Choose One: Durverger's Law or Fundamental Math Principles.

                According to Durverger’s law, any single-member-district-plurality (SMDP) country should be more conducive to a two party system whereas a proportional representation system should yield itself more conducive to the rule of multiple parties. Is this Law really truth? Or is it just another political scientist who wants his name to go be attached to something? To put this so called “law” to the test we are taking it to the remote country of South Africa, a country that is still considered a child by world standards having only had elections with universal suffrage for the last 19 years since the repeal of Apartheid.

                The National Assembly of South Africa is comprised of 400 seats which are distributed between 10 constituencies. One constituency is a national at large constituency, the other 9 constituencies are providential with the number of seats given to each province based on the population. Mathematically this would mean the District Magnitude for each constituency is 40 seats. Although theoretically this is true, realistically the constituencies range from 4 to 43 seats each.

                After an election is held, seats are given to each party based on how they did proportionally in the election. For every 1% of the vote won by the party, the party receives four seats. These seats are then distributed in a closed list system with party leaders deciding who out of the 400 people on their list will get the prized seats. The only threshold a party needs to reach to get a seat is to get more than .25% of the vote. Any party that fulfills this requirement is guaranteed a seat.

                If Durvirger’s Law is true, in a proportionally representative nation such as South Africa we should see a political system that contains not just two, but many effective parties. To calculate the effective number of parties in the National Assembly, we first calculate the proportion of seats won by each party and then square that proportion. We then add each of the squared proportions together and divide one by that number (N effective parties= 1/∑(proportion of seats won)^2). When we do this for the parties in South Africa, the result we get is surprising. According to the equation, there are 2.28 effective parties within South Africa. This can only mean one thing, either Durverger’s Law is not quite as true as we may have originally thought OR the very fundamentals of the laws of mathematics are flawed and thus our whole universe is about to implode from our flawed math. Personally I believe the first option of the two is the more realistic.

                When we look at the party dynamic in South Africa, we realize that the African National Congress has been the big kid on the block ever since the appeal of Apartheid. In every election since that point the ANC has successfully collected between 60-70% of the vote! When you have a single dominating party like the ANC in a proportional representation, there is not much room left for the other kids to play.

                I would suggest that just although we have found an exception to Durvurger’s law, it still holds true for the most part. We simply have to take into account the party dynamic that takes place within the country and understand that if there is a big bully of a party on the block like the ANC, they might not let the other parties play as much as we would expect.