Campaigns, Political Preferences and Turnout: An Empirical Study of the 1997 French Legislative Elections
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Campaigns, Political Preferences and Turnout: An Empirical Study of the 1997 French Legislative Elections Christine Fauvelle-Aymar and Abel Franc¸ois LAEP, Maison des Sciences Economiques, Universite´ de Paris I, 106-112 boulevard de l’Hoˆpital, 75647 Paris Cedex 13, France. E-mail: [email protected]
The purpose of this paper is to assess the importance of electoral campaigns for explaining turnout, and to evaluate more precisely the influence of electoral expenditures and of the multiplication of candidatures. The study of these two determinants also proposes to control for the influence of the structural determinants of the vote, notably standard socio-economic variables, as well as for the influence of the voter partisan preferences, whose impact on turnout is rarely taken into account. After a theoretical analysis of the determinants of electoral abstention, we propose an empirical analysis of the participation at the legislative constituency level for the French elections of 1997. French Politics (2005) 3, 49–72. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fp.8200070 Keywords: economics of the vote; electoral turnout; campaign expenditures
Introduction The role and relevance of the electoral campaign in the theoretical and empirical study of the determinants of electoral choice and turnout vary significantly. According to Herr (2002), one may distinguish three different positions: the campaign has no influence on the outcome of the contest (see especially Markus, 1992; Gelman and King, 1993); the sole impact of the campaign is to activate the latent predisposition of the voters1 (Bartels, 1993; Finkel, 1993); and lastly, campaigns play a minor role compared to the other determinants but can make, in the end, the difference (Holbrook, 1994, 1996; Petrocik, 1996; Shaw and Roberts, 2000). Concerning the French political process, the impact of the electoral campaign on the voters’ mobilization has not been taken into account in spite of the fact that, on the one hand, the reduction of ideological differences between parties (Lafay, 1993) has tended to emphasize the events of the campaign itself, and that, on the other, the choice of the voters seems to take place later and later during the electoral process (Cayrol, 1985).
Christine Fauvelle-Aymar and Abel Franc¸ois Campaigns, Political Preferences and Turnout
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The aim of this paper is to offer an empirical analysis, for France, of the influence of the campaign on turnout in legislative elections. Two variables facilitate the quantitative examination of campaigns in the case of the French legislative elections: campaign spending and the candidates. The total amount of campaign expenditures at the constituency level offers a good proxy measure for the intensity of the engagement of the candidates during the campaign. And the total number of candidates in competition, which fluctuates from one election and one constituency to another, measures the importance and the diversity of the electoral offer. To assess the empirical impact of these two factors, it is necessary to contro
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