly as the House of Commons from being still divided, ordinarily into two principal parties.[7]

In 1896, American academic A. Lawrence Lowell published Governments and Parties in Continental Europe. The work analysed the implementation and development of various party and parliamentary structures in different European countries. Lowell went on to be the president of Harvard University for 22 years and a well-known public figure (he was once on the cover of Time magazine). In this book he noted that continental Europe, broadly speaking, tended to avoid the rigid two-party structure, more commonly resulting in multi-party dynamics:

A study of the nature and development of parties is … the most important one that can occupy the student of political philosophy to-day [sic]. Among Anglo-Saxon people … there are usually two great parties which dispute for mastery in the state. But in the countries on the continent of Europe this is not usually true. We there find a number of parties or groups which are independent of each other to a greater or less extent, and form coalitions, sometimes of a most unnatural kind, to support or oppose the government of the hour.[8]

Lowell also refuted the notion that the two-party system, at least in the UK, was struggling. He further argued for the parliamentary system’s requirement of a two-party split:

… it has been frequently asserted that the two great parties in the House of Commons are destined to come to an end, and be replaced by a number of independent groups, [but] the prophecy does not accord with existence.[9]

A division into two parties is not only the normal result of the parliamentary system, but also an essential condition of its success.[10]

… a division of the Chamber into two parties, and two parties only, is necessary in order that the parliamentary form of government should permanently produce good results.[11]

There were other rigorous defences of the two-party system at the time. For example, American author Professor Paul S. Reinsch published a work called World Politics: At the End of the Nineteenth Century as Influenced by the Oriental Situation. Note the words ‘great organizations’:

The political experience of the last two centuries has proved that free government and party government are almost convertible terms. It is still as true as when Burke wrote his famous defense of party, in his Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, that, for the realization of political freedom, the organization of the electorate into regular and permanent parties is necessary. Parliamentary government has attained its highest success only in those countries where political power is held alternately by two great national parties. As soon as factional interests become predominant; as soon as the stability of government depends upon the artificial grouping of minor conflicting interests; as soon as the nation lacks the tonic effect of the mutual criticisms of great organizations, the highest form of free government becomes unattainable.[12]

1901, with Federation and the new Australian Constitution, was the key point in Australia’s history where we could have taken a turn towards something different and changed our party system.

The creation of a new country with a new constitution presented an opportunity. One person who saw this opportunity was Thomas Ashworth from Melbourne. He had run away to sea at 13 and then went on to be a carpenter, architect and politician. In 1901, along with his brother, he published Proportional Representation Applied to Party Government: A New Electoral System.

The Ashworths liked the idea of proportional representation and believed in the importance of the two-party state. Their basic idea was that there should be multi-member electorates with proportional representation, but with only the main two parties being able to compete. Proportional voting, in their view, was simply a means to give the public the best choices the two parties could offer. The challenge of making it onto the party’s candidates list would act as a filter and also allow for minorities to be represented. The restriction to only two parties would maintain the majority–minority dynamic and the stability of the system.

The preface to the work reads: 

The claim that every section of the people is entitled to representation appears at first sight so just that it seems intolerable that a method should have been used all these years which excludes the minority in each electorate from any share of representation; and, of course, the injustice becomes more evident when the electorate returns several members. But in view of the adage that it is the excellence of old institutions which preserves them, it is surely a rash conclusion that the present method of election has no compensating merit. We believe there is such a merit—namely, that the present method of election has developed the party system. Once this truth is grasped, it is quite evident that the Hare system would be absolutely destructive to party government, since each electorate would be contested, not by two organized parties, but by several groups. For it is precisely this splitting into groups which is causing such anxiety among thoughtful observers as to the future of representative institutions…The object of this book is to suggest a reform, which possesses the advantages of both methods and the disadvantages of neither; which will still ensure that each electorate is contested by the two main parties, but will allow its just share of representation to each; and which will, by discouraging the formation of minor groups, provide a remedy for the evil instead of aggravating it.[13]

The Ashworths also made an interesting historical comparison between the 14th and 19th century Westminster systems:

