Abstract
In mass democracies, voting—in elections or referendums—is the main way in which most citizens can publicly express their political preferences. And yet this means of expression is sometimes perceived by them as highly frustrating, partly because it does not allow for much expression. Dominant voting methods lead to a reduction of options, pressure citizens to vote tactically at the cost of expressing their genuine preferences, and fail to convey what they really think about different candidates, parties, or options. Yet citizens do not merely have a right to vote; they have a more fundamental right to political expression from which one can derive a right to a voting method that offers the most opportunities for expression among those satisfying other important requirements. The aim of this article is therefore to add this consideration about the importance of political expression to debates about voting methods that have mainly been conducted from the perspective of social choice theory. To illustrate what is at stake, it introduces evaluative voting methods (allowing voters to grade all of the candidates, parties, or options) as a promising way of honoring the right to political expression without jeopardizing other important properties of voting methods.
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Notes
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For a broader and empirically based view on citizens’ frustration with their political institutions, see Harrison 2023.
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Although some have argued that the incentive to vote tactically is a good thing, because it encourages voters to learn about the functioning of their electoral system and about the views of their fellow citizens (Dowding and Van Hees 2008, p. 10).
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This is a distinct issue that I will not take up here, having discussed it in previous work (Vandamme 2018). Voting secrecy was already questioned by John Stuart Mill (1861) among others, and has more recently been challenged by Brennan and Pettit (1990), Engelen and Nys (2013), and defended by Lever (2015).
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This is not to be understood in the sense of ‘as frequently as possible', but in terms of the richness of expression on a scale ranging from a yes/no answer to a full speech.
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And not just any expressive voting method: a more expressive voting method better honors the right than a less expressive one.
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In his interesting Principles of Electoral Reform, the Oxford philosopher Michael Dummett rejects the vision of electoral reform as shopping in a supermarket where the various systems on the shelves are those that exist in different countries. He emphasizes that there is room for more creativity: we can try new systems that have only been imagined yet never experimented with, or design new ones to meet our democratic aspirations (Dummett 1997, p. 8).
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If it sounds silly, note that first-past-the-post system should sound as silly. Vote splitting is a frequent phenomenon, dramatically illustrated by George W. Bush’s 2000 victory thanks to a splitting of progressive votes between Al Gore and Green challenger Ralph Nader (see Poundstone 2008, pp. 59–91 for a short history of vote splitting in the USA). Two-round systems run a broadly similar risk.
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This would mean, here, an equal probability to prevail (when considering probabilities in the absence of knowledge about citizens’ actual preferences).
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Majority judgment was nonetheless used in the 2022 Primaire populaire in France, a grassroots (and unsuccessful) initiative to select a unifying presidential candidate for the Left. And open-list systems may be seen as incorporating a form of approval voting—within the selected list (Baujard et al. 2018, pp. 14–15).
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Evaluative voting is usually thought to be appropriate to identify a single winner, as in a first-past-the-post election, rather than composing a Parliament. Research is ongoing on its possible applicability in parliamentary elections with proportional representation. One option is simply to sum points and allocate seats in proportion to the percentage of points obtained by each party, possibly with a threshold to avoid excessive fragmentation. One problem that must be dealt with, however, is the incentive that this would create to fragment parties in smaller yet coordinated units. See Dummett 1997, pp. 169–173.
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This is the most salient advantage of this method compared to preferential methods such as the one recommended by Jean-Charles de Borda in the eighteenth century, and still defended by some voting theorists (such as Dummett 1997), in which voters can only rank candidates. Another is that tactical voting is less hazardous. For some interesting criticisms of preferential voting, see Barry 1986.
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For example, those using points instead of qualitative appreciations, as in Fig. 3, or a different scale (e.g. 0–3).
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It is unclear to what extent this model applies in more personality-centered elections.
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I follow Goldman’s (1999) causal responsibility approach: even if ‘an individual’s vote is not decisive for a given candidate’s victory, such a vote can still qualify as a partial cause of that victory' (p. 217).
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Acknowledgment
The author wishes to thank Alice el-Wakil and Simone Marsilio for detailed comments on a previous version of the manuscript, and all the participants in the workshop on decision-making methods organized by Suzanne Bloks and Dorota Mokrosinska in Hamburg in September 2022 for their helpful suggestions.
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FWO, 1283723N, Pierre-Etienne Vandamme.
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Vandamme, PÉ. The Right to Expressive Voting Methods. Res Publica (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-023-09645-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-023-09645-9