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The 2012 French electoral campaign: Tools to understand campaign dynamics

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French Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

During the last French presidential election, scholars paid considerable attention to the campaign and several projects were set up to analyse its different facets. This article reports both the available data and the main preliminary results on what was undertaken in relation to media coverage, web campaigning and the evolution of public opinion, interests group and candidate strategies in the year before the election.

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Notes

  1. They are François Hollande, Nicolas Sarkozy, Marine Le Pen, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, François Bayrou and Eva Joly.

  2. The researchers working on the project Enpolitique.com consider that the candidates under-reported their expenditures for web campaigning because it does not include expenditures that took place before April 2011 and some items of expenditure are not included in the campaign budgets of the candidates (for instance, the Facebook page of Nicolas Sarkozy was financed by the Elysée).

  3. European Elections Studies provide same items to assess individual voting behaviour. For an extensive review of the advantages of such a tool, see van der Eijk et al (2006).

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Brookes, K., Le Gall, C. & Magni Berton, R. The 2012 French electoral campaign: Tools to understand campaign dynamics. Fr Polit 12, 255–264 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1057/fp.2014.13

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