Articles


  1. Citizens’ Attitudes Under Covid19: a cross-country panel survey of public opinion in 11 advanced democracies.

    Scientific Data (Nature) (with S. Brouard, E. Michel, M. Becher, P. Vasilopoulos, P.-H. Bono, N. Sormani), 9(108), 2022.

    This article introduces data collected in the Citizens’ Attitudes Under Covid-19 Project (CAUCP), which surveyed public opinion throughout the Covid-19 pandemic in 11 democracies between March and December 2020. In this paper, we present a unique cross-country panel survey of citizens’ attitudes and behaviors during a worldwide unprecedented health, governance, and economic crisis. This dataset investigates the behavioral and attitudinal consequences of multifaceted Covid19 crisis across time and contexts. In this paper, we describe the design of the CAUCP and the descriptive features of the dataset; we also present promising research prospects.

    | Article |

  2. Emotions, governmental trust and support for the restriction of civil liberties during the covid-19 pandemic.

    European Journal of Political Research (with P. Vasilopoulos P., H. MacAvay and S. Brouard), 2022.

    The Covid-19 pandemic brought unprecedented governmental restrictions to personal and political freedoms. This article investigates individual-level differences in mass support for the restriction of civil liberties during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. Employing theories of affect and decision making, it assesses the extent to which different emotional reactions toward the pandemic influenced attitudes toward mobile phone surveillance and the implementation of curfews. We test our hypotheses in five advanced European democracies using panel data which allow us to identify the role of emotions in support for restrictive policies controlling for individual heterogeneity. The results suggest that experiencing fear about Covid-19 had a strong positive impact on supporting these measures, while hope and anger only played a minimal role. Importantly, the findings indicate that emotions moderate the impact of trust toward the government, a key variable for supporting the restriction of civil liberties during the pandemic. Specifically, experiencing fear was associated with higher acceptance of civil liberty restrictions. Further, experiencing fear substantially decreased the effect of trust in the government, rendering those who lack trust toward the government more supportive of civil liberty restrictions. These findings help us understand the psychological mechanisms that leads citizens to swiftly decide to sacrifice their civil liberties in the light of threat. Further, they offer empirical support for the causal role of affect in political decision-making.

    | Article |

  3. Socioeconomic status, time preferences and pro-environmentalism.

    Journal of Environmental Psychology (with C. Chevalier C., A. Grandin, L. Guillou and R.A. Sater), 2022.

    Future-oriented individuals tend to display more pro-environmental attitudes and behaviours, compared to those who are present-oriented. Investigating the determinants of time preferences could therefore shed light on factors that also influence environmentalism. A key factor that impacts time preferences is socioeconomic status (SES). Importantly, SES is also positively correlated with willingness to act for the environment. In this paper, we test whether time preferences partially mediate the relationship between SES and pro-environmentalism in three studies. In the first study, we tested the assumption that pro-environmental attitudes are positively correlated with SES on a large cross-sectional French sample (N = 15,924). We found expected results both with an objective and a subjective measure of SES. Then, we conducted an online study including a temporal discounting task, which allowed us to fully test the mediation hypothesis on British participants (N = 650). Our results suggest that the positive association between SES and pro-environmental attitudes is partially mediated by temporal discounting, but no significant mediated relationship was found for pro-environmental behaviour. Finally, we conducted a third study with an experimental setting, for which we recruited British participants who underestimated their position in the income distribution (N = 855). In the treatment group, participants received a correction of their misperception, in order to increase their perceived relative income. Although the expected shift towards increased preferences for the future was not observed, we found a moderated effect of the treatment on pro-environmentalism.

    | Article |

  4. Trust in scientists in times of pandemic: Panel evidence from 12 countries

    PNAS (with Y. Algan, D. Cohen, E. Davoine, and S. Stantcheva), October 5, 118(40), 2021.

    This article analyzes the specific and critical role of trust in scientists on both the support for and compliance with nonpharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) during the COVID-19 pandemic. We exploit large-scale, longitudinal, and representative surveys for 12 countries over the period from March to December 2020, and we complement the analysis with experimental data. We find that trust in scientists is the key driving force behind individual support for and compliance with NPIs and for favorable attitudes toward vaccination. The effect of trust in government is more ambiguous and tends to diminish support for and compliance with NPIs in countries where the recommendations from scientists and the government were not aligned. Trust in others also has seemingly paradoxical effects: in countries where social trust is high, the support for NPIs is low due to higher expectations that others will voluntary social distance. Our individual-level longitudinal data also allows us to evaluate the effects of within-person changes in trust over the pandemic: we show that trust levels and, in particular, trust in scientists have changed dramatically for individuals and within countries, with important subsequent effects on compliant behavior and support for NPIs. Such findings point out the challenging but critical need to maintain trust in scientists during a lasting pandemic that strains citizens and governments.

    | Article |

  5. A guilt-free strategy increases self-reported non-compliance with COVID-19 preventive measures: Experimental evidence from 12 countries

    Plos ONE (with J.-F. Daoust, É. Bélanger, R. Dassonneville, E. Lachapelle, R. Nadeau, M. Becher, S. Brouard, C. Hönnige and D. Stegmueller), 16(4): e0249914, 2021.

    Studies of citizens’ compliance with COVID-19 preventive measures routinely rely on survey data. While such data are essential, public health restrictions provide clear signals of what is socially desirable in this context, creating a potential source of response bias in self-reported measures of compliance. In this research, we examine whether the results of a guilt-free strategy recently proposed to lessen this constraint are generalizable across twelve countries, and whether the treatment effect varies across subgroups. Our findings show that the guilt-free strategy is a useful tool in every country included, increasing respondents’ proclivity to report non-compliance by 9 to 16 percentage points. This effect holds for different subgroups based on gender, age and education. We conclude that the inclusion of this strategy should be the new standard for survey research that aims to provide crucial data on the current pandemic.

    | Article |

  6. COVID-19 Vaccine’s Gender Paradox’

    CEPR Discussion Paper (with V. Galasso, V. Pons and P. Profeta), London, Centre for Economic Policy Research, 2021.

