| The essence and core of the politics are party and election.The relationship between electoral system and party system is always the key issue of the politics.The Duverger's Law,that 'the simple-majority single-ballot system favors the two-party system' is one of the most famous findings of the study on the political consequences of the electoral system.Since its birth in the 20th century,Duverger s law has been widely discussed by scholars and its validity has been verified in many democratic countries.Japan use Medium-sized districts during 1947-1993 which was a compromise between single-member districts and large districts.The essence of Medium-sized districts is the combination of Multi-Member District and the Single Non Transferable Vote. It was neither merely majority representation nor proportional representation.Therefore,before uising Duverger's law to analyze the influence of the Medium-sized districts on its political party system, we must develop the rule first. Otherwise, the particularity of Japanese system also lied in the situation that there were two party systems under one electoral system: After 1955,the Japanese political system came into a dominant one-party system which was called '1955 system'.Did it mean that Japanese case was a exception of Duverger's law at that time?The most powerful effect of any electoral system(which is independent variable in Duverger's law)are felt at the district level,but the party system (dependent variable) must be identified at the national level.It is obvious that there is a dislocation of analysis between district level competition and national level competition,Thus we put forward a hypotheses that there exist some variables which have impact on party system during the process of transformation between the district level. This paper analyzes the relationship between the electoral system and party system through an empirical study by using the method of analysis based on Duverger s law to verify the hypotheses.
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