The second round of the French elections, to be held on July 7, offers interesting lessons about democracy. In each constituency where no candidate received more than 50% of the vote in the first round, those who received more than 12.5% are allowed to run in the second round. A political party or coalition whose candidate came in third or lower may have an incentive (and an informal obligation under electoral agreements) to pressure him to drop out so as not to split the vote between the two leading candidates in case the election of one of them would be detrimental to its post-election position in the National Assembly. The “centrist” parties have allied themselves with the left-wing New Popular Front to try to block the “far-right” National Rally. (I put “far right” in quotes because the RN is not unquestionably more right-wing than the NPF is left-wing, and many of their statist proposals are similar.) This strategy led to 224 candidates dropping out in the 577 constituencies. (See “French elections: 224 candidates have officially withdrawn from the second round” The worldJuly 2, 2024.)
The purpose of a runoff election is to increase the chances (or ensure, depending on the exact configuration) that the elected candidate can claim to represent the “will of the people,” i.e., 50% + 1 of the individuals comprising “the people.” One might think that, for a democracy worshipper, removing an option from the voters’ menu would be a sin. Technically, this violates the so-called “neutrality“In democratic theory, it favors some options over others. In reality, the limitation of the options presented to voters necessarily occurs all the time, in one way or another, if only because there are billions of possible collective (political) choices; each voter potentially has his or her own ideal option.
For a given voter, the limitations on his voting choice are inconsequential, because his vote, whatever the menu, is not decisive. He (including her, of course) would stay home and the winner would not change. However, a political strategy of making a candidate drop out can change the collective choice resulting from the election, compared to what it would have been otherwise. The contradictions and inconsistencies of democratic mythology are numerous.
No democratic gimmick can make an election or referendum better express “the will of the people.” which doesn’t exist anyway. As I noted in a previous post, different methods of democratic voting can produce very different results. Interpreting Donald Saari’s work (“Millions of election results from a single profile” Social choice and well-being1992), Gordon Tullock wrote (in Government Failure: A Guide to Public Choice2002):
There are many different voting rules in the world, each of which leads to a somewhat different outcome. Saari 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 this with the Condorcet paradox and its contemporary extensions, it would be a mistake to look for the elusive majority. A majority is just one possible majority among others, depending on the voting system and back-office politics, not to mention the frequent influence of bureaucracy on the political agenda. As political scientist William Riker would say, democratic decisions are either dictatorial or “arbitrary nonsense, at least some of the time” (see his article on democratic democracy, 1999). Liberalism versus populism(1982).
The not insignificant advantage of constitutional democracy (“constitutional” means “limited”) is that it offers voters, when enough voters are dissatisfied with their leaders, a cheap way 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 capacity to limit “official tyranny.” We should not ask too much of democracy.
As much as the limitation of the options presented to an electorate is inevitable, the constant limitation of individual choices by collective choices is not the only imaginable state of the world. It is usually ineffective or immoral, or both. A collective choice removes many options from groups of individuals. It has a direct effect on the choices of all individuals who would have done what is now forbidden. That, and not in democratic mythology or in gadgets, is the issue.
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I asked ChatGPT to “generate an image depicting democracy.” I didn’t tell it anything else. It described its image (the main image of this post, reproduced below) as follows: “A group of vibrant, diverse people standing together in a large open space, each holding a different flag representing various countries of the world. In the center, there is a large, ornate ballot box on a raised platform, symbolizing democracy. Above the stage, a bright sun shines, casting a hopeful, unifying light on the crowd. The background includes iconic world landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, and the Great Wall of China, representing international unity and cooperation.” This is a hollow concept of democracy: democracy is all well and good; but it is probably widely shared, as the bot’s database attests. (“It” produced a second image, at the same level of emptiness.)
Democracy is beautiful, good and hollow, if we are to believe DALL-E