    Women die less than men of COVID-19, but have been more concerned about its health consequences and more compliant with the public health rules imposed during the pandemic. Since return to normal life depends on vaccination, but delays in acceptance or outright refusals of vaccination are already apparent, we investigate gender differences in attitudes and expected behaviors regarding COVID-19 vaccination. Using original data from a survey conducted in December 2020 in ten developed countries (N=13,326), we discover a COVID-19 Vaccine’s gender paradox. Being more concerned about COVID-19 and more likely to believe to be infected and consequently to become seriously ill, women could be expected to be more supportive of vaccination than men. Instead, our findings show that women agree less than men to be vaccinated and to make vaccination compulsory. Our evidence suggests that their vaccine hesitance is partly due skepticism, since women are less likely to believe that vaccination is the only solution to COVID-19 and more likely to believe that COVID-19 was created by large corporations. Using a survey experiment performed in these ten countries, we show that information provision on the role of vaccination to become immune to COVID-19 is effective in reducing vaccine hesitance.

    | Article |

  7. ‘Rally round the flag’: the COVID-19 crisis and trust in the national government

    West European Politics (with S. Kritzinger, R. Lachat, J. Partheymüller, C. Plescia and S. Brouard), 44(5-6): 1205-1231, 2021.

    During international crises, trust in government is expected to increase irrespective of the wisdom of the policies it pursues. This has been called a ‘rally-round-the-flag’ effect. This article examines whether the COVID-19 crisis has resulted in such a rally effect. Using multi-wave panel surveys conducted in Austria and France starting from March 2020, in the article it is examined how government trust was affected by the perceived threats to the nation’s health and economy created by the pandemic as well as by the perceived appropriateness of the government’s crisis response. A strong rally effect is shown in Austria, where trust was closely tied to perceived health risks, but faded away quickly over time. Perceptions of government measures mattered, too, while perceived economic threat only played a minor role. In France, in contrast, a strong partisan divide is found and no rally effect.

    | Article |

  8. What Kind of Electoral Outcome do People Think is Good for Democracy?

    Political Studies (with A. Blais, D. Bol, S. Bowler, D. M. Farrell, A. Freden, E. Heisbourg, R. Lachat, I. Lago, P. J. Loewen, M. Nemcok, J.-B. Pilet, and C. Plescia), Online First, 2021.

    There is perennial debate in comparative politics about electoral institutions, but what characterizes this debate is the lack of consideration for citizens’ perspective. In this paper, we report the results of an original survey conducted on representative samples in 15 West European countries (N = 15,414). We implemented an original instrument to elicit respondents’ views by asking them to rate “real but blind” electoral outcomes. With this survey instrument, we aimed to elicit principled rather than partisan preferences regarding the kind of electoral outcomes that citizens think is good for democracy. We find that West Europeans do not clearly endorse a majoritarian or proportional
    vision of democracy. They tend to focus on aspects of the government rather than parliament when
    they pass a judgment. They want a majority government that has few parties and enjoys wide popular
    support. Finally, we find only small differences between citizens of different countries.

    | Article |

  9. Pandemic politics: policy evaluations of government responses to COVID-19

    West European Politics (with A. Altiparmakis, A. Bojar, S. Brouard, H. Kriesi and R. Nadeau), 2021.

    The COVID-19 crisis has demanded that governments take restrictive measures that are abnormal for most representative democracies. This article aims to examine the determinants of the public’s evaluations towards those measures. This article focuses on political trust and partisanship as potential explanatory factors of evaluations of each government’s health and economic measures to address the COVID-19 crisis. To study these relationships between trust, partisanship and evaluation of measures, data from a novel comparative panel survey is utilised, comprising eleven democracies and three waves, conducted in spring 2020. This article provides evidence that differences in evaluations of the public health and economic measures between countries also depend on contextual factors, such as polarisation and the timing of the measures’ introduction by each government. Results show that the public’s approval of the measures depends strongly on their trust in the national leaders, an effect augmented for voters of the opposition.

    | Article |

  10. “Gender Differences in COVID-19 Related Attitudes and Behavior: Panel evidence from eight countries”

    PNAS (with V. Galasso, V. Pons, P. Profeta, M. Becher and S. Brouard), No. 27359, September 2020.
    NBER Working Paper (with V. Galasso, V. Pons, P. Profeta, M. Becher, S. Brouard), No. 27359, June 2020.

    Using original data from two waves of a survey conducted in March and April 2020 in eight OECD countries (N = 21,649), we show that women are more likely to see COVID-19 as a very serious health problem, to agree with restraining public policy measures adopted in response to it, and to comply with them. Gender differences in attitudes and behavior are substantial in all countries, robust to controlling for a large set of sociodemographic, employment, psychological, and behavioral factors, and only partially mitigated for individuals who cohabit or have direct exposure to COVID-19. The results are not driven by differential social desirability bias. They carry important implications for the spread of the pandemic and may contribute to explain gender differences in vulnerability to it.

    | Article |

  11. “The Politician and the Vote Factory: Candidates’ Resource Management Skills and Electoral Returns”

    Journal of Policy Modeling (with E. Farvaque and S. Vigeant), 42(1): 38-55, 2020.

    This paper disentangles resource management skills of candidates from the electoral circumstances that help them getting (re-)elected. It is first made use of the DEA method to measure candidates’ resource management abilities. Second, determinants of these scores are estimated. The paper uses a database detailing the different sources of campaign funding for French members of Parliament to analyze their relative performance. Results show a large variance in campaign resource management ability, particularly between political parties, and incumbents and newcomers. They also reveal an important role of constituencies’ characteristics and of politicians’ experience in explaining differences between politicians’ efforts. Thus, public policies could promote virtuous regulations to reduce disparities among candidates with different financial backgrounds and access to resources, to foster a fairer democracy.

    | Article |

  12. “Special issue on critical French citizenship.”

