He was born in Angoulême, France. He devised a theory which became known as Duverger's law, which identifies a correlation between voting systems and the formation of a two-party system.
Factors in a Two-Party and Multiparty System (http://www.janda.org/c24/Readings/Duverger/Duverger.htm), in Party Politics and Pressure Groups (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1972), pp. 23-32.
External link
Yahoo! France biography (http://fr.encyclopedia.yahoo.com/articles/d/d0005914_p0.html) (in French)
Duverger's Law is a principle which asserts that a first-past-the-post election system naturally leads to a two-party system.
The discovery of this principle is attributed to MauriceDuverger, a French sociologist who observed the effect and recorded it in several papers published in the 1950s and 1960s.
Duverger himself did not regard his principle as absolute: instead he suggested that first-past-the-post would act to delay the emergence of a new political force, and would accelerate the elimination of a weakening force - proportional representation would have the opposite effect.
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