This Thursday (23^rd June), voters in the constituencies of Tiverton and Honiton, and Wakefield go to the polls in by-elections caused by the scandal-related resignations of their previous MPs. By-elections allow voters to pick a new MP and puts a small group of voters in the political limelight. But how are vacancies filled when they arise in the parliaments of other countries and is it possible to mix by-elections and proportional representation?

Next in line – By-elections with Party Lists

31 out of the 43 countries most often considered to be within Europe elect their parliament using some form of Party List PR, and the lists providing a handy way to fill vacancies. If an MP resigns or dies, the highest candidate on the list who isn’t currently in parliament automatically takes the seat. As being a government minister is a full time job, in some countries, such as the Netherlands or Sweden, if an MP is appointed as a minister, their seat is filled by a substitute from the list for the duration of their time in government.

In Germany, which uses a mix of first past the post and party lists, all vacancies are now filled by the next available candidate on the party’s state list. A by-election would only be held in the case that a vacancy was caused by a constituency member elected as an independent, though Germany has not elected any independent MPs since 1949.

Send in a sub – By-elections in France

France, with their Two-Round system, uses a mix of substitutes and by-elections. Substitutes are elected alongside Deputies to take their place if they die, become government ministers or are appointed to a position that is otherwise incompatible with sitting in the National Assembly. But, if a Deputy resigns, a by-election is held instead.

I demand a countback – By-Elections with STV

The one proportional voting system where by-elections are commonly used to fill all vacancies is the Single Transferable Vote (STV) – by-elections are used to fill vacancies in the Irish parliament and on Scottish councils. Unless multiple vacancies arise in the same constituency at the same time, an STV by-election effectively takes place using the Alternative Vote.

The Alternative Vote isn’t a proportional system though. A better method is ‘countback’, also called ‘count again’, – used in Malta and some Australian states. This involves returning to the original ballot papers from the general election and recounting them without the now retired candidate – effectively continuing the count of the original STV election. This method enables the representation of that constituency as a whole to remain somewhat proportional to its political opinion, and prevents the costly need for new elections.

Other methods of filling vacancies include co-option – whereby either parties or the legislative body itself chooses the new representative (Northern Ireland Assembly and parish councils in the UK) – and substitute lists (Irish seats to the European Parliament).

It seems that having an easy way to replace an MP when they resign, also makes it easy to temporarily replace them when they becoming the Speaker, a minister, or go on maternity leave.

Fresh from re-electing Emmanuel Macron as president on 24 April 2022, French voters are now returning to the polls on the 12 and 19 June to elect a new parliament. Historically, presidential and legislative elections were held on two separate cycles. But this could lead to ‘cohabitation’ – where the President was of a different party or bloc to the parliamentary majority and Prime Minister. Since 2002, they have been lined up so that elections to the National Assembly happen shortly after the new presidential term begins.

This has, thus far, eliminated cohabitation, but has led to a sustained and significant decline in turnout for legislative elections – the French electorate don’t seem that enthused about having to go to the polling station four times in three months.

The Voting System

The 577 deputies of the French National Assembly are elected by the non-proportional Two-Round System in single-member constituencies – with 539 elected in France, 27 representing France’s ‘overseas’ territories and 11 chosen by French citizens living abroad. French citizens living in Britain make up the overwhelming majority of the ‘third overseas residents’ group, though it also contains Ireland and the Nordic and Baltic countries.

However, the Two-Round System that is used to elect the National Assembly differs slightly from the ‘standard’ version that is used to elect the French President. If no candidate wins a majority of votes in the first round, the top two candidates still proceed to a second ‘run-off’ election, but additional candidates can also get through if they win votes equivalent to 12.5% of registered voters – which, given average turnouts over the last 20 years, translates to roughly a quarter of votes.

Having multiple candidates in a second round is quite rare and, even when it does happen, the third-placed candidate can drop out. But, if they don’t, these constituencies are often decided by a plurality rather than a majority of voters. Aube’s first constituency, surrounding the town of the town of Bar-sur-Aube, was the only seat to have a three-way run-off in 2017, being won by Macron’s En Marche on just 36% of the vote.