    French Politics, 17(4): 403-406, 2019.

    This special issue engages with the “cultural backlash hypothesis”—that citizens dissatisfied with democratic regimes tend to support the emergence of non representative democracy. The first article challenges classical notions of citizenship and shows that critical citizens actually call for more competent representatives. The second piece asserts that critical citizenship is more complex than what previous research has shown and that only certain types of citizenship are more likely to result in protest votes. As the introduction points out, the two pieces together paint a far more complex picture of citizenship than previously understood through an innovative approach that combines normative political theory with survey research in a country setting. A new research agenda that comes out of these findings is also proposed.

    | Article |

  13. “Anger Mediates the Effects of Fear on Support for the Far Right - A Rejoinder”

    Political Psychology (with G.E. Marcus, N. Valentino, P. Vasilopoulos, ), early view, 2019.

    We are grateful to John Jost for carefully engaging with our work and presenting a different interpretation of our findings on the effects of fear and anger stemming from the November 13, 2015, Paris attacks on the propensity to vote for the far right. Jost advances a model that holds that anger mediates the effect of fear on support for the far right. In this rejoinder, we respond to the issues he raises regarding our model specification, consider his alternative suggestion, and offer some conclusions about how to resolve this debate empirically. We hope this exchange advances the literature on the impact of various societal threats on voting for the far right.

    | Article |

  14. “Applying the Theory of Affective Intelligence to Support for Authoritarian Policies and Parties.”

    Advances in Political Psychology (avec G.E. Marcus, N. Valentino, P. Vasilopoulos, ), 40(1),
    109-139, 2019.

    Emotion, after a long period of inattention, began to attract greater scrutiny as a key driver of human behavior in the mid‐1980s. One approach that has achieved significant influence in political science is affective intelligence theory (AIT). We deploy AIT here to begin to understand the recent rise in support for right‐wing populist leaders around the globe. In particular, we focus on specific emotional appraisals on elections held at periods of heightened threat, including the two 2015 terror attacks in France, as influences on support for the far‐right Front National among conservatives. Contrary to much conventional wisdom, we speculate that threats can generate both anger and fear, and with very different political consequences. We expect fear to inhibit reliance on extant political dispositions such as ideological identification and authoritarianism, while anger will strengthen the influence of these same dispositions. Our core findings, across repeated tests, show that fear and anger indeed differentially condition the way habits of thought and action influence support for the far right in the current historical moment. Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is anger that mobilizes the far right and authoritarians. Fear, on the other hand, diminishes the impact of these same dispositions.

    | Article |

  15. “Wealth and voter turnout: Across twenty-eight democracies”

    Polity (avec R. Nadeau, M. Lewis-Beck,), 51(2), Published online March 18, 2019.

    Voter turnout still receives considerable attention in electoral studies. Recently, there have been numerous investigations of a neglected determinant, sometimes labeled “patrimony” and here labeled “wealth.” This variable, measuring how much wealth a voter has, appears to help account for party choice, beyond more usual socioeconomic measures. However, as yet we know little about how wealth affects voter turnout. In this article, we explore the relationship of wealth to voter turnout, using a battery of questions on wealth, administered in 28 nations, from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). We observe that more wealth corresponds to higher voting turnout. Further, the strength of this link compares favorably to that of more traditional measures, such as income and education.
    Theoretically, such a sharp empirical result suggests expanding the resource model of electoral participation in order to include this less traditional, but more encompassing, measure of economic status.

    | Article |

  16. “The rise of populism and the collapse of the left-right paradigm: Lessons from the 2017 French presidential election”

    Centre for Economic Policy Research (avec Y. Algan, E. Beasley, et D. Cohen), CEPR Discussion Paper 13103, 2018.

    We examine the dislocation from the traditional left-right political axis in the 2017 French election, analyze support for populist movements and show that subjective variables are key to understanding it. Votes on the traditional left-right axis are correlated to ideology concerning redistribution, and predicted by socio-economic variables such as income and social status. Votes on the new diagonal opposing “open vs closed society” are predicted by individual and subjective variables. More specifically, low well-being predicts anti-system opinions (from the left or from the right) while low interpersonal trust (ITP) predicts right-wing populism.

    | Article |

  17. “L’efficacité des règles budgétaires dans les provinces canadiennes.”

    Revue Française d’Economie (avec E. Farvaque et M. Joanis), 32(2): 131-160, 2018.

    Cet article s’inscrit dans le débat sur les règles budgétaires, qui occupe une place centrale dans les questions de politiques publiques étant donné les déficits hérités de la grande récession. La diversité des règles dans le cas canadien offre une expérience quasi naturelle de leur effet. Nous définissons une nomenclature des règles d’équilibre budgétaire en vigueur dans les dix provinces canadiennes, puis examinons les performances des diverses règles existantes, via une analyse économétrique sur la période post 1980. Le problème de l’endogénéité de l’adoption des règles étant intégré, les résultats confirment que l’existence de règles contraignantes contribue à réduire le niveau de dette nette.

    | Article |

  18. “Fear, Anger and Voting for the Far right: Evidence from the November 13, 2015 Paris Terror Attacks.”

    Political Psychology (avec P. Vasilopoulos et G. Marcus), First published: 14 October 2018.

