The French two-round system and party format: From extreme pluralism to concentration?

Abstract

The article deals with the debate about French parties and the party system. Through a large-n controlled comparison, a number of persistent ambiguities, conceptual fallacies and received ideas are criticized and disproved. The most tenacious and popular fallacy is that parliamentary two-round system (2RS) works in the same way and generates the same effects as the plurality system. Instead, the French 2RS operates more like a system of proportional representation (PR); indeed, it operates like a permissive or weakly restraining variety of PR, given France has one of the most fragmented party systems of any democracy. Fragmentation, in turn, goes along with the limited control of the electoral market by poorly structured French parties, as indicated by total net electoral volatility. Finally, a recent counter-tendency towards the concentration of the party system is put in the context of a turn to re-presidentialization and the personalization of politics. Whether such processes will feed a sustainable change of party format, or even a peculiar sort of French twopartism, is discussed in the concluding section.