In the unlikely event of a second-round election ending in an exact tie, the seat is awarded to the older candidate – a quirk of French politics dating back to the 18^th century.

End of an Era?

But the continued use of the Two-Round Vote for the National Assembly is contentious. It is incredibly bad at translating France’s multi-party system into seats – frequently producing highly disproportional results (France’s recent elections have managed to be even less proportional than Britain’s!) and leaving large chunks of voters with little or no representation. These results have been blamed for France’s increasing polarisation and unusual levels of extraparliamentary opposition.

During the presidential election campaign, a pledge to introduce some form of proportionality to the National Assembly became a rare point of unity between the main candidates. We’ll have to wait to see if the promise is fulfilled. Similar pledges have been made before, though not against a background of such clear and widespread discontent at the French political system.

A shift to PR wouldn’t be particularly alien to France, who already use proportional or semi-proportional systems to elect their regional councils, municipal councils with over 1,000 inhabitants and France’s members of the European Parliament.

The Parties

Just shy of three dozen individual parties sit in the 2017 National Assembly. It is also relentlessly unstable. 15 years ago, roughly two-thirds voted for the Socialists and the UMP (now the Republicans). In April, their candidates got just 7% between them in the presidential first round.

2017 French National Assembly Results

Source: https://www.interieur.gouv.fr/Elections/Les-resultats/Legislatives/elecresult__legislatives-2017/(path)/legislatives-2017//FE.html

Parties often campaign together in ad hoc alliances and sit as parliamentary groups in the National Assembly, rather than as individual parties. And just because two parties are in the same electoral alliance, that doesn’t mean they’ll sit together in the same group.

The ‘presidential majority’ alliance in this election is the centre-right Ensemble, which is primarily comprised of Macron’s La République En Marche! and the smaller, centrist MoDem. In 2017, the alliance won a 123-seat majority from less than a third of the first-round vote. Although polling even lower this time, the combination of the Two-Round Vote with their relative centrism could still hand them a majority.

Their main opposition is the New People’s Ecological and Social Union (NUPES), an alliance of all significant left-of-centre parties. It hopes to build on the unexpectedly strong performance of left-wing populist Jean-Luc Mélenchon in the presidential first round and enforce cohabitation on Macron. Aside from Mélenchon’s La France Insoumise, the other key parties in the bloc are The Greens, the centre-left Socialist Party and the Communist Party.

The other interesting battle is for third place. Le Pen’s National Rally might have secured a record result in the presidential election and are, indeed, polling at a clear third place in vote terms. But the Two-Round System will make it difficult to translate this support into more than a small parliamentary group.

Instead, the third largest bloc is likely to be the Union of the Right and Centre (UDC), largely made up of the conservative Republicans and the moderate UDI. In the event that neither Ensemble nor NUPES win a majority, Macron will likely have to turn to the UDC parties for parliamentary support.

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America’s presidential election is the most famous presidential election in the world. The antiquated American system of choosing a president via an electoral college is also one of the worst methods for choosing a national leader. Since 1788, many other methods have been tried – so I’ve put some of them in order from what I think are worst, to best.

Worst. System. Ever – Electoral College

Americans don’t actually vote for the president, they are voting on what to tell a group of ‘electors’. Each state has a set number of electors based on their representation in the US Congress, the votes cast by Americans tell these electors who to vote for when the electoral college elects the president.

Like much of the US constitution, this bizarre system came out of the compromises needed at the time to create a nation out of 13 disparate colonies. Southern states, with massive enslaved populations, didn’t want to be dominated by northern voters. The numbers of electors each state has was also a compromise between the states. Each state gets one elector for each member of the House of Representatives they have, plus one for each senator. As every state has two Senators, irrespective of their population, voters in smaller states have more power to decide the president than voters in larger states.

