No country has ever found the keys to democracy in its cradle. Although the regime natural to man, apt to transform the rights of man into rights of the citizen does exist, highlighting it requires some research work in order to fully grasp its rationality. It has no connection with ancient Greece and emerged in Europe under its modern form at the end of the Middle Ages, as a result of a long evolution of Law. As sophisticated as contemporary regimes have become, they however remain empirical systems born of trial and error and, for lack of the opportunity earlier on to refer to a theoretical model, remain unfinished.
The democratic model
Two possible ways can be used to define the concept of democracy. The first, based on logical reasoning, is that of political philosophers. The demonstration starts from an obvious reality and proceeds through successive deductions. The method is not without risks, for it is difficult to reason accurately at a high level of abstraction. If the reasoning is flawed, it will spread all the more quickly as it will have a demagogical connotation, with the risk of creating an ideological pandemic, as the ones we went through in the 20th century.
The deductive method
The possibility to define the concept through pure reason was demonstrated by the French academic, member of the Institut de France, Jean Baechler. The argument can be summed up as follows: men are the only animal species whose behaviour is not conditioned by nature, they must therefore find a way to live together despite their contentious and even gregarious nature. They manage to do so thanks to the two superior qualities nature has endowed them with: language and reason. They give up violence and entrust the monopoly of its use to a superior authority. The state plays its role thanks to a magic ingredient: Law, in the primary sense of “what is fair”.
The state’s operating mode being coercion, it only uses it if necessary. Why use it if there is no reason for it? Issues pertaining to the common good are dealt with in the public sphere, where things are decided at a majority for lack of any other means. A democratic regime is thus characterized not by the election of its governments — it already existed in Rome — but by its capacity to muster a majority in the public space so as to be able to make collective decisions.
Such is the role of the voting system, the first tool needed for a democratic regime to function. Knowing that by virtue of another law, mathematical this time, only two parties can durably compete to win a majority of votes, there is only one solution to obtain the desired majority: the single majority vote (or “first-past-the-post system”). The result of an empirical discovery, consubstantial to democracy, it spontaneously generates two main political forces, whose alternance in power will determine the optimum dose of state that the society needs, on condition that each of the two camps plays its part. The one represents the aspiration to liberty, the other the aspiration to equality, provided it does not infringe on liberties.
What then emerges is two moderate parties, for it is necessary to gain the votes of the centre in order to win. The proponents of a total state are eliminated from the electoral scene and forced to melt into the ranks of the Left. The leader of the majority party is put in charge of the executive power and will be replaced if he deviates from the political line determined by the election. The result is a strong government, supported by an authentic majority and who can rightly claim to be democratic. He can also rely on the support of the Head of State who, being above the parties, represents the whole of the population and makes sure that the rules of the game are respected. The latter are defined by the constituent power, also placed under the control of the citizens.
Democracy can thus be defined as the regime in which the decision to use public force, necessary to a regulation of the society by Law, is made at a majority on the basis of valid arguments. The citizens thus remain the masters of their choices for all the things that they can deal with by themselves. In the private sphere, everyone thus remains sovereign — in a form of direct democracy, so to speak — while decisions in the public sphere will be made by representatives of the citizens.
The inductive method
The rules of democracy can also be found through the inductive method, which consists in testing the hypotheses liable to account for reality. The observer induces a generalization from facts observed. This is the procedure that has been followed by the author of the present lines. While in charge of studies and documentation in the party of the President of the Republic in 1981, he witnessed an unexpected event, the victory of the leader of the opposition to the recently elected parliamentary majority in the presidential election. A significant fraction of the parliamentary majority had abstained to vote. It was then necessary to probe out the origin of the mishap. The Fifth Republic is the result of two principal innovations: the adoption in 1958 of the majority vote in two rounds, which put an end to political instability, and the election in 1962 of the Head of State by universal suffrage, which confirmed the President in his role of real chief of the executive. Being at a distance from Parliament, encouraged to carry out a personal policy, he is exposed to the risk of being disowned in the next presidential vote. This is what happened. The leader of the opposite camp can then claim power and dissolve the National Assembly to change the majority. The nature of the regime had changed.
Beyond the ambiguity of the system, which perplexes the French, what has been set into light is the decisive character of two factors, the voting system and the method of selection of the chief of the executive. Their combination gives birth to four types of different regimes, with the French experimentation enabling one to suppose that the first factor has a beneficial effect while the second is harmful. The thesis establishes the superiority of the Westminster model and the gradation of the efficiency of those regimes. Given that there is a lack of studies on the subject and that the concept of democracy is nowhere defined, the author was led to found the Institut pour la démocratie in order to fill the gap.
To uphold the law, it was first necessary to examine the case of the South-American countries, which seemed, at first sight, to offer the most critical choice. The author went there on a fact-checking trip. The choice of institutions turns out to be the produce of history and geography. On becoming independent, those countries adopted the presidential model of their North-American big brother and then proportional representation, which was in vogue in Europe at the turn of the century, for the election of the representatives. The outcome was caudillismo. The ground under the presidents being fragile, candidates to power preferred to join the army with the secret hope to be able one day to take the presidential palace by storm and sit directly in the president’s armchair.
What could be learned from this gave birth to a published article, corroborated by the experience of the other countries(1). Less dramatically, the combination of proportional representation and presidential vote in a parliamentary regime — the choice validated by Western chanceries for most of the new regimes after the fall of the Berlin wall — generates weak governments, tarnishing the image of democracy in the whole area. Ukraine will have been one of the victims. If it had had a true parliamentary regime, pro-Russians and pro-West Ukrainians, concentrated in separate geographical zones, would have divided themselves along interior lines, instead of which the presidential vote unfortunately had the reverse effect.
The Institut pour la démocratie has eventually put into light one of the best guarded secrets of political science. Although it is not referred to in the constitution or is not the proper system, the voting system is the latter’s most important element. Democracy does not rhyme with multi-party but with bi-polarity (2). Field experiences confirm what reasoning was predicting. What looms ahead is then a conflict of interest between the people and their governments, because faction leaders prefer the presidential system, which enshrines power in a person, and proportional representation, which guarantees their election.
This discrepancy is even more obvious when the issue is the perimeter of the state, the primary cause of state hypertrophy in contemporary democracies. It was necessary to wait till the said regimes were in crisis to discover how necessary it was to explain the democratic model and remedy the situation and how necessary it was to have a true Upper House, so that constitutional acts should no longer be left in the hands of those in power, both judge and jury in the circumstances. Since it has become possible to found the rules of the political game on fundamental principles, the citizens can appoint pledged delegates to represent them in the exercise of their constituent power.
Democracies are once again demonstrating their total resilience. France must seize the unique opportunity offered, not only to get out of the ditch by itself, but also to show that a leap forward is possible at the political level, a field in which it has for a long time claimed to have a pioneer’s vocation.
G.L.
- Guy Lardeyret, Constitutions et modes de scrutin, les leçons de l’expérience, Cahiers de la démocratie, n°1, Winter 1992-93
- For more on the subject, see : Guy Lardeyret, Réinitialiser la démocratie, Revue politique et parlementaire, April-June 2022