France has FPTP, and it works for a lot more than two parties. Admittedly, France has a second round run off in case no candidate has more than 50% of votes in the first round so.
For the vast majority of it's existence, the 5th republic has had proportional representation in the legislature (only changed with Sarkozy, who instituted 2-round elections - IIRC).
Presidential has been 2-round for much longer, perhaps from the beginning of the 5th republic.
Straight FPTP as implemented in many places in the US allows plurality winners (ie, winners that don't get 50% of the votes), France's system does not.
Sounds like a run-off voting system. The French use a similar system to elect their presidents, as far as I know. Is that right? Have you looked at the French experiences?
Not strictly first past the post but a similar two round system, which devolves into the same thing as people have to tactically vote or risk wasting them. And even worse is that the legislative has the same system with single members being elected to the legislative through local two-round elections as well, which meant that in 2017 En Marche, Macron's party ended up with a large majority of seats but basically 25% of popular support.
France generally produces the most disproportionate election results in any Western democracy.
If you mean a two-round first-past-the-post system, it works about the same as a one-round system. This is what got Jacques Chirac elected with 82% of the votes in France in 2002 in the second round. Whatever the number of rounds, it's a broken system designed to favour the two main parties.
> which combines proportional representation in a 1st round
No it doesn't.
The french parliament is elected in 577 single member constituencies by a 2 round system: in the 1st round, voters vote for any candidate.
If no candidate wins >50% of all the votes in that constituency, a 2nd round is held, where candidates that came 1st or 2nd or got >12.5% of the vote, in the 1st round, can run.
Thus the French 2 round system is similar to Instant Runoff Voting, except that it isn't instant.
As an example of how the French system isn't proportional, En Marche got 32% of 1st-round votes but 61% of seats.
> for the powerful presidency
Presidential elections, like any other election that elects 1 candidate cannot in principle be proportional, because each party must either win 100% or 0% of the candidates elected.
> When it became clear that the far-right would be the largest single party
No, the National Front only got 13.2% of 1st round votes (and only ended up winning 8 seats, 1.4% of the total). They were nowhere near being the biggest party.
"how France elects their president. Their system is a two round system. In the first round, anyone who is eligible can be on the ballot. But if no candidate receives more than 50% of the votes (not electors), it goes onto the second round, where the two candidates with the most votes are the only ones on the ballot."
California moved to that for their state representative elections a while ago. The upshot is you can (and several times have) had two Democrats or two Republicans running against each other at the end.
For Parliamentary elections there's a two round system that works this way:
First round candidates who got more that a certain threshold (percentage of registered voters) go through to second round unless a candidate gets more than 50% of the vote and is then elected. Usually that means 2 candidates, sometimes 3.
Second round is first past the post.
Le Pen has been campaigning for decades to change the system to a more proportional representation because although they get something like 20-30% of the votes overall they get very few MPs, approx 0 to 5 out of 577 because they don't reach majorities in constituencies.
This is standard in electoral systems based on constituencies vs. systems based on share of national vote ( for instance, Israel?)
France is essentially first-past-the-post with a single runoff for presidential (who is a very powerful executive like US model + he can dissolve parliament).
The dynamics are same prior to runoff because the plurality electoral system gives no representation to the majority that didn't vote for the winner (almost a given since there will be >2 candidates).
You'd need proportional representation and/or an electoral system like Borda,RCV,Star or instant runoff to significantly proof against spoiler mechanics that the wealthy can exploit.
Again, none of these measures guarantees against money corrupting electoral processes, just makes it more costly and unsure that any given corruptive effort pays off.
In France we have two rounds. Each voter chooses one candidate during the first round and then only two candidates are selected for the second one.
Having to choose amongst one candidate only is terribly bad because some candidates may have lot of similar ideas. However they may diverge on some points, such as they decide to make two parties.
The votes get then divided between these two candidates, and they may not reach the second round, even though their idea may be more popular...
The winning parties has never wanted to change the system since that makes them win I guess.
Any other system would be a better idea than that one.
I stand corrected. Apparently proportional representation only happened in the 1986 elections when Mitterrand made that change for that single election [1]. Amusing reading back on what happened vs. what I heard about from others.
