The Panel Electoral Français 2007: Methodological Issues

Abstract

Analyzing political attitudes and how voters make electoral decisions from a longitudinal perspective is not an entirely new approach in French electoral sociology. In 1960, for the first time in France we had an electoral analysis―L’établissement de la Ve République: le référendum de septembre et les élections de novembre 1958 (Establishing the Fifth Republic: The 1958 September Referendum and November Election)―that was based on a panel survey. During this survey the same individuals were interviewed twice, first during the 1958 referendum campaign and then during the following legislative election. Georges Dupeux, Alain Girard, and Jean Stoetzel underlined the contribution made by this interview procedure at that time: “this method has the advantage of showing how individual intentions can vary and what makes them vary” (AFSP, 1960, p. 120). The idea was to understand an election using more than a single snapshot taken at a given point in time t. In his preface to this book, Jean Touchard underlined one of the significant findings of the 1958 French Panel: “the extent of the fluctuating vote” (op. cit., p. XIV).