From the U.K. and France, two lessons for the future of U.S. democracy

What can we learn from the elections across the pond?

It’s been an extra tough week or so for U.S. democracy. Instead of dwelling on that, let’s talk about something else for a moment: the legislative election results from across the Atlantic, which hold important insights into the way forward. 

In the U.K. general election, Labour clinched 33.7% of the votes and a whopping 412 of 650 seats — a dominant majority. In France’s snap parliamentary election, the far-right National Rally won 37.1% of the vote…and, somehow, not nearly enough for a governing majority. In fact, the result is a shocking upset for a party most analysts expected to win big. How is it possible that Labour’s 33% secured a decisive victory in the U.K., while the National Rally’s 37% spelled somber speeches and teary-eyed campaigners in France?

The answer is a story of two electoral systems.

First-past-the-post distortion in the United Kingdom 

To elect Members of Parliament (MPs) to the House of Commons, the U.K. uses a first-past-the-post (FPTP) system that closely mirrors House elections in the U.S. The country is divided into 650 districts, drawn by a nonpartisan body that combines convenient local boundaries. There is no gerrymandering, and voters in each district elect one MP to represent them. Sounds reasonable enough!

And yet last week’s U.K. election results are the most distorted electoral outcome in the country’s history — the biggest gap on record between the share of the vote won by parties and the number of seats they gained. It’s easy to see why, even for anyone unfamiliar with U.K. politics: 

Credit: The New York Times, Anatomy of a Landslide

The results are a collection of fun-house mirrors. Despite placing third overall in the popular vote count, Reform won less than 1% of available seats. And a difference of 10% in the Labour and Conservative popular vote share stretched to a difference of nearly 45% in seat share. Reporting from The Guardian makes clear the full extent of the distortion:

The Liberal Democrats under Ed Davey ruthlessly targeted resources at winnable seats rather than focusing on vote share. As a result, they won a record 72 seats, up from eight in 2019, despite a similar vote share of about 12%…

Analysis of the results at the cross-party pressure group Make Votes Matter found that 58% of voters did not choose their MP. The group’s spokesperson, Steve Gilmore, said previous election results using FPTP had also been “disproportional and unrepresentative”.

In 2015 the Conservatives won a majority with 36.9% of the vote, and in 2017 they had to form a minority government with 42.4%. Then in 2019 they landed an 80-seat majority on a vote share increase of 1.2 percentage points.

Though FPTP’s supporters describe it as the most stable, straightforward system of elections, the above sounds more rouletteish than anything. One thing, however, will always remain stable about FPTP: whether in the U.S. or the U.K., it will almost always distort electoral outcomes and inflate the value of some votes over others.

That’s because FPTP is a type of winner-take-all electoral system; under FPTP, if a candidate wins the most votes (whether that’s a strong majority or some small plurality), she wins 100% of the representation. This means that a party can get a significant portion of the vote in a district (up to 49%!) and have zero representation to show for it. Though that might sound fair on a district-level, if you play that FPTP reality out across enough districts, the effect can be enormous system-level distortions; e.g., Labour eking out enough minor victories across districts to secure a seat share leagues stronger than its popular vote share. This kind of distortion shows up time and time again in FPTP systems. Recall how Republicans took the House in 2012, winning 33 more seats than Democrats despite earning fewer total votes. 

The impetus behind New Zealand’s switch to proportional representation was a series of FPTP distortions, including two instances in which the National Party won parliamentary majorities despite losing to Labour in the popular vote. Proportional representation, the system used by most democracies around the world, combats these kinds of distortions by creating multi-winner districts with representation allocated in proportion to votes. For example, in a six-seat district, if a party’s candidates win 51% of the vote, they would be expected to win three of the six seats rather than all of them (more on how proportional representation works here).

The results out of Britain are particularly distorted because their warped electoral system is being tasked with making sense of resurgent multipartyism. It’s clear that U.K. voters are tiring of the longstanding Labour-Conservative paradigm — the two major parties received a historically low joint vote share, and for the first time four parties gained more than 10% of the popular vote. The U.K. is a multiparty country, but because FPTP tends to only accommodate two major parties, its electoral system is ill-equipped to foster a vibrant multiparty democracy.

That’s a problem. Democracy requires faith in its institutions and in its ability to deliver for the people. Disproportionate, distorted results do little to foster that faith, or to empower voters to maintain a sense of agency over the levers of democracy. That helps explain why a historic level of distortion was paired with the second lowest level of voter turnout since before World War II. Distortion naturally cultivates disengagement and cynicism — something no democracy can afford. 

What’s more, FPTP is ripe for abuse by anti-democratic forces. Cynicism and grievances about nonfunctional democracy are the lifeblood of autocrats; there’s no reason to choose an electoral system that aids and abets this strategy. Today's disproportionate winners may well be tomorrow's disproportionate losers, and vice versa. Distorted democracy doesn't do anyone any long-term favors — its benefactors can and will shift. Meanwhile, those whose votes matter little or not at all will always pay the price.

