There has been a heated debate in the print media recently about constitutional reform and reform of the presidential election system. I do not have a preference on whether the presidential election should be decided by a relative or an absolute majority, but I would like to focus on aspects that have been ignored.
Until now, discussions in Taiwan on the absolute majority system have merely referred to the runoff election system employed in France. However, a look around the world reveals that there is not just one version of the absolute majority system. Other versions are the preferential ballot system used in the elections to Australia’s House of Representatives and the supplementary vote system that was recently adopted in the London mayoral election.
I will limit my discussion to the runoff election system.
Generally speaking, there is indeed a possibility that a minority president could be elected in a relative plurality system when there are more than two candidates. In the long term, however, a relative plurality system is more likely to result in a battle between two parties, as we saw in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections in Taiwan.
This is because there is only one round of votes, and competition between candidates from the same camp must be settled before the election. If a split occurs in one camp, two candidates could emerge and this often means that the split camp will lose.
Experience shows that a relative plurality system tends to create a battle between two parties over the long term, unless voters learn how to implement strategic voting.
Runoff elections could encourage more candidates to take part in the first round of elections, and it makes integration between candidates from the same camp in the first round harder. In the first round of voting, the main candidates must try to place first or second to position themselves for the second round.
Even if a candidate is unable to gain first or second place, gaining a sufficiently large part of the vote in the first round will give them the bargaining position to form a political collation or even make a political deal with the two leading candidates before the second round starts.
A clear example of this was the 1996 Russian presidential election, where president Boris Yeltsin struck a deal promising a certain position to Alexander Lebed, who had placed third in the first round, to gain his support.
The French Fifth Republic is another example. Since France’s first direct presidential elections in 1965, there have been eight presidential elections. The smallest number of candidates to run in any election was six, the largest was 16. There was not one single occasion when victory was decided in the first round of voting and on three occasions, the leader from the first round ended up losing in the second round.
The winner of the second round, is often decided by a “manufactured majority” created through political coalitions.
Both of these election systems have their pluses and minuses, but if we look at the systems adopted by other countries, we will see that in more than 90 countries where the national leader is popularly elected, only 20 percent have adopted a plurality system, while almost 60 percent have adopted a runoff system.
This clearly shows that regardless of whether it is a manufactured majority or not, system designers in most countries are most concerned about ensuring the legitimacy provided by gaining more than half of the vote.
Wang Yeh-lih is a political science professor at National Taiwan University.
TRANSLATED BY DREW CAMERON
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