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Forecasting the 2012 French legislative election

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French Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

Who will win the next French legislative election? This article provides forecasts based on an estimated vote function from local data (départements) between 1986 and 2007. Predicting the presidential winner or presidential outcomes is a recent tradition in France but one that has produced fairly accurate results. Yet the literature has paid less attention to forecasting legislative elections. In this article, I propose to fill this gap by estimating a politico-econometric model where vote decision is based on economic (unemployment, GDP) and political (PM popularity, previous electoral vote share, partisan trend) factors. On the basis of this model, a defeat for right-wing parties at the second round is forecasted unless, against all odds, Nicolas Sarkozy wins the presidential election.

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Notes

  1. See Lafay et al (2007) and Dubois (2007) for a survey of vote functions in the French case.

  2. But the same model was quite disappointing for predicting the 2002 and 2007 presidential elections (Lewis-Beck et al, 2008).

  3. From now called Department.

  4. For the June 2007 election for instance, the GDP predicted in December 2006 for the year 2007 is used. Why using the month of December? In an ideal world, it would have been preferable to keep the month preceding the second round of the legislative elections. However, this article is written in December 2011, which limits our choices and forces us to consider the closest month to the election. There again, in accordance with the hypothesis derived from the theory of economic voting, the sign for this variable is positive suggesting that incumbent governments benefit from wealth creation in the year before the election. Of course, this measure rests on the implicit idea that voters take into account the value of the predicted GDP when forming future economic expectations to judge the performance of the incumbent government in its capacity to favor growth.

  5. Data come from an extensive statistical series provided by the pollster SOFRES, which publishes each month a barometer of public opinion.

  6. The Breusch and Pagan Lagrangian multiplier test for random effects reports a Chi2 value of 2.53 (with a P-value=0.1119). Consequently we fail to reject that variances across departments are zero. Then there is no evidence of significant differences across departments.

  7. The modified Wald test for groupwise heteroskedasticity in fixed effect regression model reports a Chi2 (96) value of 2691 and confirms rejection of the null hypothesis of homoskedasticity.

  8. In other words, if the random-slope model is different that the random-intercept model, then we may be conservative if the null hypothesis is on the boundary.

  9. Let us remind that we use cantonal data in the first forecasting model as they are the last known elections in December 2011.

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Acknowledgements

I thank Eric Dubois and Antoine Auberger for allowing me to access some data that they collected for previous forecasting on French elections. I also thank André Blais, Frédéric Mérand, Jean-François Godbout, Richard Nadeau and Michael Lewis-Beck for their careful and fruitful reading. All remaining errors are mine.

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Foucault, M. Forecasting the 2012 French legislative election. Fr Polit 10, 68–83 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/fp.2012.2

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