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A Dwarf amongst Giants? Understanding third party vote in contemporary French elections. The case of the FN.
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home base. In 2007, it has become, in a sense, much more genuine “far right” party, but only because the traditional right has changed and there has been a constant decline of the PCF’s vote (Perrineau et al. 2007; Perrineau 2007d). The traditional right under Sarkozy moved into the home base of the FN by coopting many of the old Lepenist messages. To compound the irony yet further, the voters that the new French right has claimed from the FN would likely have been “closet leftists,” at least by their second round voting patterns.
In other words, at least a substantial part of the change in the patterns of French
elections consisted not of the traditional rightists shifting further to the right to capture the “far right” voters in general, but using the supposedly “far right” FN as a conduit to capture allegedly leftist voters in the second round.
One of the most interesting contributions of our paper is a methodological one.
Most of the analyses which exist on the electoral bases of the Front National rely exclusively on post-electoral survey data to make claims about the preferences of individuals (Mayer and Perrineau 1996; 1992; Evans 2000; Ivaldi 2005). Contrastingly, we use actual aggregate electoral data to analyse the direction of vote transfers from the first round into the second round. Our “cheap” technique has much room for improvement but we think it is indeed a small step in the right direction for analysing voter and party strategies in the current French institutional arrangement.
Future extensions of this paper would include the incorporation of the 2002 electoral
race as a further test of validity and, if available, more finely grained electoral data.
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| | Authors: Hoyo, Veronica. and Kim, Henry. |
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home base. In 2007, it has become, in a sense, much more genuine “far right” party, but
only because the traditional right has changed and there has been a constant decline of the
PCF’s vote (Perrineau et al. 2007; Perrineau 2007d). The traditional right under Sarkozy
moved into the home base of the FN by coopting many of the old Lepenist messages. To
compound the irony yet further, the voters that the new French right has claimed from the
FN would likely have been “closet leftists,” at least by their second round voting patterns.
In other words, at least a substantial part of the change in the patterns of French
elections consisted not of the traditional rightists shifting further to the right to capture the
“far right” voters in general, but using the supposedly “far right” FN as a conduit to capture
allegedly leftist voters in the second round.
One of the most interesting contributions of our paper is a methodological one.
Most of the analyses which exist on the electoral bases of the Front National rely exclusively
on post-electoral survey data to make claims about the preferences of individuals (Mayer and
Perrineau 1996; 1992; Evans 2000; Ivaldi 2005). Contrastingly, we use actual aggregate
electoral data to analyse the direction of vote transfers from the first round into the second
round. Our “cheap” technique has much room for improvement but we think it is indeed a
small step in the right direction for analysing voter and party strategies in the current French
institutional arrangement.
Future extensions of this paper would include the incorporation of the 2002 electoral
race as a further test of validity and, if available, more finely grained electoral data.
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