“A more democratic Fifth Republic”
French Pres. Sarkozy yesterday received the Balladur Report with 77 prescriptions on making France “more democratic.” According to Le Monde, “two of the more sensitive subjects were installing a dose of proportional and strict limits on the dual mandate.”
Former PM Édouard Balladur chaired the committee, which Sarkozy commissioned three months ago. Vice president of the commission was the Socialists’ Jack Lang, whose own party under Mitterand briefly implemented PR for Chamber of Deputies elections until its rapid abandonment in 1986. The country also used PR from 1945 to 1958.
The IHT has some specifics on proposed adjustments to presidential-parliamentary relations: state-of-the-republic addresses and limiting powers of decree among them. Other proposals call for counting presidential TV addresses as campaign time, holding presidential elections simultaneously with parliamentary elections and barring legislators from holding other political offices.
According to IHT, up to 30 of 577 Assembly seats would be elected under PR. The paper calls the current system first-past-the-post, which is somewhat inaccurate. France uses a two-round runoff system in single-member districts.
Is an interesting case of MMP on the horizon?
An 18-page summary report is available in PDF from lemonde.fr. I have barely just skimmed it. The headings are: A better controlled excecutive power, A reinforced parliament, New rights for citizens.
MSS on 02 Nov 2007 at 10:08 am #
The Fourth Republic was not fully PR. The electoral system varied by department. It was a very partisan-engineered system, though I have never been able to get my head around the details.
Also, regarding decree powers: Unless the IHT is talking about emergency powers (very rarely used), the “decree” is in the hands of the cabinet, not the president. This may not be important in a period, such as the present, when the president’s own party has a huge majority. But it is very important under cohabitation or under the more diverse coalitions that have been common in the 5th Republic.
Finally, a bit off topic… I notice that Jack is starting to use the “more” option in his posts, while the other bloggers here seem not to do it. As a reader, I find the “more” annoying. As a blogger, I use it only when a post is unusually long or likely to appeal only to a minority of my readers. It is a lot easier for the reader to determine whether the whole post is interesting if he or she can see the whole post while scrolling down the page.
Just my two or three cents worth…
Jack on 03 Nov 2007 at 6:55 pm #
Thanks, Prof S.
About the WP “more” tag. As a reader, I agree with you because it forces one to make more clicks: into the full post, back out to the main page and/or among the “recent posts” on the right. As a writer, however, I like it for two reasons. One, it forces me to distill a post into its most “newsworthy” points for the first graf. Two, following your own second criterion, it spares those readers not sharing my interests the need to scroll, scroll, (and maybe scroll some more).
Tradeoffs abound. Fun to think about at any rate. Ultimately I hope to boost the user-friendliness of this site all around.
In the shorter term, I will be a little more discriminating in my experiments with the “more” tag.
MSS on 04 Nov 2007 at 9:37 am #
More discriminating. Yes, less ‘more’ is more.
On the distilling, I thought that was what the “excerpt” function was for. In WP, the excerpt is what shows up in the in-box for Atom feed readers (though not for RSS, which just takes the first few lines of text).
Bancki on 21 Nov 2007 at 8:07 am #
The IVth Republic had experience with PR:
Shortly after WWII it conducted three elections with party-list PR (D’Hondt) in the departments as districts (as in 1986). De gaulle favored departmental PR in these postwar circumstances because it could be easily implemented and no-one could foresee who would prevail (fear for communists ending first)
The system was changed for the elections of 1951 and 1956:
In Paris and suburbs (2 departments) it was simple quota-PR (”plus forte reste”).
Elsewhere, parties could forge cartels (”apparentment”): if a party or a cartel won >50%, it received all the seats; otherwise (and between the parties in a cartel) D’Hondt (”plus forte moyenne”) was used.
It was devised to favor the middelsized governing parties against gaullists and communists who were strong but had no allies. It worked out as projected in 1951, but the centrist parties failed to agree broad cartels in 1956.
Jack on 22 Nov 2007 at 8:37 pm #
Thanks for this description, Bancki.