Analysis by Keith Rankin, 12 July 2024.
The recent French elections delivered an entirely predictable result; although few in the mainstream media actually predicted it. Instead, the pre-election narrative was that the dastardly ‘far right’ was heading for a win, and that a win for Rally France would presage some kind of disaster for democracy (even bigger, potentially, than the disaster being played out in the United States). And then, after the votes were counted, it seemed that the ‘oddball’ French voting system won the day by delivering the Left in a contest that had been presented as Centre versus Right.
The French two-ballot voting system, used in France’s Fifth Republic (1958 constitution) is a variant of the Australian preferential system, and the multi-ballot systems used for electing presidents and leaders of political parties. One of the earliest countries to use the simple two-ballot electoral system was Maoriland New Zealand – Maoriland was once the preferred indigenous name for New Zealand – in 1908 and 1911.
The French system has one complicating quirk that distinguishes it from its New Zealand antecedent, and that’s what allowed the Rally France (“far right”) party/alliance to (disingenuously) claim that it was robbed in last Sunday’s final vote.
The simple two-ballot system – adopted by New Zealand for the 1908 election – is simply the ‘first past the post’ plurality system (FPP, still used by United Kingdom, United States, and Canada) but with a second round election in electorates for which one candidate failed to gain a majority of votes.
Multi-Ballot Voting
A purest multi-ballot system would have up to four rounds of voting in an electorate with five candidates; after each round the lowest-polling candidate would be eliminated. Thus, the final round would be a simple run-off between the two surviving candidates. We see this system used, ubiquitously, in ‘Reality TV’ shows.
The two advantages of multi-balloting are, one, that it eliminates the ‘vote-splitting’ which is the bane of the FPP system; vote-splitting occurs when two or more candidates occupy a similar place on the political spectrum, to the potential detriment of all those allied candidates. And, two, that multi-balloting enables voters to reflect before making their final choice, knowing where other voters’ preferences lie, and therefore knowing who the real contestants are. Thus, early ballots (especially the first ballot) efficiently serve the same purpose as today’s political polls.
Preferential voting is a compressed version of the multi-ballot system, which eliminates the vote-splitting problem, but fails to address the need for advance information about the actual prospects of each candidate. A vote for someone who has no realistic chance of winning is commonly called a ‘wasted vote’. Preferential voting overcomes this disadvantage if there are reliable political polls published ahead of election day. The problem though, in systems fully based on single-member constituencies – France, UK, USA (Congress and Senate), Canada, Australia – is that most polling is done on the nationwide popular vote, with little reliable polling at electorate-level.
The two-ballot system is a cut-down version of the multi-ballot system, which avoids the cost and potential tedium of having more than two rounds of voting. In its pure New Zealand (1908-1911) form, it eliminates all candidates except the two leaders from the first round. We note that France and a number of other countries (eg Iran, in its recent election) use simple two-ballot elections to vote for their presidents.
France
France, for its Parliament, uses a variation that is confusing to most people outside of France and also to many people in France. Under two-party politics – where, in most electorates, only two candidates are genuine contenders – the French system works like the former New Zealand system – to eliminate obvious also-rans. But in three party politics – or ‘three-alliance politics’, as we now see in France (strictly three alliances plus a still-popular centre-right party) – the simple two-ballot system could enforce the elimination of some genuine contenders.
Thus, in France, it is possible for three or more candidates to make it to the second ballot; meaning that, even on the final ballot, vote-splitting would still be a problem. In the 2024 France election, and for the first time ever, three candidates qualified for the second round ballot in most electorates.
To avoid vote-splitting, in the few days after the first round ballot ‘horse-trading’ is encouraged and as a result many candidates qualifying for the second round withdraw their candidacy. This is sensible practical politics; the candidates themselves work out who is likely to come third, and – especially if the most disliked candidate is in the first-round lead – the likely third-placed candidate formally withdraws from the electoral race. What in the end happens, in most electorates, is that the second ballot ends up exactly as it would have been in the New Zealand 1908-1911 system.