We’ve ranked the electoral college as the worst way to elect a president as…

• While everyone has one vote they aren’t equal, votes cast in Wyoming carry 3.6 times more influence than those from California. A basic element of fair elections is one person one vote and every vote being of equal value.
• While voters in Wyoming have the equivalent of 3.6 votes each. Neither candidate has even visited the state. That’s because most states give all their electors to the winner of that state. Wyoming has voted republican since the 1960s, with large margins in recent years. The 20% of Wyomingite’s who voted for Hilary in 2016 saw their votes go nowhere. Millions of votes are wasted this way.
• Sometimes the loser goes on to win the election. All first past the post elections have a risk that the team that get the most votes don’t win the election, it happens in America, the UK and New Zealand (before they ditched the system in favour of MMP).

Less terrible. First Past the Post

There is a campaign in America to scrap the electoral college and give the presidency to the popular vote winner. But while that may seem a simple solution, the experience of countries that have a straight first past the post contest for president has been mixed. As we know when using first past the post to elect MPs in the UK, while the loser won’t win, the winner doesn’t need a majority of the vote to win either. In fact, the majority of voters may be opposed to the president.

In the Philippines, their, shall we say, controversial president, Rodrigo Duterte only won 39% of the vote in 2016. In May 1992 Fidel Ramos was elected to be president of the Philippines with only 24 per cent of the popular vote. We’ve ranked first past the post as the second-worst system as…

• Democracies should generally move in the direction the majority want. A minority of voters shouldn’t be able to steer the country off course.
• Election results under first past the post are often more to do with electoral politics than voters’ preferences. Rather than trying to win voters round, candidates can try to split opposition voters between multiple candidates.

Presidential elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cameroon, the Comoros Islands, Equatorial Guinea, Guyana, Honduras, Iceland, Kiribati, South Korea, Malawi, Mexico, Palestine, Panama, Paraguay, the Philippines, Rwanda, Singapore, Taiwan, Tunisia, Venezuela, and Zambia are all conducted via first past the post.

Getting Better. Two Round System

An easy way to stop candidates winning on less than half the vote is to have a second round of voting with just the top two candidates. France is the most famous country to use a two-round system. The first round of voting is similar to voting in the UK: electors vote for their preferred candidate.

If a candidate gets over half the votes, they are elected. If no candidate receives an overall majority, the second round of voting takes place two weeks later with the top two candidates from the first round.

Here’s why we only ranked the two-round system as the second-best method…

• The first round has all the vote-splitting problems of first past the post. In 2017, Macron and Marine Le Pen got though to the runoff, which Macron won easily. Le Pen only made it through because the centre right was split between multiple candidates. Ifop-Fiducial polled a hypothetical second round where Macron was up against Fillon (who was 1.3% points behind Le Pen). Macron still won, but only beat Fillon by 52% to 48%. It seems a more popular candidate was excluded, and an extremist let through.
• There is no guarantee that both candidates to go through will be from different sides of the political spectrum. In 2002 French voters had the choice between right-wing incumbent Jacques Chirac and the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen. The slogan “Vote for the crook not the fascist” became popular on the left…

Two-round systems are widely used around the world. 

Simply the Best. Preferential Vote

The problems with having two separate elections can be fixed with some clever ballot paper designs and counting methods.

Rather than asking people to vote, then come back and vote for a reduced set of candidates, with a preferential vote, voters are asked to complete a ballot paper with numbers next to each candidate. The numbers explain who they would vote for first with a 1, then who they would vote for if their favourite candidate didn’t get though with a 2, who they would vote for if neither got through with a 3 and so on.

When they count the ballots, anyone who has 50% of the first votes wins. If nobody gets 50% the person who came last is excluded and the ballots are recounted in a ‘virtual’ second round. If your favourite candidate is still in the race, you still vote for them. If your favourite has been excluded your vote goes to your second choice. This process continues until one candidate gets half the vote.

