Abstract

Maurice Duverger passed away on 22 December 2014. Duverger was the main thinker behind the creation and the development of a method for the analysis of institutions, that we could define «combinatorial», that gave attention to both the legal component and the features of the political system. Beyond the specific conclusions he drew from his analysis, Duverger's motivations for devising such method during the crisis of the French regime in the 1950s are still valid today. The Italian legal scholarship has adopted his method to study Italy's transition of the 1990s and, more recently, the French scholarship has also contributed to revive Duverger's intellectual heritage.