How do the conditions presented by the nineteenth century differ from those of the fourteenth? And how is the problem of representation affected? We have seen that the great forces which animated the nation in the fourteenth century were organization and leadership. Have these forces ceased to operate? Assuredly not. In the fourteenth century we had a united people organized under its chosen leaders against the encroachments of the King and nobility on its national liberty. In the nineteenth century the people have won their political independence, but the struggle is now carried on between two great organized parties. The principle of leadership is still as strong as ever. The careers of Pitt, Peel, Palmerston, Beaconsfield, and Gladstone attest that fact. The one great difference, then, between the fourteenth and the nineteenth centuries is that instead of one party there are two. The problem of representation in the fourteenth century was to keep the people together in one united party, and to allow them to select their most popular leaders. Surely the problem is different in the nineteenth century. The requirements now are to organize the people into two great parties, and to allow each party separately to elect its most popular leaders. And yet we are still using the same method of election as our forefathers used six centuries ago. Although the conditions have entirely changed, we have not adapted the electoral machinery to the change. The system of single-membered electorates was rational in the fourteenth century, because there was only one party. Is it not on the face of it absurd to-day, when there are two parties?[14]

On the division between the two parties:

A more rational view of the distinction which often underlies party divisions is between those who desire change and those who oppose change. J.S. Mill points out how the latter may often be useful in preventing progress in a wrong direction. There are times when such attitude is called for, but generally speaking we may say that the fundamental distinction between parties should be a difference of opinion as to the direction of progress. Nor is it inconsistent for a party to change its opinion or alter its policy; on the contrary, it is essential to progress. The majority must often modify its policy in the light of the criticism of the minority, and the minority must often drop the unpopular proposals which have put it in a minority. These features are all essential to the working of the political machine.[15]

An interesting historical note is that at the time Lowell, Reinsch and the Ashworths were writing, the labour movement was in existence, but it had not yet begun its successful journey to become one of the two major parties in some of the countries they wrote about. While there was an awareness of socialism, the idea of the labour party itself did not rate a mention in their commentaries.

In the first quarter of the 20th century, proportional voting had its time in the sun. This corresponded with the rise of the Labour Party as a significant electoral force, William Riker observed.

Practical publicists, excited by the controversy over proportional representation, which was considered or adopted in most European countries between 1900 and 1925, tended to favour proportional representation if they belonged to parties without a majority and to oppose it if they belonged to parties with the majority or close to it…One author who explicitly stated this belief was J. Ramsay MacDonald, later a Labour prime minister, who wrote frequently against proportional representation…(MacDonald 1909, p. 137). As a socialist he thought the plurality system was a good discipline for new socialist parties like the Labour party, and furthermore, when his party won, he wanted it to win the whole thing—His Majesty’s Government—not just a chance at a coalition.[16]

As proportional representation became a common reality, the links between the voting systems and the party structures became more evident. There was more criticism of the new voting methods.

Two strands of intellectual development removed the doubts. One was the spread of dissatisfaction in the 1930s with proportional representation; the other was an increased scholarly examination of the origins of the two-party system that characterized the successful American polity…An excellent example of the effect of that experience is observable in the two editions of a Fabian Society tract by Herman Finer, a prominent student of comparative politics. In the initial edition (1924), he criticized proportional representation in much the same way as had MacDonald fifteen years earlier, that is, as a system that confused responsibility. In the second edition (1935), however, he added a postscript in which he blamed proportional representation in Italy and Germany for increasing the number of political parties. Then he attributed the weakness of executives and the instability of governments to the multiplicity of parties, and he explained the rise of Mussolini and Hitler as a reaction: ‘people become so distracted by fumbling governments, that they will acquiesce in any sort of dictatorship… (Finer 1935, p. 16). Hermens’s Democracy or Anarchy: A Study of Proportional Representation (1941) constitutes the most elaborate indictment of this electoral system for its encouragement of National Socialism.[17]

Observations of the two-party system and its relationship to plurality voting were refined and reformulated by Maurice Duverger in Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State (1951, 3rd ed. 1964). Duverger was a French political scientist and left-wing politician. In a section of the book devoted to the two-party system, he laid out a myriad of observations on the system and its effects.