In France, once the second-round ballots are finalised – that is, before the votes are cast – the result is predictable in most electorates. Thus it was clear two days before the election – that is, on 5 July 2024 – that the Left alliance would be headed for a narrow ‘win’, where the winner is defined as the alliance or party with more successful candidates than each of their rivals.
Of course the Left didn’t really win. President Macron’s second-place centrist alliance has all the influence in any minority administration that forms, because the Centre will be able to play off both the Left and the Right (and noting that the Right has more MPs than the Left, given that the Right is made up both of Marine Le Pen’s’ far-right’ alliance and the centre-right ‘Les Républicains’ party). As a concession to the Left, President Macron is likely to choose a Prime Minister (PM) from the right of the Left. To me, the obvious candidate for PM would be former president François Hollande. Macron came to prominence in French politics as Hollande’s technocratic finance minister (2012-2017).
In the context of efficient ‘horse-trading’ that may take place when there are more than two contestants in the final ballot, the United Kingdom election of 4 July was an interesting case study. There was significantly more so-called ‘tactical voting’ in the UK than usual, with the main tactical goal being to create an informal alliance against the ‘Tory’ Conservative Party. Thus we saw Liberal Democrat (LibDem) voters ‘lend’ their votes to Labour in most constituencies, while in about 70 constituencies very many former Labour voters chose the LibDems this time.
What happened in New Zealand in the 1900s?
In 1905, under FPP, Richard Seddon’s Liberal Party got 53.1% of the vote, and 58 out of 80 seats. Seddon died in 1906, replaced by Joseph Ward. It was a time of party formation, with the Opposition then being William Massey’s Conservatives. It was a time of increasing numbers of three-way electoral contests in which credible Independent candidates might split-the-vote, allowing rival rather than allied candidates to win.
In 1908, under the two-ballot system, Ward raised the Liberal vote to 58.7% but won fewer seats (50 instead of 58 in 1905). 22 of the 80 electorates required second ballots.
The main drama happened in 1911. In the final vote, Ward’s Liberal Party won 34.2% of the vote and 33 seats, Massey’s conservative Reform Party got 37 seats with 33.4% of the vote. The (literally ‘new’) Labour Party got 4 seats with 11.5% of the vote. Simple maths tells us that 6 seats were won by others, including Independents.
The action that mattered was in the Kaipara electorate. Gordon Coates, running as an ‘Independent Liberal’ came second to the official Liberal, on the first ballot. Once the Reform candidate was eliminated, Coates gained most of the eliminated candidate’s votes, enabling him on the second ballot to defeat John Stallworthy, the official Liberal candidate. Massey spotted Coates as a potential ally in negotiations to resolve this ‘hung parliament’; Coates differed from official Liberal policy in favouring freehold tenure for farmers, otherwise he was a Liberal. Massey’s Reform party was founded as a way for the Conservatives to emphasise their preference for freehold over leasehold land tenure.
After the election, Joseph Ward tried to form a minority government, but was unable to win a vote of confidence. Nor could Massey. A Liberal minority government persevered through most of 1912, under the Prime Ministership of Thomas Mackenzie.
It was Massey’s head-hunting of Gordon Coates that enabled Massey to defeat Mackenzie in a confidence vote late in 1912, and for Massey himself then to form a minority government; a government which maintained the confidence of the House until the 1914 election. The 1914 election was held in the early years of World War 1; Massey (with Coates) won comfortably but not comprehensively. Massey was arguably helped by his action, in early 1913, to revert the electoral system to the FPP which older New Zealanders knew but never really loved.
My final observation here is to note that Coates succeeded Massey as Prime Minister when Massey died (in office) in 1925. Coates went on to be a failed Prime Minister (his party voted out into third place in 1928); though, in the mid-1930s, he was the Minister of Finance who did more than anyone else to bring New Zealand out of the Great Depression. (He even sought advice from, among others, alleged ‘Communist’ economists; as a result, he precipitated the split in his conservative coalition party which brough Labour and Michael Joseph Savage to power in 1935, thanks to the vagaries of FPP.)
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Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand.
