The Reaffirmation of a Multiparty System in France

In accord with the office-seeking theory of parties, we explore the impact of the structure of electoral competition on French parties. We speculated that the Fifth Republic's electoral structure—dual-ballot elections in single-member districts—would produce a multiparty system consisting of parties tailored to the two-ballot mode of winning. To test our proposition we devised two measures of winning for the members of the national assembly's partisan groups: the percentage of members who won the absolute majority that was needed to win on the first ballot and the average shift in the electoral margin of the groups' remaining members from the first to the second ballot. The two measures revealed four distinct ways of winning, each of which fostered a prototypical party.

The Election of Blacks to City Councils: Clarifying the Impact of Electoral Arrangements on the Seats/Population Relationship

The notion that at-large elections for city council seats are discriminatory toward blacks has recently been attacked as empirically invalid. Recent studies have reached conflicting conclusions as to whether electoral arrangements or socioeconomic factors are the major influence on how proportionately blacks are represented. This article addresses this issue, using a regression-based analysis in which proportionality is treated as a relationship across cities with electoral structure as a specifying variable. Socioeconomic variables found to be important in other studies are included. The results support the traditional notion and suggest that the electoral structure begins to have a discernible impact on the level of black representation once the black population reaches 10 percent of the total municipal population. While one socioeconomic variable, the relative income of the city's black population, is found to affect the election of blacks, its impact is greater than that of the electoral structure only when the black population is less than 15 percent.

The Mid-Nineteenth Century Electoral Structure

It is far too early to talk with any real certainty about the mid-nineteenth century electoral structure. The very materials of which it was built are in dispute, let alone the shape of the edifice. A deference school of historians is challenging traditional notions of the growth of political individualism in the period, while so-called quantitative historians are beginning to question the assumptions and approach of both deference historians and traditionalists. Serious and detailed study of the questions involved has hardly begun. Still, some comment on the present state of the controversy may not be entirely out of place. An enduring interpretation can only be constructed of sound materials; and I am by no means certain of the soundness of some of those now being put forward for our use.W. O. Aydelotte, in a paper read a couple of years ago and soon to be published in a series of essays entitled The History of Parliamentary Behavior, notes the divergence of opinion among historians on the role of the electorate in shaping parliamentary opinion after 1832. As he rightly suggests, Norman Gash in his Politics in the Age of Peel appears to be of two minds on the subject, depending on whether one reads his introduction or his text. In the former Professor Gash stresses the increase of popular influence on Parliament, in the latter the continuance of traditional influences over the mass of the electorate. D. C. Moore comes down heavily on the side of the latter influences, contending that a relatively few leaders of what he has called “deference communities” represented effective electoral opinion, which was simply registered by the mass of the electorate.