Elections are not merely the time when electors are given the chance to express their party preferences officially and secretly; they are also the means of putting into office, more or less directly, the party or coalition of parties which will govern the country until the next election (or the first crisis). This function is crucial under the parliamentary system or the semi-presidential system of the French type, as experiences with “cohabitation” have shown, and it remains very important under the presidential system where, by definition, the presidential election fulfils this function, but where the essential role played by the legislature in the political process invariably results in the parliamentary elections having a clear impact in terms of investiture or censure, especially when they take place between two presidential elections, as in the case of the US midterm elections.

a. This function is naturally particularly significant and the most strongly felt in countries relying on the plurality and majority systems for their elections, especially all its most extreme form of the single-round plurality ballot, which is notorious for fostering the development of a functional two-party system involving two potentially majority organisations which assume in turn, with swings in one or the other direction, the functions of government and countergovernment (which means the official opposition whose aim is to become the governing party). In democracies of this type, electors in voting have the direct, clear potential to put their government into office. It is therefore possible to speak in this connection of a “governing democracy”.

b. This is not necessarily the case with democracies whose electoral culture is that of proportional representation, unless there are sociological (exceptionally clear social divisionsreflecting religious and cultural splits, for example) or historical (memories of a trauma associated with the absence of a government majority) factors which come into play. This is because the logic of proportional representation is naturally to give preference to the function of representation over the function of investiture. The more this logic is adhered to (constituencies having numerous seats, rule of the highest average, no threshold and no second round or majority correcting factor), the more the election becomes a mere poll of all the existing political tendencies. Pure proportional representation favours a multi-party system and the jealously guarded independence of parties. It deprives the elector of the possibility to have a direct influence in the formation of the government, which is invariably the outcome of bargaining between the parties represented in parliament, more often than not after rather than before the elections. Hence the expression “governed democracy” that is used for these types of systems in which the conclusive choice of the government majority is monopolised by the political class, thereby depriving the sovereign people of the full exercise of their sovereignty: “democracy without the people”, to borrow the title of a work by Maurice Duverger on the French tradition of the Parliamentary Republic before 1958.

c. The example of France also shows that proportional representation is not the only system being questioned. Doubtless this form of electoral system may be introduced to respond to exacerbated criticism to the effect that in the long run a majority system causes small and medium-sized parties to be excluded from the distribution of seats and that the smallest parties even find it difficult to survive as independent parties in their own right. But it can also “record” a fundamental political split that the majority system – especially in a less effective form than the first-past-the-post – cannot eradicate owing to cultural factors or historical events resulting in irreconcilable differences (war, revolution, economic crisis, etc). This was the case in France between the two world wars when the continuance of a revolutionary movement in a working class awakened by the Soviet revolution had created an irreconcilable cleft between the communists and the socialists and the continuing cleft between conservative Catholicism and anti-clerical radicalism had prevented the right from regrouping even before the extreme fascist right burst on to the scene. In such a socio-political setting, two-round majority voting was considered above all from the point of view of the results of the first round – which enabled each political family to count its electors – rather than the second, which, admittedly, eradicated “in functional terms” the divisions within the two major tendencies by presenting a façade of a right/left split, but the latter did not take long to shatter in the Assembly when major problems facing the country had to be dealt with. The lack of interest in the second round is so manifest and seems so natural that second-round results were virtually never quoted before the 1970s in the historical and political-science literature dealing with the period. So much so that a man with a mind as keen as Maurice Duverger claimed to study the “inequalities of representation” under the Third Republic by relating the distribution of seats following the second round to the distribution of votes in the first, without paying the slightest attention to the transfers of votes between the first and second rounds and without this legerdemain seeming to pose any problem to him.