    The conjecture that negative emotions underpin support for far‐right politics is common among pundits and scholars. The conventional account holds that authoritarian populists catalyze public anxiety about the changing social order and/or deteriorating national economic conditions, and this anxiety subsequently drives up support for the far right. We propose that while emotions do indeed play an independent causal role in support for far‐right parties and policies, that support is more likely built upon the public’s anger rather than fear. This article explores the relative impact of fear and anger in reaction to the 2015 Paris terror attacks on the propensity to vote for the French far‐right party, the Front National, in the 2015 regional elections. Contrary to conventional wisdom, we find that anger is associated with voting for the Front National, while fear is associated with voting against the Front National. Moreover, anger boosts the Front National vote most powerfully among far‐right and authoritarian voters. On the other hand, fear reduces support for the far right among those same groups.

    | Article |

  19. “The impact of terrorist threat on political attitudes: The case of France in the aftermath of the 2015-2016 attacks.”

    West European Politics (avec S. Brouard et P. Vasilopoulos), 41(5):1073-99, 2018.

    This study investigates what impact the terrorist attacks in Paris (2015) and Nice (2016) had on political attitudes in France. Drawing on nine cross-sectional surveys, it tests the premises of three major theories of opinion change that predict contrasting shifts in opinion in the aftermath of terrorist attacks and ideological change of position among ordinary citizens: the Reactive Liberals Hypothesis (RLH), the Terror Management Theory (TMT), and the Bayesian Updating Theory (BUT). In line with both RLH and BUT, the findings show that left-wing sympathisers shifted toward the right following the attacks. However, the results suggest that, in line with BUT, the attacks only had a significant impact in attitudes toward security, while they had no effect on attitudes toward immigration, or toward moral and socio-economic issues.

    | Article |

  20. “Emotional Responses to the Charlie Hebdo Attacks: Addressing the Authoritarianism Puzzle.”

    Political Psychology (avec P. Vasilopoulos et G. Marcus), forthcoming, 2018.

    The finding that threat boosts the public’s preferences for authoritarian policies has been well established in the research literature. Why this shift occurs, remains open as the extant literature reports contradictory findings regarding the interaction of dispositions, such as conservatism and authoritarianism, with threat. One line of research argues that threat increases authoritarian preferences among those who are more prone to authoritarianism. Another argues that it is those with a non-authoritarian ideology who switch in response to threat. By using a two-wave panel study of the French population taken before and after the January 2015 twin attacks in Paris we find that both trends simultaneously occur. Our results show that the factors that drive the impact of ideological dispositions on support for authoritarian policies are emotional reactions. On the one hand, anxiety led left-wing respondents to move towards adopting authoritarian policy preferences following the attacks, yet produced no such change among right-wing respondents. On the other hand, anger did not turn left-wing voters more authoritarian, but strengthened authoritarian policy preferences among right-wing respondents.

    | Article |

  21. “The Politics of Fiscal Rules within the European Union. A dynamic analysis of fiscal rules stringency.”

    Journal of European Public Policy (avec P. Doray-Demers), 24(6): 852-70, 2017.

    Over the last 25 years, fiscal rules (FRs) have been proliferating in Europe bringing in-depth change to the architecture of fiscal institutions. This paper investigates different theories explaining the changes in national fiscal rules stringency (FRS) using a panel of 28 European countries from 1990 to 2013. We found evidence that fiscal stress prevents fiscal reform in the short term, and leads to stronger fiscal rules in the long term. This pattern corresponds to the “war of attrition” argument formulated by Alesina et al (1989). We found evidence that countries eager to join the EU showed their commitment to Maastricht targets by incorporating FRs into national laws. Countries facing financial difficulties after the 2009 sovereign debt crisis were coerced into adopting more stringent FRs to obtain fiscal support from the EU. Both cases support the idea that coercive diplomacy might explain the strength of national fiscal rules in the EU.

    | Article |

  22. “Good times and bad times. Electoral Accountability and Taxation.”

    Electoral Studies (avec K. Seki et G. Whitten), 45(2): 191-200, 2017.

    In this article we address two important and related questions. First, do economic
    hard times make defeat inevitable for any incumbent? And, second, do voters sanction
    incumbents for a poor economy whatever the economic policy pursued? To answer
    these questions, we propose a new theory about the ways in which taxation policies,
    clarity of responsibility, government ideology, and economic conditions come
    together to shape election outcomes. We address these questions with a new set of
    data collected on elections, government policies, and economic measures before and
    during the current economic crisis. Our findings indicate that taxation policies have
    effects on incumbent electoral patterns net of economic performance measures, but
    that these effects differ in theoretically-expected fashions depending on clarity of responsibility,
    government ideology, and whether or not there has been a recession in
    the year before an election is held.

    | Article |

  23. “Duverger and the French Semi-Presidential Democracy.”

    French Politics, forthcoming, 2016.

    In this article, I propose to go back on the reasons why some theoretical ideas of Duverger have not been so disseminated in the French political science and shed light on the concept of semi-presidentialism to understand to what extent such a concept is still useful to understand the functioning or malfunctioning of the current French Fifth Republic.

    | Article |

  24. “Does a Growing Income Gap Affect Political Attitudes?”

    Canadian Public Policy (avec A. Perrella , E. Bélanger, et R. Nadeau), 42(1): 35-48, 2016.

    Few have asked about political implications of increasing income inequalities in Canada. Over several generations, those in higher echelons have enjoyed considerable growth, while those in lower tiers have seen no growth, or worse, declines. This leads us to ask whether there also exists a bifurcation of political attitudes, with those in the lower income tiers showing more negative orientations compared to those who fare much better. More precisely, we examine whether growing income inequality—mainly the growing income gap—has any measurable effect on political attitudes. We approach this study by incorporating econometric data from Statistics Canada and survey data from the Canadian Election Study, spanning from the early 1990s to 2011.

    | Article |

  25. “Towards a better operationalisation of strategic culture: A rejoinder to Endres, Mader and Schoen”

    European Journal of Political Research (avec F. Mérand), 54(4): 860-865, 2015.

    | Article |

  26. “Decentralisation in Africa and the Nature of Local Governments’ Competition: Evidence from
    Benin”

    International Tax and Public Finance (with E. Caldeira, G. Rota-Graziosi), 2015, Early view.