We think this is the best way to elect a president as…

• You can’t split the vote. In 2011, seven people ran for president of Ireland – after four rounds of counting we know that, poet, politician and noted dog owner, Michael D Higgins was the candidate the majority of voters preferred. In 2018 he went on to win on the first round on a landslide.
• As extremist candidates are unlikely to get second choices, the system tends to work against candidates who are polarising and help those who are broadly liked.
• Candidates are also incentivised to run less divisive campaigns, as candidates will want to become their opponent’s voters second favourite candidate.

Badly designed electoral systems shape candidates, campaigns and countries. When extreme candidates can win on minorities of the vote under First Past the Post style systems, there is little incentive to appeal to a broader electorate. Instead, elections just become about snatching slim victories and playing the system. It’s not enough to just vote for better people, we need to stop the systems that let unpopular candidates win.

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Apart from the UK, France is the only other European democracy not to use some form of proportional representation for its state-wide elections (Here’s a list of voting systems used at the state-level in Europe). Instead, French voters use the Two-Round System to elect their president and MPs, and for regional elections.

What distinguishes the way the French choose their MPs from Westminster is the fact that to get elected, a candidate needs to get more than half the votes, not just more votes than anyone else.

Many countries that directly elect their presidents, such as Austria, Columbia, Poland, Russia and Ukraine, use the Two-Round System. The system is less commonly used for electing MPs. France is an exception in this regard as it has used it on and off since 1928 for electing MPs as well.

How do elections work in France?

The main feature of the two-round system is that voting takes place on two different days. Slightly different versions are used for presidential and parliamentary elections in France – we are focusing here on presidential elections (you can find out more about elections to the National Assembly and regions on Democratic Audit).

The first round of voting is similar to voting in the UK: electors vote for their preferred candidate.

If a candidate gets over half the votes, they are elected and there is no second round. In practice, no presidential candidate has won in the first round since direct elections of the president were introduced in 1962.

If no candidate receives an overall majority, the second round of voting takes place two weeks later.

Only the top two presidential candidates are allowed to take part in the second round (i.e. those with the highest and second highest number of votes in the first round) – all other candidates are excluded. Given that voters can now only choose between two candidates, the winner will definitely receive more than half the votes.

The table below shows the results of the 2017 French presidential election. Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen both progressed to the second round as they received the highest and second highest number of votes, with Macron ultimately winning the election.

Results of the 2017 French Presidential Elections

Source: https://www.interieur.gouv.fr/Elections/Les-resultats/Presidentielles/elecresult__presidentielle-2017/(path)/presidentielle-2017/FE.html

What is interesting to note, however, is that the Two-Round System gave Marine Le Pen (of the far-right National Front – now renamed National Rally) a considerable chance of winning the entire election and becoming president of France, just because she obtained 1.3% more than François Fillon, who was eliminated from the race altogether.

Ifop-Fiducial polled a hypothetical second round where Macron was up against Fillon. Macron still won, but only beat Fillon by 52% to 48%. It seems a more popular candidate was excluded, and an extremist let through.

This goes to show that majoritarian systems do not protect against the far-right – in fact, the one-person-takes-all nature of systems like Westminster’s First Past the Post and France’s Two-Round System can give far-right parties much more power, if they manage to reach a tipping point of success.

Another disadvantage of the Two-Round System is that it’s possible for both candidates who go through to the final round to be from the same side of the political spectrum – and to go through on a small percentage of the vote (e.g. 24% and 21% respectively for Macron and Le Pen). This means that voters from the other side of the spectrum are effectively denied a genuine choice of who to vote for and may have to pick the ‘least worst’ option.

In 2002 the slogan “Vote for the crook not the fascist” became popular as the right-wing incumbent Jacques Chirac ran against the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen in the final round. Chirac won even though he was facing corruption allegations at the time.

The two-round system might appear to be an improvement on Westminster’s voting system as it stops results like Belfast South in 2015, where an MP was elected on 24.5%, as candidates need to get more than half the votes to be elected.

