This is a big surprise to many people, because in the first round, the right was doing much better in terms of votes and seats. We will know more soon, but in the meantime, I am reminded of one of the paradoxes of expressive voting theory. You may want to cast a protest vote, but you don’t want too many people to cast the same protest vote. For example, some voters who voted for Ralph Nader didn’t really want him to win. And that may be the case with the French right. So the right’s show of strength in the first round may have limited its vote share later on. More generally, you could say that an equilibrium, when there are a lot of expressive votes, is extremely sensitive to expectations about the voting behavior of others. Especially when the voters who receive the expressive votes are close to holding real power.
Do you know the apocryphal story of the economics department that wanted to unanimously vote 18 to 3 on the tenure file of a junior professor? It was not allowed, so everyone voted for it.
I wonder what all this means for a possible Democratic mini-primary!?