Regarding the 3 candidates in 2nd round - yes that's only possible because France allows 3 & 4 candidates to go into 2nd round if they have over 12.5%. This is usually not the case, so 3-rounds are very limited but as you indicate they do present a plurality win possibility.
France is always a 1 party system in regards to who is in direct central power, since parliamentary elections are just after presidential ones, to send the winning president a parliament they can work with. In almost all cases the ( slim) majority the ruling party has falls apart over the course of their term.
And that's why there's an indirectly elected upper chamber ( Senate), to avoid a populist wave changing too much.
It's interesting you gave France as an example, because they have a nice workflow/system to avoid this.
There are presidential elections every 5 years, which are "standard", if no candidate gets over 50% of the votes, there's a second round between the first two candidates from the first round. A month later, there are legislative elections, the concept being that people will send the new president a parliament he can work with if they're OK with him. Macron won with 20 something % in the first round ( second round was against the aforementioned National Rally, so his victory was guaranteed), but his party got 50%+ in the legislative elections because people decided to give him a chance to enact his program, even if he wasn't their first choice. That isn't always the case, and if the far right wins the presidential elections next year i'm certain they won't have a parliamentary majority.
To avoid a popular wave sweeping everything, the legislature id bicameral, the aforementioned legislative elections only for the lower chamber, the National Assembly. The higher chamber, the Senate, which is more limited in powers but can still exert influence over the lower chamber's law making, is indirectly elected by mayors, local/departmental/regional councilors with staggered 6 year terms ( every 3 years half the seats are up for election).
IMHO it's overall a good system that allows for everyone to be represented, enables governments to be stable ( but doesn't force it). The main thing i'd improve is ranked choice voting for single seat elections ( presidential, local).
And besides all that specific to France, i disagree about "classic" MMP. It forces cooperation and compromise, much better than a party forcing through with whatever they want because there's nobody that can opose them.
We all know that having a single turn (like in the US) leads to a political landscape with 2 major political parties and few nuances (but the major problem in the US system is "the winner takes it all" policy in most states: if the number of members of the electoral college were proportional to votes in each states, the results would already be more fair)
But the French system (with 2 turns) is also very far from optimal and non-linear, and also leads (to a lesser extent, and some variants/surprises) to 2 major political parties + some smaller "satellite" political parties. And some issue are for example that
* sometimes, a candidate that would win against all others has a too low score at the first turn to pass to the 2nd turn (this is what happens in 2007 where all polls said that François Bayrou (who was center/moderate and more consensual) would have won both against Nicolas Sarkozy and against Ségolène Royal, but couldn't get enough votes to pass the 1st turn)
* sometimes, the opposite issue happens i.e. a candidate that has no chances to win the 2nd turn has enough votes to pass the 1st turn: this is what happened in 2002 when Le Pen (extreme right wing) supplanted Jospin and went to the 2nd turn (that Chirac was then 100% certain to win at that time, with a consequence that there were no real/constructive debate about the programs)
* some people who have new ideas cannot participate because you need 500 signatures of already-elected people in order to participate (so if you are not a member of an established political party, it's very hard to become a candidate to the presidential election)
Just to say that there is no binary split between "democracy" and "dictature" : the voting system and algorithm influences a lot the political landscape and therefore the debates. Maybe people here are familiar with the Condorcet method used (among other things) in https://www.debian.org/vote which is better in my opinion (yet a little bit difficult to implement in a wider scale such as a presidential election). Another approach / voting method that I quite like is this one (only in French, sorry) https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jugement_majoritaire : I like it because 1°/ it is simple to implement and to understand, 2°/ it would inherently avoid the issues above and forces the candidates to be more consensual (i.e. to become "president for everyone") rather than cleaving, while still enabling nuances to express during the debates (not only on a "binary" axis left/right).
I don't think so – France uses this exact model, and their party system has just in the last 15 years or so transitioned out both of the former top two parties (PS and LR).
If anything, I would expect this model to reduce duopoly. An unpopular republican might be overtaken by a candidate from the libertarians in the first round, giving them a shot at victory which they could hardly get if the ghost of "wasted votes" on third-parties was haunting them.
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