The second round of the French election, to be held on July 7, carries some interesting lessons about democracy. In each circumscription where no candidate obtained more than 50% of the votes in the first round, those who got more than 12.5% are allowed to run in the second round. A political party or coalition whose candidate came third or lower may have an interest (and an informal obligation under electoral agreements) to pressure him to drop out in order not to split the votes among the two major candidates in case the election of one of them would be prejudicial to its post-election position in the National Assembly. “Centrist” parties agreed with the leftist New Popular Front to try to block the “far-right” National Rally. (I put “far-right” in scare quotes because NR is not unquestionably farther to the right than NPF is to the left, and many of their statist proposals are similar.) This strategy led 224 candidates to drop out in the 577 circumscriptions. (See “French Elections: 224 Candidates Have Officially Withdrawn from the Second Round,” Le Monde, July 2, 2024.)
The purpose of a second round is to increase the chances (or to guarantee, depending on the exact setup) that the elected candidate will be able to claim to represent the “will of the people,” that is, 50%+1 of the individuals making up “the people.” One might think that, for a worshipper of democracy, removing one option from the voters’ menu would be sinful. Technically, it violates the condition called “neutrality” in democratic theory, for it favors some options over others. In reality, though, limiting options presented to the voters necessarily happens all the time, one way or another, if only because there are zillions of possible collective (political) choices; each voter potentially has his own ideal option.
For any single voter, voting choice limitations are inconsequential because his vote, whatever the menu, is not decisive. He (including she, of course) would stay home and the winner would not change. However, a political strategy of making one candidate drop out may change the collective choice resulting from the election, compared to what it would otherwise have been. The contradictions and inconsistencies of democratic mythology are numerous.
No democratic gadgetry can make an election or referendum better express “the will of the people,” which does not exist anyway. As I noted in a previous post, different democratic voting methods can achieve widely different results. Interpreting the work of Donald Saari (“Millions of Election Outcomes from a Single Profile,” Social Choice and Welfare, 1992), Gordon Tullock wrote (in Government Failure: A Primer in Public Choice, 2002):
Many different voting rules are used in the world and each leads to a somewhat different outcome. Saari has produced a rigorous mathematical proof that for a given set of voters with unchanged preferences, any outcome can be obtained with at least one voting method.
Combining all that with the Condorcet Paradox and its contemporary extensions, it would be an error to search for the unfindable majority. A majority is only one possible majority among many, depending on the voting system and back-office politics, not to mention the frequent bureaucratic influence on the political agenda. As political scientist William Riker would put it, democratic decisions are either dictatorial or “arbitrary nonsense, at least some of the time” (see his Liberalism Against Populism, 1982).
The non-negligible benefit of constitutional democracy (“constitutional” means “limited”) is to offer voters, when enough are dissatisfied with their rulers, a low-cost means to get rid of them. Liberal democracy (which, in its classical sense, means constitutional democracy), Riker writes, allows for “an intermittent and sometimes random popular veto” that has some capability of restraining “official tyranny.” We must not ask too much from democracy.
As much as the limitation of the options presented to an electorate is unavoidable, the constant limitation of individual choices by collective choices is not the only imaginable state of the world. It is generally inefficient or immoral or both. A collective choice removes many options from the opportunity sets of individuals. It has a direct effect on the choices of all individuals who would have done what is now forbidden. This, not democratic mythology or gadgetry, is the important issue.
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I instructed ChatGPT to “generate an image illustrating democracy.” I did not tell “him” anything else. He described his image (the featured image of this post, reproduced below) as follows: “A vibrant and diverse group of people standing together in a large open space, each holding a different flag representing various countries around the world. In the center, there is a large, ornate ballot box on a raised platform, symbolizing democracy. Above the scene, a bright sun shines, casting a hopeful and unifying light over the crowd. The background includes iconic global landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, and the Great Wall of China, representing international unity and cooperation.” It is a vacuous concept of democracy: democracy is nice and good; but it is probably widely shared, as the bot’s database attests. (“He” produced a second image, at the same level of vacuity.)
Democracy is nice, good, and vacuous, if we believe DALL-E
READER COMMENTS
Jim Glass
Jul 5 2024 at 1:49am
Who says that? Is “will of the people” written in French electoral law? I don’t know, just asking. But as political scientists tell us that in general elections the rationally ignorant masses more often vote ‘against’ than ‘for’ (thus the massive negative campaigning) I don’t see how the “will of the people” statement is supposed to fit in.
E.g., in Britain right now as I write the Tories reportedly are being hammered through the basement floor deep into the ground. But the polls say very few are voting ‘for’ Labour. Indeed, Labour’s leaders have kept their mouths zipped about Labour policies, so as not to distract voters from how angry they are at the Tories. (Much as FDR ran a silent campaign sweeping the country from Hoover in 1932 amid the Depression.) I find it hard to square this with any rhetoric that the election is supposed to represent “the will of the people” in any positive sense. In the negative sense of “purge the d*** Tories”, sure. But I don’t see how one can say it is impossible for an election to meet the will of the people in that sense. It sure can!
