Framed Field Experiments on Approval Voting: Lessons from the 2002 and 2007 French Presidential Elections

Competitive elections are an essential feature of representative democracies; thus, the choice of voting method is partly constitutive of the form of the democracy. Clearly, this engenders fundamental debates on the properties that acceptable voting rules should and should not exhibit. These debates take place primarily in two spheres: the public and the scientific. Let us here consider an example from France. The President of the French Republic is elected by direct universal suffrage, on the basis of a two-round plurality vote. In other words, run-off voting ensures that the elected President always obtains a majority. On each round, each voter can vote for one and only one candidate. If no candidate receives a majority of votes in the first round of voting, there is a run-off between the two highest-scoring candidates. The winner of this latter round is the winner of the election. Hence, each round is determinant for the result and considered as an important source of information on citizens’ political preferences. The results of the first round of the 2002 French presidential election were a shock for a large part of the population: contrary to the predictions of the opinion polls, the candidate for the extreme Right, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and the sitting president, Jacques Chirac, were selected for the second round. This surprise has contributed to serious public debate on the mechanisms of the two-round single-name vote. This discussion focuses in particular on the tension between tactical and sincere voting, with many citizens pleading for the adoption of a voting method which would allow better expression of their true preferences.