The Struggle for Electoral Reform in France*

Robert G. Neumann

American Political Science Review, 1951, vol. 45, issue 3, 741-755

Abstract: The French Constitution does not regulate the precise mode of election to its principal legislative chamber, the National Assembly, beyond stipulating (Art. 3) that it shall be elected on a territorial basis through direct and universal suffrage. This general provision was until recently implemented by a law which established a proportional list system based in general on the principal unit of French local government, the département.The Assembly which enacted these electoral laws was completely dominated by the three big parties of the Left, the Communists, the Socialists, and the Popular Republican Movement (MRP). These groups favored proportional representation for a variety of reasons. First of all, devotion to proportionalism was part and parcel of left doctrine—an important point in a country in which political battles are carried out to a very large extent on the plane of ideas and doctrines. The Communists thought that PR would assure them a large representation in the dominant branch of goverment, i.e., the Assembly, while the MRP, an essentially new party without local organizations and experience with precinct work, considered it more favorable to its interests than a system in which its largely unknown candidates would have been hard-pressed in a struggle of personalities against older, and therefore better-known, men of such traditional parties as, for instance, the Radicals.

Date: 1951
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:45:y:1951:i:03:p:741-755_06

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().