    Decentralization has been put forward as a powerful tool to reduce poverty and improve governance in Africa. This paper will study the existence and identify the nature of spillovers resulting from local expenditure policies. These spillovers impact the efficiency of decentralization. We develop a two-jurisdiction model of public expenditure, which differs from existing literature by capturing the extreme poverty of some local governments in developing countries through a generalized notion of Nash equilibrium, namely constrained Nash equilibrium. We show how and under what conditions spillovers among jurisdictions induce strategic behaviors from local officials. By estimating a spatial lag model for a panel data analysis of the 77 communes in Benin from 2002 to 2008, our empirical analysis establishes the existence of the strategic complementarity of public spending in various jurisdictions. Thus, any increase in the local public provision in one jurisdiction should induce a similar variation among the neighboring jurisdictions. This result raises the issue of coordination among local governments, and more broadly, it questions the efficiency of decentralization in developing countries in line with Oates’ theorem.

    | Article |

  27. “Public Support for European Defence:Does Strategic Culture Matter?”

    European Journal of Political Research (with B. Irondelle and F. Mérand), 54(2): 363-383, 2014.

    This article identifies previously ignored determinants of public support for the European Union’s security and defence ambitions. In contrast to public opinion vis-à-vis the EU in general, the literature on attitudes towards a putative European army or the existing Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) suggests that the explanatory power of sociodemographic and economic variables is weak, and focuses instead on national identity as the main determinant of one’s support. This article explores the possible impact of strategic culture, and argues that preferences vis-à-vis the EU’s security and defence ambitions are formed in part through pre-existing social representations of security. To test this proposition, ‘national’ strategic cultures are disaggregated and a typology is produced that contains four strategic postures: pacifism, traditionalism, humanitarianism and globalism. Applying regression analysis on individual-level Eurobarometer survey data, it is found that strategic postures help explain both the general level of support for CSDP and support for specific Petersberg tasks.

    | Article |

  28. “Forecasting the rise of the Front National during the 2014 municipal elections”

    French Politics 12(4): 338-347, 2014 (with S. Brouard).

    This article develops an electoral forecasting model for the extreme-right vote share in France during the 2014 municipal elections. On the basis of data gathered between 1998 and 2014 from a sample of 56 cities where the Front National(FN) has always presented candidates for municipal office, the model anticipated a rise in the FN’s share of the vote during the 2014 municipal elections. Controlling for political context through election type, FN popularity and electoral dynamics in addition to the criminality rate, this article adds to previous extreme-right forecasting models demonstrating that the FN’s vote share is not at all unpredictable even in the case of local elections.

    | Article |

  29. “The impact of election outcomes on satisfaction with democracy under a two-round system”

    French Politics 12(1): 22–35, 2014 (with L. Beaudonnet, A. Blais, D. Bol).

    Previous research has found a positive relationship between having voted for a party that is part of the government and satisfaction with democracy. However, no research has examined this relationship in the specific case of a two-round system. Relying on original panel data survey conducted before and after the 2012 legislative election in France, this article addresses the question of how vote choices in the first and second rounds affect satisfaction with democracy. We find that both rounds have a similar impact and that voters who rallied a winning party in the second round are as happy with the democratic process as early supporters.

    | Article |

  30. “Patrimony and French Presidential Vote Choice: Evidence from the 2012 Election”

    French Politics, 12(1): 59-68, 2014 (with E. Bélanger, R. Nadeau, M. Lewis-Beck and M. Turgeon).

    Studies of French voting behavior have pioneered the inclusion of patrimony in explanations of vote choice in presidential elections. Patrimony, as measured by the number of assets that an individual owns, has been found to matter to vote choice in recent French presidential elections. Can we say that its influence has continued with the latest 2012 presidential election, which took place in the context of the European economic crisis? We explore this question using TNS Sofres survey data. We find that patrimony continued to matter in 2012, that it clearly distinguished supporters of Nicolas Sarkozy from those of François Hollande, and that its effect on second-round vote choice was distinct from that of other socioeconomic determinants. These findings provide further support for the idea that capital income needs to be taken into account when assessing the relationship between individual wealth and voting behavior.

    | Article |

  31. “Les politiques économiques européennes face à la Grande Récession”

    Politique Européenne 42(4): 8-21, 2014.

    | Article |

  32. “Transformation des politiques de recrutement des forces armées au Royaume-Uni et aux Etats-Unis”

    Gouvernement et Action Publique 4(4): 621-640, 2013 (avec B. Irondelle).

    Dans cet article, nous proposons un état de l’art des politiques de recrutement
    militaire au Royaume-Uni et aux États-Unis pour illustrer leur transformation au
    prisme du processus de libéralisation économique et d’affirmation comme puissance
    militaire de ces deux pays. Nous abordons la question des instruments de la politique
    de recrutement des forces armées américaines et britanniques sous l’angle des politiques
    publiques mais aussi des études de sécurité afin de mieux comprendre la logique
    de changement à l’oeuvre depuis une dizaine d’années. En s’appuyant sur un travail
    documentaire exhaustif, nous illustrons les points de convergence et divergence
    d’action des ministères de la Défense dans la gestion d’une ressource humaine militaire
    enchevêtrée entre logique économique d’efficacité et logique de transformation du rôle
    de l’État. Si l’emploi d’instruments de nature incitative (salaires bonifiés, primes de
    reconversion, d’éducation) et le recours aux sociétés militaires privés caractérisent le
    mieux la politique de recrutement des armées américaines et britanniques, ces dernières
    se démarquent par une appréciation différente d’une approche en termes de
    qualité et de quantité de recrues.

    | Article |

  33. “French Legislative Voting in the Fifth Republic”

    French Politics 11(4): 307-331, 2013 (with J.F. Godbout).

