French Double Ballot Effects: American Experiments

Abstract

Scholarship on how particular electoral arrangements influence vote choice, turnout, coalition behavior, and government policy has received renewed attention with the emergence of so many democracies in the last two decades. The French case is particularly noteworthy because national elections normally require two ballots in order for winners to secure a majority of the votes, and also due to the prevalence of French-style presidential contests implemented in several new democracies (e.g., Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, Russia, and Ukraine). The overriding research question of this chapter is the impact of the double ballot. We depart from the observational paradigm of previous research, using laboratory experiments to distinguish how double ballot electoral systems differ from single ballot systems on several outcome variables: effective number of candidates, sincere voting, accurate forecasters, party ideological distance, voter ideological distance, and candidate ideological distance. The results of the experiments, conducted in the United States, suggest that double ballot rules produce statistically different results from single ballot rules. In principle, these results would appear to be applicable cross-culturally and may have important implications for presidential reform in both the United States and the France.