But it still does not give voters genuine choice on who to vote for. In the French National Assembly, it artificially boosts larger parties and excludes smaller ones, which in turn can foster disillusionment with the political system among their supporters.

Only the Single Transferable Vote – the ERS’s preferred system ­– enhances voter choice and guarantees a strong link between MPs and voters, while also distributing seats in parliament in a way that is fair and reflects how people voted. When used to elect one person, like a president, the system allows votes of left-wingers to steadily accumulate around the most widely accepted left-wing candidate, and the same for the right-wing candidate. Once it is down to two candidates the one with the most votes wins.

Rather than forcing voters to choose between just two parties as the two-round system does in the second round, the Single Transferable Vote helps ensure every vote counts and people’s voices are heard and represented.

After last year’s political whirlwind, attention has turned to 2017’s elections for evidence of further shocks. Voters are going to the polls in the Netherlands, in Germany but most attention is focused on France, whose election takes place in April and May, and where the far-right Marine Le Pen currently polls in first place.

On the centre-right the candidate of choice is Francois Fillon, who has been described as a French Thatcherite whereas the centre-left is very split.

To get a sense of this landscape, here’s a recent first round poll from the French pollster Ifop-Fiducial with the position on the political spectrum of the candidates.

Several things about this landscape are striking. Firstly, there are now 5 candidates polling in double digits. French politics, like politics elsewhere, is experiencing fragmentation. So while Le Pen is in first place, it is on only a little more than 1 in 4 of the population, with 74% of the population supporting candidates to her left.

Only in First Past the Post can candidates on the extreme ends of the political spectrum with low levels of support win 100% of political power. Unlike First Past the Post, however, France’s electoral system prevents a candidate from winning on such a meagre percentage of the vote. France uses a two-round system in which, if no one wins more than half the vote on election day, the two most popular candidates will go through to a second ‘run off’ round two weeks later, where voters will return to the polls to pick the President. On this polling that would lead to Le Pen vs. Fillon second round. When Ifop-Fiducial polled this hypothetical second round, they found that Fillon would win with 64% of the vote to 36% for Le Pen.

Usually France’s Two Round system results in the second round featuring the most popular centre right candidate and centre left candidates. But note that there are only two centre-right candidates and Dupont-Aignan polls a mere 1.5%. It is the centre and left which is most split, with Emmanuel Macron in third.

Macron is the former economy minister of President Hollande, a centrist who has the highest approval ratings of any French politician.

Ifop-Fiducial also polled hypothetical second round results against both Fillon and Le Pen. Macron beats Le Pen by 65% to 35% and Fillon by 52% to 48%. This would seem to suggest he is what students of Social Choice Theory call the Condorcet winner, that is, the candidate who would beat all other candidates if they were the only two running and, therefore the best representative of voter views.

The Two Round System makes voters vote tactically, by predicting who would get into the second round, then changing behaviour accordingly. A strategy that left wing voters might adopt then would be to tactically vote for Macron to eliminate Fillon or Le Pen in order to have a candidate more to their taste in the second round.

But for those who back the far-left Melenchon, for instance, Macron is still fairly distant from what they really want. Such voters are thus left in the unenviable position of choosing between expressing their true views or voting against what they most dislike, based on a prediction which may be wrong.

A small tweak to the French electoral system would be to move from a two round ‘run-off system’ to an instant run off system like the Alternative Vote. In an instant run-off system French voters would say who their second, third or fourth choices were on one ballot paper, rather than having to come back two weeks later. If no candidate wins 50% of the vote the worst performing candidate is eliminated and the votes of their supporters are moved to their second favourite candidate. Thus the votes of left-wingers would steadily accumulate around the most widely accepted left-wing candidate. Once it is down to two candidates the one with the most votes wins. In this way French voters could support whoever they liked safe in the knowledge that their vote would be much less likely to contribute towards the election of a candidate they disliked. Whilst the world of multi-party politics has broken First Past the Post, even the two round system increasingly struggles to cope with the realities of modern politics.