    This study analyzes legislative voting in the French National Assembly during the Fifth Republic. We use an original dataset of roll call votes to understand the development of party voting unity from the Ist to the XIIIth Legislature (1958-2012). We also include a spatial analysis of legislative voting to measure the dimensionality of politics in the legislature. Our results show that party unity is very high in the National Assembly and that the policy space in the legislature is primarily one-dimensional. However, we note that party unity is weaker under certain circumstances, particularly when voting is related to Foreign policy issues and the European Union, or when the government is composed of an ideologically diverse coalition of parties.

    | Article |

  34. “Patrimonial Voting: Refining the Measures”

    Electoral Studies 32(3): 557-62, 2013 (with R. Nadeau and M. Lewis-Beck).

    Several studies have shown the importance of patrimony on voting for the right in French, British, and American national elections. However, these studies have only taken into account the diversity of patrimony and not their value. We propose to fill this gap in the literature with the “Mode de vie des Français” dataset that contains information on the savings and patrimony of French voters and was collected before the May 2007 presidential election. The results show that including measures that take into account the value of survey respondents’ patrimony does not change the conclusions of previous studies that have demonstrated the existence of a strong relationship between holding a risky patrimony and support for the right.

    | Article |

  35. “Les règles budgétaires dans les provinces canadiennes: Nomenclatures et éléments d’analyse”

    L’Actualité Économique (avec E. Farvaque et M. Joanis). 2013, à paraître.

    Cet article fait le point sur la question des règles budgétaires, qui occupe une place centrale dans les débats de politiques publiques sur la résorption éventuelle des déficits hérités de la Grande Récession. Il revient d’abord rapidement sur la littérature théorique relative aux règles budgétaires. Il dresse ensuite une nomenclature des règles budgétaires en vigueur dans les provinces canadiennes. La nomenclature proposée est plus fine que celle existant dans la littérature, et elle se fonde sur les travaux récents menés sur les États américains. Le menu des options de politiques publiques disponibles dans le contexte canadien est enfin évalué, afin d’examiner les performances relatives des diverses règles existantes.

    | Article |

  36. “Looking back on the forecasting of the French legislative election”

    French Politics, 10(4): 384-88, 2012.

    This note offers a review of a forecasting model implemented for the 2012 legislative election. Based on real outcomes, I highlight to what extent this model provides better forecasting than preceding ones and how it could be improved for the next national elections. Introducing local data to forecast national electoral outcomes is no doubt a promising research avenue in such a field.

    | Article |

  37. “The Compleat Economic Voter: New Theory and UK Evidence”

    British Journal of Political Science, 43(2): 241-261 (with M. Lewis-Beck and R. Nadeau). 2013.

    While economic voting has been much studied, almost all the work has been based on the classic reward-punishment model, which treats the economy as a valence issue. The economic is, indeed, a valence issue, but it is much more than that. In the work at hand, we explore two other dimensions of economic voting – position and patrimony. Through investigation of a 2010 UK election survey containing relevant measures on these three dimensions, we estimate their impact on vote intention, in the context of a carefully specified system of equations. According to the evidence reported, each dimension of economic voting has its own independent effect. Moreover, together, they reveal a “compleat” economic voter, who wields considerable power over electoral choice in Britain. This result, while new, confirms and extends recent work on US and French elections.

    | Article |

  38. “Decentralization in Africa and the Nature of Local Governments’ Competition: Evidence from Benin.”

    NBER Working Paper WS 18126 (with E. Caldeira and G. Rota-Graziosi), June 2012.

    Decentralization has been put forward as a powerful tool to reduce poverty and improve governance in Africa. The aim of this paper is to study the existence, and identify the nature, of spillovers resulting from local expenditure policies. These spillovers impact the efficiency of decentralization. We develop a two-jurisdiction model of public expenditure, which differs from existing literature by capturing the extreme poverty of some local governments in developing countries through a generalized notion of the Nash equilibrium, namely, the constrained Nash equilibrium. We show how and under which conditions spillovers among jurisdictions induce strategic behaviours from local officials. By estimating a spatial lag model for a panel data analysis of the 77 communes in Benin from 2002 to 2008, our empirical analysis establishes the existence of the strategic complementarity of jurisdictions’ public spending. Thus, any increase in the local public provision in one jurisdiction should induce a similar variation among the neighbouring jurisdictions. This result raises the issue of coordination among local governments, and more broadly, it questions the effeciency of decentralisation in developing countries in line with Oates’ theorem.

    | Article |

  39. “Does decentralization facilitate access to poverty-related services? Evidence from Benin.”

    NBER Working Paper WS 18118 (with E. Caldeira and G. Rota-Graziosi), June 2012.

    We study the effect of decentralization on the access to some poverty-related public services in Benin. Compiling panel data from local governments’ accounts and from surveys on 18,000 Beninese households performed in 2006 and 2007, our study suggests that decentralization has a positive overall effect on access to basic services. However, this effect appears to be nonmonotone following an inverted U-shaped curve. It varies according to local jurisdictions’ wealth and to the nature of basic services. Decentralization in Benin contributes positively to the reduction of poverty by improving the average access to poverty-related services. However, the devil is in the details, as decentralization seems to increase inequality among local governments in terms of access. Another result relying on the success of decentralization in Benin is the prioritization of basic services, which differs among local governments according to their wealth. While the poorest jurisdictions neglect primary education, focusing more on access to drinking water, the richest ones get less attention to sewage services, since these are already provided at a sufficiently high level.

    | Article |

  40. “The Challenge of Burden-sharing”

    International Journal 67(3): 423-29 (with F. Mérand), 2012.
    | Article |

  41. “Forecasting the 2012 French Presidential Election”

    PS: Political Science & Politics 45(2): 218-222 (avec R. Nadeau), 2012.

