FPTP Ain’t All That Bad: Nationalist Parties, Immigrants, and Electoral Systems in Québec and Flanders

Abstract

At the time of writing, the United States is recovering from one of its most divisive and bitter presidential elections. The contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney polarized the entire country into two camps, leading many observers to bemoan this state of affairs. This chapter offers a counter-intuitive view that goes against the grain in the scholarly literature as well as in popular perception. In this huge democracy of 300 million citizens, the election was divisive, true; but the polarization united the country from ocean to ocean — a phenomenon best captured by the German phrase die Einheit der Zweiteilung (‘the unity of bifurcation’)- Differences in race, ethnicity, religion, class, region, and demography all managed to merge around two nationwide camps who were offering different degrees of the same Whig ideology. Most pundits seem to believe that the Republican flirtation with the anti-immigrant sentiment originating from the right-wing of the party, which seems to have cost them centrist support, played a big role in Romney’s defeat. While not being the sole reason for nationwide politics punishing extremist policy positions, this chapter calls for a second look at an electoral system that seems to have only a few friends left among political scientists. This is a call to evaluate the pluses and minuses of the first-past-the-post (majoritarian) electoral system in an even-handed way.