Notably, the U.K. might be on the precipice of change. A majority (54%) supported moving from FPTP to proportional representation before the most recent election, and given the results, it seems that support will only grow. The Electoral Reform Society imagined what the U.K. election results may have looked like with proportional representation, a decidedly less distorted and more representative outcome:

Credit: The Electoral Reform Society, How the 2024 election could have looked with proportional representation

Britain may well soon join the majority of the world’s democracies by switching to proportional representation. We’ll see whether the U.S. has the political willpower to catch up. 

France’s exercise in coalitional politics 

Democracy’s biggest victories in recent years have hinged on not letting the pro-democracy coalition fracture, from the U.S. in 2020 to Brazil in 2022 to Poland last October. Though the context is quite different, there are echoes of the same lesson in France’s snap parliamentary election results. 

To elect MPs to its National Assembly, France divides the country into 577 single-member districts. Unlike the U.K. and the U.S., though, France holds elections in two rounds. In the first, candidates who fail to secure at least 12.5% of the vote are eliminated. Anyone who earns more than 50% of the vote with a district turnout of at least 25% wins outright, so no one is elected by a paltry plurality. The second round is a series of runoffs, usually featuring somewhere between two and four contenders. Candidates may withdraw between the first and second round, which incentivizes strategic coalition-building between parties. Say two pro-democracy parties finish behind a third anti-democracy one in the first round, but none meet the 50% cutoff. The pro-democracy parties might coordinate on which candidate to send into the second round, consolidating their vote share in the hopes of defeating a common enemy. 

A version of this played out in the French snap election. In the first round, National Rally won 33% of the total vote and the most out-right majorities in districts, soundly defeating Macron’s Renaissance party and the New Popular Front, a leftwing coalition of parties. 

The first round results alarmed plenty of French voters and international observers alike. Though the National Rally is not an election-denying party of the MAGA-ilk, it's not exactly a pro-democracy political force either. Marine Le Pen, the longtime leader of the National Rally, essentially inherited her role from her father. Jean-Marie Le Pen — an almost cartoonishly evil figure in French politics — is a man of many transgressions, most infamously his comments downplaying the centrality of the Holocaust to World War II (to him, six million Jews murdered by Nazis were a minor detail/small technicality in a larger war.) Marine Le Pen has taken some steps to reform the image of the party — she expelled her father in 2015 and renamed it. But there’s a throughline to the party’s politics. Recent proposals have included scrapping birthright citizenship in a broader bid to scapegoat and demonize immigrants, as well as “national priority” policies that reimagine the contours of French citizenship and its privileges.

Regardless, the coalition that assembled to defeat the far-right National Rally is known historically as “the republican front” — a pro-democracy movement to defeat a politics it views as a threat to constitutional principles of equality. Voters took the second round seriously: Turnout was at its highest rate in more than 40 years. And most notably, leftwing and centrist parties coordinated across second round electoral contests — putting aside certain ideological differences in service of their shared understanding of democracy. Members of this coalition withdrew candidates who placed third in the first round and divided critical vote share, an act of solidarity with powerful levels of efficacy. 

The result? Despite earning 37% of the popular vote share — the most of any single party — Le Pen’s Nationally Rally placed third overall in seat share. 

Credit: POLITICO, How France voted: Charts and maps

To be clear: France’s electoral system is not free from flaws. National Rally earned the highest share of the popular vote and yet placed third in seats — undeniable distortion. And the fact that no party or bloc secured a governing majority leaves the political future of the country uncertain.

But in addition to lessening the extremity of first-past-the-posts’ distortions, the two-round system has the benefit of more accurately capturing overall voter preferences. In France, the clear voter mandate was to deny the National Rally a victory. The two-round system effectively captured the will of voters, whereas first-past-the-post would’ve likely resulted in decisive victory for the far-right. The system — by allowing coalitions to form and adjust between rounds — encouraged the creation of strategic, value-based alliances. Such incentives are almost unthinkable in the U.S. electoral system.

What this means for the U.S. 

Some electoral systems are better than others at doing what representative democracy is supposed to do: accurately capturing the will of the voters, and allowing groups of like-minded people to work together to achieve common goals. Like, for example, the preservation of democracy. 

A lot is up in the air for U.S. democracy right now. It’s hard to feel certain of anything. But two things are very clear: 1) defeating seismic threats requires seismic unity — coalitions that place shared principles over partisan politics; and 2) unity is not enough without electoral systems that facilitate it. If our democracy is to have a fighting chance, we need to move towards a system that better captures voter preferences, incentivizes cooperation and coalitions, fosters faith rather than cynicism, and is representative of our ideologically and racially diverse electorate.