On the differences between the French and UK systems of government:

The experts emphasize the fact that the British Cabinet enjoys at all times the right to dissolve Parliament, whereas the French government is less well-armed against the National Assembly; for them the threat of dissolution appears to be the essential means of avoiding ministerial crises. This explanation is advanced by some Englishmen who reproach the French with having adopted the parliamentary ‘motor’ and having forgotten to include a ‘brake’. This explanation, although closer to the truth than the other, is still very inadequate; in practice the British Cabinet never uses the power of dissolution to bring pressure to bear on Parliament in order to avoid a vote of censure or to escape its consequences, for the very good reason that such a vote is almost always impossible, since an absolute majority is in the hands of a single party. And here the fundamental difference separating the two systems clearly shows itself: the number of parties…a homogenous and powerful Cabinet has at its disposition a stable and coherent majority. In the other case a coalition between several parties, differing in their programmes and their supporters, is required to set up a ministry, which remains paralysed by its internal divisions as well as by the necessity of maintaining amidst considerable difficulties the precarious alliance on which its parliamentary majority is based.[18]

On the US system:

It is not always easy to make the distinction between two-party and multi-party systems because there exist alongside the major parties a number of small groups. In the United States, for example, in the shadow of the two Democratic and Republican giants there are to be found a few pygmies: the Labor, Socialist, Farmer, Prohibitionist, and Progressive parties…However, the obvious disproportion between them and the major traditional parties, as well as their local and ephemeral character, makes it possible for us to consider the United States system as typically two-party.[19]

On the resetting of the British system after Labor got one of the top two spots:

…the dual nature of the British system is undeniable. For we must rise above the restricted and fragmentary view to examine the general tendencies of the system. We then note that England has had two parties throughout her whole history up to 1906, when the Labour movement began to show signs of development, that since 1918 and especially since 1924 there has been a gradual process of elimination of the Liberal party tending to the re-establishment of a new two-party system, and that at the present moment this process seems to be near its end.[20]

On the US system (again):

In the United States dualism has never been seriously threatened; the parties have changed profoundly since the rivalry between Jefferson and Hamilton which epitomized the opposition of Republicans to Federalists, the former defending State rights, the latter urging an increase in the powers of the Union. After the break-up of the Federalist party and a period of confusion the two-party system reappeared with the opposition between the Democrats grouped around Jackson and the ‘National-Republicans’, led by Clay and Adams, who were also called ‘Whigs’; these different names masked the old Jeffersonian party. The Civil War naturally introduced considerable confusion into the position of the parties and their organization; none the less [sic] it did not appreciably modify the two-party system, which reappeared after the war in the antithesis between republicans and Democrats.”[21]

On the situation with the creation of the Commonwealth countries:

…in the countries of the British Commonwealth the traditional opposition of Tories and Whigs, of Conservatives and Liberals, underwent a profound crisis at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the birth of Socialist parties gave rise to a three-party system. The question could then be asked whether this system was not going to become permanent. However, the two-party system triumphed in the end, as a result either of the elimination of the Liberal party or of its fusion with the Conservatives.[22]

On the effects of socialism on the two– party structure:

“The birth of Socialist parties was an almost universal phenomenon in Europe and the British Dominions at the turn of the century. However, the two-party system was not everywhere destroyed. As a matter of face only one of the countries in which a two-party system flourished previously was unable to re-establish it: Belgium, because of the electoral reform of 1899. Everywhere else the two-party system suffered a period of eclipse of varying duration, to be reborn later in a new guise approximately in conformity with the class-struggle pattern of Marxist doctrine: opposition between a Bourgeois and a Socialist party. The former is sometimes the product of a fusion between two older parties, Conservative and Liberal, as is the case in Australia and New Zealand.[23]

On the labour movement obtaining one of the two-party spots:

What we are considering is much more a ‘Conservative-Labour’ than a ‘Conservative–Socialist’ dualism. The new two-party system was established only in countries with Socialist parties based on Trade Unions, indirect in structure, with little doctrinal dogmatism, and of reformist and non-revolutionary tendencies. The last feature is fundamental: a two-party system cannot be maintained if one of the parties seeks to destroy the established order.[24]

On the tendency towards dualism in politics:

None the less [sic] the two-party system seems to correspond to the nature of things, that is to say that political choice usually takes the form of a choice between two alternatives. A duality of parties does not always exist, but almost always there is a duality of tendencies. Every policy implies a choice between two kinds of solution: the so-called compromise solutions lean one way or the other. This is equivalent to saying that the centre does not exist in politics: there may well be a Centre party but there is no centre tendency, no centre doctrine. The term ‘centre’ is applied to the geometrical spot at which the moderates of opposed tendencies meet: moderates of the Right and moderates of the Left. Every Centre is divided against itself and remains separated into two halves, Left-Centre and Right-Centre. For the Centre is nothing more than the artificial grouping of the right wing of the Left and the left wing of the Right. The fate of the Centre is to be torn asunder, buffeted and annihilated: torn asunder when one of its halves votes Right and the other Left, buffeted when it votes as a group first Right then left, annihilated when it abstains from voting. The dream of the Centre is to achieve a synthesis of contradictory aspirations; but synthesis is a power only of the mind. Action involves choice and politics involves action.[25]

On dualism throughout history:

Throughout history all the great factional conflicts have been dualist: Armagnacs and Burgundians, Guelphs and Ghibellines, Catholics and Protestants, Girondins and Jacobins, Conservatives and Liberals, Bourgeois and Socialists, ‘Western’ and Communist: these antitheses are simplified, but only by neglecting secondary differences. Whenever public opinion is squarely faced with great fundamental problems it tends to crystallize round two opposed poles. The natural movement of societies tends towards the two-party system…[26]

On the way the trade unions mobilised to take one of the spots:

…one of the deep-seated reasons which have led all Anglo-Saxon Socialist parties to organize themselves on a Trade Union basis; it alone could put at their disposal sufficient strength for the ‘take-off’, small parties being eliminated or driven back into the field of local campaigns. The simple-majority system seems equally capable of re-establishing dualism when it has been destroyed by the appearance of a third party.[27]

On the effects of voting systems:

…the simple-majority single-ballot system favours the two-party system. Of all the hypotheses that have been defined in this book, this approaches the most nearly perhaps to a true sociological law. An almost complete correlation is observable between the simple-majority single-ballot system and the two-party system: dualist countries use the simple-majority vote and simple-majority vote countries are dualist. The exceptions are very rare and can generally be explained as the result of special conditions.[28]

William Riker was an eminent American political scientist of the 20th century. He brought the idea of game theory and maths into political behaviour and wrote about how people formed political coalitions. It was Riker, in his 1982 paper The Two-party System and Duverger’s Law: An Essay on the History of Political Science, who labelled Duverger’s key phrase (‘the simple-majority single-ballot system favours the two-party system’) as ‘Duverger’s law’. In this paper he also provided a history of the development of scholarly understandings of the how the system worked.

On Duverger’s law:

It should be the case…that political science, like any other science, has a history, even if it has not heretofore been chronicled. My intention in this essay is to demonstrate that a history does exist, and my vehicle is a particular series of reformulations called Duverger’s law. I am not undertaking this demonstration out of chauvinism, merely to claim for students of politics the name and privilege of scientists, but rather to show that the accumulation of knowledge is possible even when dealing with such fragile and transitory phenomenon’s as political institutions. This is also why I deal with Duverger’s law, a not very well accepted proposition dealing with institutions of only the last two hundred years. If it is to be demonstrated that knowledge has accumulated, even in this not yet satisfactorily formulated ‘law’ about an ephemeral institution, then I will have demonstrated at least the possibility of the accumulation of knowledge about politics.[29]