    Who will win the next French presidential election? Forecasting electoral results from political-economy models is a recent tradition in France. In this article, we pursue this effort by estimating a vote function based on both local and national data for the elections held between 1981 and 2007. This approach allows us to circumvent the small N problem and to produce more robust and reliable results. Based on a model including economic (unemployment) and political (approval and previous results) variables, we predict the defeat, although by a relatively small margin, of the right-wing incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round of the French presidential election to be held in May 2012.

    | Article |

  42. “Forecasting the 2012 French Legislative Election”

    French Politics 10(1): 68-83, 2012.

    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. Based on this model, a defeat for right-wing parties at the second round is forecasted unless, against all odds, Nicolas Sarkozy wins the presidential election.

    | Article |

  43. “Canadian Federalism and Change in Policy Attention: A Comparison with the United Kingdom”

    Canadian Journal of Political Science. 45(3): 635-56 (with E. Montpetit). 2012.

    Federal systems empower multiple policy actors from different levels of governments. For some scholars, the disagreements arising within such a diverse group of actors create policy stalemates. Others contend instead that new ideas are more likely to arise and diffuse from such a diverse group. This article is a contribution to this scholarly debate. It argues that both perspectives are useful to understanding the dynamic of policy-making within federal systems. Looking at change in policy attention in Canadian and British speeches from the Throne, the article argues that federalism constrains change immediately following a party turnover in government. In the following years, however, federal arrangements encourage larger changes in policy attention than arrangements where power is centralized.

    | Article |

  44. “La persistance de l’effet patrimoine dans les élections présidentielles”

    Revue Française de Science Politique. 61(4): 659-680 (with R. Nadeau and M. Lewis-Beck). 2011.

    Dans un ouvrage novateur, Jacques Capdevielle et ses collaborateurs ont mis à jour il y a une trentaine d’années l’existence d’un « effet patrimoine » expliquant de façon significative le comportement électoral en France. Malgré la portée de ce résultat, l’étude de cette question a reçu moins d’attention par la suite. La mesure du patrimoine a occupé de moins en moins de place dans les enquêtes électorales françaises, notamment au moment des élections présidentielles de 2007. Nous démontrons dans ce texte que l’effet patrimoine est toujours aussi pertinent aujourd’hui pour expliquer le comportement électoral en France. En proposant un modèle général inspiré des travaux sur l’aversion au risque, nous montrons comment le patrimoine risqué se révèle être un puissant prédicteur du vote à droite en France sur longue période. Ce constat montre l’intérêt de renouer avec un concept novateur de la science politique française.

    | Article |

  45. “Assets and risk: A neglected dimension of economic voting”

    French Politics. 9(2): 97–119 (with R. Nadeau and M. Lewis-Beck). 2011.

    Economic voting studies have been dominated by the classic reward–
    punishment paradigm, in which voters vote for the incumbent under good economic performance, but against under bad. This paradigm works well when the economic issue is a valence issue, such as prosperity. However, it leaves out positional economic voting, in which the voter’s place in the economic structure influences policy preference, and thus party preference. More precisely, we suggest that the better the economic location of voters in terms of assets, highrisk assets in particular, the more they will vote right, because the right promises a better return on their investments. We demonstrate this effect in French presidential election data, from three national surveys – 1988, 1995 and 2002. This assets effect well exceeds other economic effects tested, and does so under strong statistical controls.

    | Article | Données en dta

  46. “The Fractal Process of European Integration: A Formal Theory of Recursivity in the Field of European Security”

    French Politics, Culture and Society. 29(2): 68-89 (with G. Mallard). 2011.

    Based on a simplified formal theory derived from bargaining games, this paper provides an argument for the recursive aspect in the process of European integration to formalize the cycles of treaty negotiations of the first and the latest European treaties in the security domain.
    Our article challenges the role that successive generations of EU scholars have granted to the transnational networks of European federalists in the process of European integration. We argue that federalists increased the expected utility that states derived from the signing of federalist treaties, 3) by spreading the risk of rejection of these treaties into successive rounds of negotiations. Federalists, we claim, segmented treaties into components with different probabilities of acceptance, and structured the different rounds of negotiations of these components by starting with the less risky ones, promising to continue negotiating more risky ones in future rounds. Future research should look into economic treaties to see if a similar sequencing of negotiations occurred, and whether this sequence is what distinguishes the process of European integration from other processes of integration elsewhere in the world.

    | Article |

  47. “Patrimonial Economic Voting: Legislative Elections in France”

    West European Politics 33(6): 1261-77 (with R. Nadeau and M. Lewis-Beck). 2010.

    Patrimonial economic voting has been neglected, in favor of classical economic voting studies. This assertion holds less, however, with French election investigations, where the neglect is relative, rather than absolute. Whereas classical economic voting holds the economy to be a valence issue, patrimonial economic voting regards the economy as a positional issue. Voters who own more property, in particular high-risk assets, are held to be more right-wing in their political preferences. This patrimonial effect shows itself to be statistically and substantively strong in one of the few election data-sets with sufficient measures available - surveys on the National Assembly contests of 1978, 1988, 2002. The electoral effect exceeds that from the traditional “heavy variables” of class and income. Moreover, further work might show its impact comparable to that of classic sociotropic retrospective evaluations of the national economy. Certainly a case can be made for further study of patrimonial economic voting, as compared to classical economic voting.

    | Paper | Data in dta

  48. “Public Spending, Public Deficits and Government Coalitions”

    Political Studies 58(5), 829-846 (with A. Blais and J. Kim). 2010.