In light of this, ISTM the real purpose of the French second round may be just to produce the candidate who is the least objectionable to the most voters. Which is an eminently sensible desire if there is an intent to minimize the virulent tribal-political warfare that has produced the daunting list of so many failed democracies, and with which the French in particular have had ample historical experience. (The USA…I won’t digress.) This evident purpose is supported by the fact that historically the second round has produced significantly more moderate-centrist winners than the first round has. (Also by the fact that I’ve seen several French commentators state it explicitly.)
An electoral system can be designed to provide incentives to inflame the partisan extremes or strengthen the stable moderate center. The latter has been devoutly desired all the way back to Athens.
Indeed! The most important of which is the survival of the democracy itself, or not. Back to Athens. I may have mentioned this before, but it truly is Democracy 101, almost nobody knows the story, and today is the anniversary of the start of our “democracy”. To put a great deal of history and political perfidy in half a nutshell…
In the 6th Century BC, Solon set up world democracy try #1, giving all citizens the vote. But they lived in three disparate regions, the city, plains and hills. So ambitious political operators gained power by stoking resentments in each against the other. “The city merchants are robbing us on price … The plains farmers are withholding food… etc.” (Voting ‘against’ goes way back to very first days!) The internecine struggles that resulted produced a new tyranny. Fail.
After the tyranny self-destructed came democracy try #2. This time citizens voted through “tribes” (think, election districts) that were 1/3rd each city, plains and hill territory. The politicians could no longer gain by ripping each other as before, so now they had to make proposals that appealed to the whole polity. See the difference? It’s huge. Incentives are everything. Athens was off to achieve all it is still remembered for. Voting systems sure do make a difference. (A full peanut shell’s worth of more details.)
The first duty of a democracy is to survive, with a voting method that makes that possible. And democracies have a terrible survival rate. The Founders knew this and profoundly distrusted democracy. That’s why the Constitution creates a Republic with so many restrictions on its democratic element. They certainly weren’t any kind of “worshippers of democracy” — anybody who is today should remember that, and beware.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 6 2024 at 11:44am
Jim: I am in broad agreement with what you say. I don’t understand, though, why you linked to the statement of a poor mother (we can certainly understand her grief) demanding more limitations to the Second Amendment. Your summary of Athenian democracy is interesting, but I know too little about the second phase you describe to comment. Do you have a reading to recommend?
About the “will of the people,” many American (and French) politicians have used the expression, even recently. The origin probably lies in Rousseau’s Social Contract. The expression does not figure in French constitutional texts, although “general will” (volonté générale) does. Rousseau considered the general will to be the same as the “will of the people” and the “sovereign will.” All these expressions are time bombs.
Jim Glass
Jul 9 2024 at 9:51pm
??? I linked to: “The Constitution of Athens”. Just checked, it works for me.
As to the 2nd round of the French election, it was another example of voting ‘against’ as 200+ leftists and centrists stepped aside for each other to block the rightists — they all abandoned what they wanted most to prevent what they wanted least.
And as to politicians talking about “the will of the people”, sure they do, but what do they mean? As you correctly state, the masses are not a ‘superorganism’ with a single will to be expressed. And I’ve never heard any politician ever say that they are. Arguing against what people don’t say seems kind of not right.
I think they mean what I mean, “the will of the people” is that in our social-contract, constitutional system, when an election determines an issue the winner of the election wins and carries the issue. E.g.: As ‘a people’ it has never been my will that NYC carry rent controls forward from WWII into the 21st Century, nor that any presidential candidate since Pat Paulsen ever be elected. But I accept all these electoral results as being the legitimate will of the people, because the people legitimately will to live in a “democracy”, and this how democracy works, as per “the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” [- Menken]. Which is a legitimate preference because the alternatives are worse.
In France, the right is not happy at all about losing, but is accepting it as “the will of the people” embedded in the social contract of their constitution and laws. Their acceptance shows they share in “the will of the people” too, as to that.
One could imagine them going into the second round planning: “We’re going to win, but if we don’t we’ll storm government buildings to force a takeover, and in the meantime we’re organizing vote stealing plots in several key departments…” Which would have defied their social contract and constitution, and shattered the will of the people, making things much worse in France than they are today. But they haven’t done that. The French. Heirs of The Terror and Guillotine. Go figure. Good for them.
Craig
Jul 5 2024 at 11:45am
“I put “far-right” in scare quotes”
Quoting your scare quotes, but yeah I’ve been seeing that subtle defamation in the mainstream press relatively frequently.
Mactoul
Jul 5 2024 at 10:24pm
Electoral democracy depends upon certain presuppositions such as existence of a general agreement among the voters as to the fundamental questions.
So, elections are a way to settle questions of lesser import — should the tax rate be 30 percent or 35 etc.
But fundamental questions such as whether we should have communism can not be settled by voting.
This is so because loss in an election should be bearable to the loser. Otherwise the loser has incentive to go outside the voting game altogether and take more vigorous measures to ensure his rights.
Pierre Lemieux
Jul 6 2024 at 10:32am
Mactoul: What you are saying is theoretically compatible with a Buchanan-type constitutional political economy: fundamental rules should be unanimously consented to. It is also compatible with Hayek’s view, in which fundamental rules must (generally) be the result of practical agreement over long periods of time.
Mactoul
Jul 6 2024 at 12:16pm
Well, Buchnanian unanimity is a overly strict condition, which I suppose follows from the egalitarianism inherent in any liberal theorizing.
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