Duverger’s Law is a dead parrot: outside the USA, first-past-the-post voting has no tendency at all to produce two party politics

Political science has very few ‘laws’, perhaps explaining why the discipline has so stubbornly clung onto Maurice Duverger’s famous claim that countries using first-past-the-post voting systems will always have two party politics. It is no exaggeration to say that this proposition still underpins whole fields of research. Yet Patrick Dunleavy explains that modern theory and better evidence now show that the alleged ‘Law’ has lost all credibility.