Latest, 1 July 2024
First round: NFP 29.2%; Macron ENS 21.5%; RN 34.2%
NOTE: median voter votes for Macron. Middle democracy.
... 29 June 2024: France parliamentary elections
2 France, 2012-2024: from M-shape to W-shape to?
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Le Monde: https://www.lemonde.fr/en/2024-french-elections/
Most consequential election in decades:
https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/27/europe/france-parliament-election-explainer-intl-cmd/index.html
Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_French_legislative_election
Opinion polling indicates the three peaks, left NFP, centre ENS and right RN to give a W-shape, with Macron’s middle having the lowest of the peaks and NFP including the centre-left:
1 29 1 20 1.5 0.5 8 4 32 1
. NFP ENS LR RN Rec
.includes centre-left Macron centre-right Le Pen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_2024_French_legislative_election
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NOTE: The following Chapters 9-14 were to be in “The Middle Opinion. USA”.
“We promise you the earth.” Cartoon of Rishi Sunak, Keir Starmer and Ed Davey, with their manifestos. The Times, June 13 2024: 25. Peter Brookes.
Dissatisfaction … ask for satisfaction, promise satisfaction, vote … constraint, dissatisfaction … dissatisfaction with system.
‘Best’ possible is the middle … the middle gives greatest dissatisfaction to the extremes … opposite extreme is greatest dissatisfaction for each extreme.
1 Asking for the impossible? Can democracy, can the state, can anything, deliver what the people want?
SEE BELOW
2 France, 2012-2024: from M-shape to W-shape to?
3 2 Key ideas and overview of chapters
Part 1 Satisfaction and democracy
10 Middle parties and the M-shaped distribution in political space
11 Satisfaction with democracy
12 Value spaces
Part 2 Optimal social choice
13 Optimal social choice, preference functions: Peter Emerson and Dublin City Council
14 Optimal social choice, value functions: social design, ethics and the amount of value
Asking for the impossible?
Can democracy, can the state, can anything, deliver what the people want?
Even the wisdom of Solomon could not give (exclusive of the other) the baby to both the women claiming to be the mother. Nor can all the land be given (exclusive of the other) to both the Israelis and the Palestinians. Nor can Israel’s democracy give the people of Israel what they want. Nor can a country be (exclusive of the other) both welcoming and unwelcoming to others, nor can that country’s democracy deliver that. Those who want X and those who want not-X cannot be simultaneously satisfied (exclusive of the other). In general, “you can please all the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot please all of the people all of the time”. The limitations of democracy are referred to in such concepts as the ‘democratic deficit’, Downs’ ‘inherent inequality of democracy’ and Arrow’s ‘impossibility theorem’.
The year 2024 is a year of elections. The largest ever democratic election has just taken place in India. And the large international election has just taken place in the European Union. Here in the UK we are in the middle of an election. Meanwhile the rest of the world watches the election in the USA.
In some cases the incumbent government has suffered, or is likely to suffer, a setback. The incumbent government was elected to give the people what they want, but presumably did not do so and so the people have voted for an alternative that will deliver what they want. But will the alternative do any better?
One issue here concerns the notion, “what the people want”. It is a notion akin to “the will of the people” which has been critically appraised in the book by Albert Weale. During an election campaign, each party make promises relating to what the people want, but then is challenged by other parties and by experts who say that the promises will not be kept or indeed cannot be kept.
If the impossible is not achievable, what is possible? Is it perhaps possible to attain the best outcome out of all the things that are possible? This issue is addressed by social choice theory. In certain circumstances there are certain arguments which point to the middle as being the best possible outcome, what I refer to as ‘middle democracy’.
Some studies find that voters’ preferences favour the middle in the sense that their preferences have a mode in the middle of some continuum. However the party systems in existing democracies do not always deliver the middle. Instead the party preferences of voters give an M-shaped distribution on the continuum.
THE END