Macron calls for a snap election, the gears of political bargaining begin turning after Marine le Pen wins the first round and the threat of a nationalist government becomes very real, a center-left coalition emerges, and et voila a surprisingly strategic median voter snatches victory from the jaws of xenophobic cruelty.
Can such things happen in the US system? Yes and no. The US is neither a parliamentary system nor do we have a two-stage majority-rule electoral rule, but the same bargaining occurs beyond closed doors, yielding new and sometimes surprising coalitions. The political bargaining behind candidates, however, is beholden to the primary system, so it’s not always clear when bargaining plays out and what actually transpires. For example, as the prospects of President Biden winning re-election over former President Trump, there is increasing speculative expectation of an alternative Democratic candidate despite the party already nominating the President.
The process happening as we speak is a messy process, absent explicit institutional rules and, in the case of the Democratic candidate, a player with veto power, both effectively and literally. The gravity of the median voter is far weaker when the rules, or in this case the absence of specific rules, lead to large transaction costs and, in turn, enormous uncertainty. Whether the US median voter will hold in November’s election is unclear. All we can do for the moment is doff our caps to French voters, their (in my opinion superior) voting rules, and the political operators who bargained the country out of a potentially disastrous new administration.
Economist Writing Every Day 