Abstract
This article uses a peculiarity of French local elections to test the influence of mobilization factors and the cost of voting on electoral turnout. At local elections, half of the constituencies have to vote in a single election (regional elections), whereas the other half cast two ballots (a departmental election and a regional election). Since these two categories of constituencies are distributed randomly, this context provides the conditions of a natural randomized experiment. Comparison of the turnout rates in both types of constituencies allows us to assess in a particularly robust way the significant impacts of mobilization activities and of the cost of voting on turnout in the context of double ballots. We estimate the average impact of an additional election at the national level on turnout to be around four percentage points, but this impact is much higher at the local level.
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Notes
This refers to the question of the internal validity of an experiment, which we will discuss below.
For instance, districts with congressional elections can only comprise a population on average poorer, less educated or more deprived than the population in districts with concurrent elections. In that case, turnout would be higher in these latter districts.
The Dettrey and Schwindt-Bayer (2009) study is a panel data analysis but the authors do not employ fixed or random effect techniques of estimation.
There are 22 regions, 96 departments and about 36,600 municipalities in Metropolitan France.
On average, regions have 4.4 departments and 181 cantons, and departments have 41 cantons.
In addition, regional and departmental elections do not have the same voting system. Elections for a regional council use a two-round mixed electoral system based on proportional representation by party list. In a departmental election, a councilor is elected in each canton under a two-round majoritarian voting system. For a detailed presentation, see Fauvelle-Aymar and Lewis-Beck (2008). However, this difference in electoral systems has no consequence for our study since, as we will explain below, we compare turnout at the same election, namely the regional election.
We show below that the allocation of cantons between the two groups is totally random.
The situation is more complicated for municipal and departmental elections, which were sometimes held concurrently, such as in 2001, and sometimes in isolation, for instance in 1994 for cantonal elections and in 1995 for municipal elections.
France has 27 regions. Among them, five are overseas and have their own specific system of government, and they have been excluded from the analysis for reasons of comparability. For the same reasons of comparability, we also excluded Corsica and the Parisian cantons because the Paris department council has important features (in particular, the council is elected through the municipal government). Regions included in our sample are: Alsace (Als), Aquitaine (Aqu), Auvergne (Auv), Basse Normandie (BsN), Bourgogne (Bou), Bretagne (Bre), Centre (Cen), Champagne-Ardennes (ChA), Franche-Comté (FCo), Haute Normandie (HtN), Ile de France (IdF), Languedoc-Roussillon (LRo), Limousin (Lim), Lorraine (Lor), Midi-Pyrénées (MiP), Nord-Pas de Calais (NPC), Pays de Loire (PdL), Picardie (Pic), Poitou-Charentes (PCh), Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur (PAC) and Rhône-Alpes (RhA).
National elections were also held during this period, presidential elections in 1995, 2002 and 2007 and legislative elections in 1993, 1997, 2007 and 2007.
Departmental elections in the other group of cantons (group 2) were held in 2001 and 2008 at the same time as the municipal elections.
The law named “Loi n\(^{\circ }\)94-44 du 18 janvier 1994—art. 1” reintroduced the renewal of the departmental assembly by one-half, which was abolished in 1992, but not implemented. Since then, there have been some changes in the cantons as explained below.
And even in the whole of France, except for European elections whose constituencies comprise eight large electoral districts in all of France, each including between one and five regions.
French elections take place on Sunday, which reduces the opportunity cost of the vote and prevents congestion in the polling station during office hours.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank the participants of the Third European Political Science Association Conference and the seminar LaRGE-Strasbourg University. They also thank two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions and comments. The usual disclaimer applies.
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Fauvelle-Aymar, C., François, A. Mobilization, cost of voting and turnout: a natural randomized experiment with double elections. Public Choice 162, 183–199 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-014-0212-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-014-0212-0