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The impact of economic and political factors on popularity in France (1981–2017)

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French Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

In this article, we study a popularity function for the popularity of the French political parties (1981Q2–2017Q1). At first, we suppose that voters have a retrospective behaviour according to the reward-punishment model in a closed economy. We show that the unemployment rate has a significant influence on the popularity of the French political parties and find unfavourable results for the partisan hypothesis. The analysis also indicates that economic openness has an influence on popularity, thus a partly expected result for the asymmetry hypothesis: punishment without any reward. For the political variables, significant influence of the honeymoon effect, the second-order elections (regional or European) and the congresses of the Socialist party are also found to be significant.

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Notes

  1. In the model of Hibbs (1981), voters judge economic performance of the government in a relative way by comparing it with the previous party and government and voters are not very myopic and take into account economic performance over the last 4 years.

  2. Since the 2007 French presidential election, the popularity of the Left (approximated by the popularity of the Socialist party) is not a good predictor of the vote for the Left at the second round of the French presidential election.

  3. As the popularity variable is not simply a political variable but has an economic part, we shall mention it explicitly when it is used.

  4. According to Lewis-Beck and Paldam (2000), voters have more retrospective behaviour than forward-looking behaviour, but the difference between these two models is weak.

  5. In the partisan political cycles originally developed for the USA, the left-wing party (democratic) attaches more importance to the fight against unemployment and the right-wing party (republican) attaches more importance to the fight against inflation.

  6. Kayser and Grafstrom (2019) distinguish four voting models: the unemployment competence (direct interests), the growth competence, the class interests of Peltzman (1992) and the material issues models.

  7. Kayser and Grafstrom (2019) write that a variant of this argument is to suppose that left-wing parties hold a reputation for competence in the fight against unemployment and right-wing parties in the fight against inflation.

  8. Letterie and Swank (1997), and Swank (1998) construct a complete model with partisan and competence (reward-punishment) variables.

  9. The results of Hellwig and Samuels (2007) seem favourable for ‘the government constraint hypothesis’, but it would be necessary to compare these results with those obtained with an estimation with economic variables without the interaction of the economy with openness.

  10. Nannestad and Paldam (1997) and Enkelmann (2014) write that from a rational choice perspective, the (grievance) asymmetry simply reflects the fact that people are risk-averse.

  11. Fair (1978) uses as the dependent variable the vote for the democratic candidate at the American presidential elections and details a theoretical model of electoral choice.

  12. The most used dependent variable is the popularity of the President or of the Prime Minister (this is closely links to the vote for the outgoing presidential or parliamentary majority). Pissarides (1980), Borooah and van der Ploeg (1982) and Borooah and Boroaah (1990) use as the dependent variable the difference between the popularity of the government and the popularity of the opposition. Borooah and van der Ploeg (1982), and Borooah and Boroaah (1990) explain the choice of the dependent variable with a theoretical model (a logit model).

  13. We retain the data of the third month of every quarter when the data were monthly.

  14. Unit root tests for the popularity-dependent variable POPLR have given the following results: with the ADF (augmented Dickey-Fuller) and the SIC or modified SIC criterion, the Phillips-Perron, the KPSS tests, the POPLR series has not a unit root at 5 per cent level; the Perron test with an endogenous break point at 1996Q4 (with a break in the level or in the slope). The different unit root tests show that the ΔPOPLR series is stationary at 5 per cent level. Unit root tests for the UNEMN, GGDPN and INFLN economic independent variables have given the following results: with the ADF (augmented Dickey-Fuller) and the SIC or modified SIC criterion, the Phillips-Perron tests, the results are ambiguous for the UNEMN, GGDPN series, and the INFLN series is stationary at 5 per cent level; the different unit root tests show that the ΔUNEMN and ΔGGDPN series are stationary at 5 per cent level.

  15. We use this popularity index for the French presidential elections (1981–2012) and a quite similar popularity index: (POPL + POPLR)/2 for the French legislative elections (1986–2012 and 1986–2017); see Auberger (2018).

  16. We use OCDE data for the unemployment rate because, with INSEE data, the unemployment rate may not be known until 2 months after the end of a quarter.

  17. When we suppose that voters are sophisticated, we study the effect of the difference between the national economic situation and the global economic situation on popularity. With this hypothesis, the government has the capacity to influence a globalized economy and must have better economic performances than the global economy. The results obtained (statistical indicators) are not clearly different (more satisfactory) than with only the national economic situation; see Auberger (2016); then it is not necessary to suppose that voters are sophisticated. We also note that the estimated coefficient of the unemployment variable in a globalized economy is very slightly lower in absolute value than in a closed economy (1981Q2-2014Q4).

  18. The clarity of responsibility variables are not significant at 10 per cent level (ENEP × I and NPG × I) where the ENEP variable is the effective number of parties in parliament and the NPG variable is the number of parties in government. Dassonneville et Lewis-Beck (2014) do not multiply the ENEP and NPG variables by I (equals to 1 or to − 1) while they study the vote for the Left and we can question this. However, these variables seem questionable when we do not multiply them by an economic variable to study their influence but then there may be a multicollinearity problem.

  19. For the honeymoon variable, different variables have been tested with similar results.

  20. The estimated coefficients of the ΔGDPL, ΔGDPLOE, ΔINFLNL and ΔINFLNLOE variables are not significant at 10 per cent level.

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Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Robert Elgie for his interest and support as well as to Amy Mazur and the reviewer. John Wisdom’s was a great help on the English fluency of this piece.

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  1. CRED, University of Paris 2, 7 rue de la grande chaumière, 75006, Paris, France

    Antoine Auberger

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Appendix

Appendix

See Table 5.

Table 5 Descriptive statistics of variables (1981Q2–2017Q1)
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Auberger, A. The impact of economic and political factors on popularity in France (1981–2017). Fr Polit 17, 451–467 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41253-019-00103-8

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