Each elector has practically only a choice between two candidates or sets of candidates. As success depends upon obtaining a majority of the aggregate votes of all the electors, an election is usually reduced to a contest between the two most popular candidates or sets of candidates. Even if other candidates go to the poll, the electors usually find out that their votes will be thrown away, unless given in favour of one or the other of the parties between whom the election really lies.[30]

On the rational choices of donors and potential leaders in regards to third and minor parties:

The interesting question about such parties is not why they begin, but why they fail. I believe the answer is that donors and leaders disappear. A donor buys future influence and access, and many donors are willing to buy from any party that has a chance to win…But as rational purchasers they are not likely to donate to a party with a tiny chance of winning, and in a plurality system, most third parties have only that chance…Similarly a potential leader buys a career, and as a rational purchaser he has no interest in a party that may lose throughout his lifetime.[31]

[1] Riker, William H. 1982. “The Two-Party System and Duverger’s Law: An Essay on the History of Political Science”. The American Political Science Review 76 (4): 753-766, p. 755.

[2] Riker, “The Two-Party System and Duverger’s Law: An Essay on the History of Political Science”, p. 755.

[3] Hansard. United Kingdom of Great Britain. Parliamentary Debates, Legislative Assembly, 05 July 1867, 1103-1104. https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1867/jul/05/committee-progress-july-4.

[4] Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, p. 1112.

[5] Droop, Henry R., On the political and social effects of different methods of electing representatives (London: Juridical Society, 1871), 469-507, quoted in William H. Riker, “The Two-Party System and Duverger’s Law: An Essay on the History of Political Science.” The American Political Science Review 76 (4): 753-766, p. 756.

[6] Droop, Henry R. 1881. “On Methods of Electing Representatives”. Journal of the Statistical Society of London 44 (2): 141-196, p. 164.

[7] Droop, “On Methods of Electing Representatives”, p. 164.

[8] Lowell, A. Lawrence. 1896. Governments and Parties in Continental Europe. 1st ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, pp. 69–70.

[9] Lowell, Governments and Parties in Continental Europe, p. 71.

[10] Lowell, Governments and Parties in Continental Europe, p. 72.

[11] Lowell, Governments and Parties in Continental Europe, pp. 73-74.

[12] Reinsch, Paul S. 1900. World Politics at the End of the Nineteenth Century: As Influenced by the Oriental Situation. 1st ed. Norwood: Macmillan Company, pp. 327–328.

[13] Ashworth, T. R. & H. P. C. Ashworth. 1901. Proportional Representation Applied to Party Government; A New Electoral System. 1st ed. London: Swan Sonnenschein, pp. vii-viii.

[14] Ashworth & Ashworth, Proportional Representation Applied to Party Government; A New Electoral System, pp. 10-11.

[15] Ashworth & Ashworth, Proportional Representation Applied to Party Government; A New Electoral System, pp. 115-116.

[16] Riker, William H. 1982. “The Two-Party System and Duverger’s Law: An Essay on the History of Political Science”. The American Political Science Review 76 (4): 753-766, p. 757.

[17] Riker, “The Two-Party System and Duverger’s Law: An Essay on the History of Political Science”, p. 757.

[18] Duverger, Maurice. (1951) 1964. Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State. Paris: Armond Colin. 3rd ed., London: Methuen & Co Ltd, pp. 206-207. Citations refer to the Methuen & Co Ltd 3rd edition.

[19] Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, pp. 207-208.

[20] Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, p. 208.

[21] Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, p. 209.

[22] Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, p. 210.

[23] Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, p. 213.

[24] Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, p. 214.

[25] Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, p. 215.

[26] Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, p. 216.

[27] Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, p. 227.

[28] Duverger, Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, p. 217.

[29] Riker, William H. 1982. “The Two-Party System and Duverger’s Law: An Essay on the History of Political Science”. The American Political Science Review 76 (4): 753-766, p. 754.

[30] Riker. “The Two-Party System and Duverger’s Law: An Essay on the History of Political Science”, p. 756.

[31] Riker. “The Two-Party System and Duverger’s Law: An Essay on the History of Political Science”, p. 765.