Career
A member of Doriot's fascist Parti Populaire Français from age 20, Maurice Duverger completed his studies in from the Bordeaux Department of Law in 1942, before lecturing in law at Poitiers in 1942, and Bordeaux in 1943 (where he would, in 1948, found the Institut d'Études Politiques as its first director). He also taught at Vichy France's Institut d'Études Corporatives et Sociales.
In his first publication, "The Constitutions of France" (1944), he explained that the French constitution of 1940 created a "de facto government". However, towards the end of the war, Duverger grew close to the Resistance, and in Libération analyzed the legitimacy of the new government of France and devoted himself to social-scientific theory.
After the War, he taught in the faculty of law and economic sciences in Paris, 1955 to 1985, and contributed to Libération and Le Monde. From 1989 to 1994, he sat in the European Parliament as an MEP for the Italian Communist Party.
In 1946 he expanded his theses, with a special interest in the relation between electoral systems and party systems. This interest is at the heart of his most important publication: "The Political Parties" (1951). The work is one of the classics of party research, translated into several languages. That thesis led to Duverger's law, and later he coined the term "semi-presidentialism".
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