Musings on electoral systems: France’s majority bonuses

The most potent weapon in the arsenal of any opponent of proportional representation is the threat of instability. Israel, the Italian First Republic, the French Fourth Republic, and the Weimar Republic are held up as examples of the problems caused by too many small parties gaining power without responsibility, and by the need for a majority to be composed of many, often dissimilar, political forces. (Ignored, of course, are examples such as India, where first-past-the-post in single-member districts yields the world’s most kaleidoscopic array of parties.) Even where there is stable government, proportional representation is said to give disproportionate power to small parties: a well-known example is Germany’s FDP, who played kingmaker for over three decades, supporting both CDU and SPD governments until the rise of the Greens gave Germany a four-party system.

French regional and municipal elections (for towns with over 3500 residents) use a majority bonus to short-circuit these potential problems. Parties compete in a standard two-round system for top spot; if no winner emerges from the first round, lists which obtained 10% of the vote can take part in the runoff, and may combine with each other, and with parties which scored between 5% and 10%. Three-quarters of seats are distributed proportionally, with the other quarter being given to the winning list. (The bonus is one-half at municipal level, one-fifth in Martinique and French Guiana, and one-sixth in Corsica.) With such an advantage given to the winning party, the election of regional President or Mayor by the newly-elected council becomes a formality, and early elections are rare.

The need to form broad coalitions in order to win the majority bonus leads to alliances being formed prior to the runoff. Similarly to Switzerland’s system of apparentements, parties are given incentives to co-operate and to form multi-party alliances. In the 2010 regional elections, for example, the three main forces on the French left (the Socialists, the Greens, and the communist-led Left Front) fused their lists in most regions between the first round and the runoff; each of these lists already comprised independents and members of smaller parties, as did those of the (post-Gaullist) UMP. In all twenty-one mainland regions, the winning coalition obtained a clear majority of the seats, even when the runoff was a three-way affair between the left, the UMP, and the National Front. (The introduction of this system at regional level was actually spurred by the National Front winning the balance of power in several regional councils during the 1990s.)

Similar majority bonuses are awarded in Greece (the fifty out of three hundred parliamentary seats which New Democracy and SYRIZA recently contested) and Italy (whose electoral systems at all levels of government allocate fixed percentages of seats – usually 55% – to the coalition of parties backing the successful candidate for chief executive). The rest of the world uses other ways of taming proportional representation, such as requiring thresholds for representation or drawing small multi-member districts. The charm of a majority bonus is that instead of favouring the largest parties in a particular polity, it incentivises them to coalesce with smaller ones, who then receive their share of the extra seats if the alliance is victorious.

The majority bonus system could be improved by eliminating the runoff and using the Alternative Vote or Supplementary Vote to determine the winning party. The Swiss apparentement system could substitute for the need for form coalitions; the parties forming an apparentement could have their first-preference votes counted together, protecting the smaller ones from being eliminated from the count. If the executive branch is elected separately from the legislative, the bonus seats could be given to the party or parties supporting the winning candidate. Alternatively, the bonus seats could take the form of at-large seats voted for on a separate ballot using a majoritarian system such as the Block Vote (i.e. the old-fashioned method for electing members of the U.S. Electoral College from each state). With these changes, a proportional electoral system with a majority bonus would be the perfect way to ensure parties are represented according to their support, while early elections and unstable coalitions are avoided.