    The study examines the relationship between types of government and level of public spending. There are two competing perspectives about the consequences of coalition governments on the size of public expenditures. The most common argument is that government spending increases under coalition governments, compared with one-party governments. Another line of thought contends that coalition governments often are stalled in the status quo due to the veto power of each member. Our analysis of public spending in 33 parliamentary democracies between 1972 and 2000 confirms the latter argument that coalition governments have a status quo bias. Particularly, we find that single-party governments are apt to modify the budget according to the current fiscal condition, which enables them to increase or decrease spending more flexibly. On the contrary, coalition governments find it difficult not only to decrease spending under difficult fiscal conditions but also to increase it even under a more favourable context, because each member of the coalition has a veto power.

    | Paper | Data in dta

  49. “A General Empirical Law of Public Budgets: A Comparative Analysis “

    American Journal of Political Science 54(3): 855-873 (with B.D. Jones, F. Baumgartner, C. Breunig & al.). 2009.

    Political dynamics are likely to proceed according to more general laws of human dynamics and information processing, but the specifics have yet to be outlined. Here we begin this task by examining public budgeting in comparative perspective. Budgets quantify collective political decisions made in response to incoming information, the preferences of decision-makers, and the institutions that structure how decisions are made.
    We first establish that the distribution of budget changes in many western democracies follows a non-Gaussian distribution, the double Paretian or power function. This implies that budget changes are highly incremental yet occasionally punctuated by very large budget changes. This pattern holds regardless of the type of system—parliamentary or presidential—and for the level of government. By studying the power function’s exponents, however, we find systematic differences for budgetary increases versus decreases (the latter are more punctuated) in most systems, and for levels of government (local governments are less punctuated).
    Finally, we show that differences among countries in the coefficients of the general budget law are probably explained by differences in the formal institutional structures of the countries. That is, while the general form of the law is probably dictated by the fundamental operations of human and organizational information processing, differences in the magnitudes of the law’s basic parameters are country and institution-specific.

    | Paper | Data in dta

  50. “Dynamique parlementaire de la politique de défense: Une comparaison franco-britannique”

    Revue Internationale de Politique Comparée 16(3): 465-483. (with B. Irondelle). 2009.

    Cet article propose d’identifier comment les questions de défense émergent dans la société et sont transformées ou non par les décideurs publics, les institutions parlementaires et plus généralement le système politique, en politiques publiques. A partir d’un cadre d’analyse théorique de l’agenda-setting, nous étudions et comparons l’attention de la politique de défense dans l’arène parlementaire du Royaume-Uni et de la France entre 1997 et 2007. Malgré de faibles ponctuations des agendas parlementaires de défense, la France et le Royaume-Uni présentent des régularités au niveau de la dimension extérieure de la politique de défense et de fortes divergences dans son volet interne.

    | Paper | Data in dta

  51. “Un modèle explicatif du vote FNSEA aux élections des représentants des chefs d’exploitation aux Chhambres d’Agriculture départementales (1995-2001)”

    Economie Rurale 312: 32-51. (with E. Dubois, F. Facchini and A. François). 2009.

    Cet article se présente comme une extension du champ de l’économie du vote et de ses méthodes au domaine encore inexploré des élections professionnelles. A partir d’une analyse des suffrages obtenus par la FNSEA aux élections des Chambres d’Agriculture départementales de 1995 à 2001, nous mettons en évidence plusieurs résultats. Il apparaît notamment que les variations de revenu des exploitations agricoles ainsi que le nombre de nouvelles installations influencent positivement les suffrages du syndicat, attestant une dimension égotropique et sociotropique au vote. De plus, nous mettons en évidence que les territoires de culture de betteraves soutiennent plus la fédération nationale, alors que nous ne trouvons pas de relation entre les cultures céréalières et ce vote. Enfin, le faible niveau de participation lors de ces élections donne un avantage réel pour la FNSEA.

    | Paper | Data in dta

  52. “Public Budgeting in the French Fifth Republic: The End of ‘La République des partis‘ ?”

    West European Politics 32(2): 401-419. (with F. Baumgartner and A. François). 2008.

    We review trends in state spending across the Fifth Republic. Considering the partisan divisions in French political life and the importance accorded to elections and partisan control of government, one might expect substantial differences in spending patterns by governments of the Left and the Right. Instead, we find only a small number of statistically significant differences and when we do find them, governments of the Right are the higher spenders. The reasons for this are the different historical periods during which the Left and Right have been in power. As the Right dominated French politics for the first half of the Fifth Republic, it oversaw a period of the most dramatic growth in the state, across virtually all sectors. Growth in state spending declined regularly over the decades but particularly after the oil crisis and other events in the 1970s. Since 1981, when governments (if not presidential control) have alternated on a relatively regular basis, austerity and limited growth in spending has been the rule, no matter which governments have been in power. We demonstrate these facts with a comprehensive overview of public spending across eleven categories. The results are presented graphically, with statistical t-tests, and finally with regressions controlling for growth in the economy. In all cases, no linkage between Left control of government and higher spending is found.

    | Paper | Data in dta

  53. “Public Spending Interactions and Local Politics. Empirical Evidence from French Municipalities”.

    Public Choice 137(1-2): 57-80 (with T. Madiès and S. Paty). 2008.

    This paper aims at testing whether there exist spending interactions between French municipalities by estimating a dynamic panel data model. Our results suggest that there are some interactions between neighbouring municipalities as regards primary and investment expenditures. A positive relationship between municipalities’ wage bill and unemployment rates is likely to stress a rise of temporary employment in those municipalities that suffer from social troubles. Further, the estimation results show that these interdependences also exist between cities whose mayors have the same partisan affiliation. Finally, our results confirm the opportunistic behaviour of local governments, which increase all categories of public spending in pre-electoral periods.

    | Paper | Data in dta

  54. “What Does It Take for Canadian Political Scientist to Get Cited ?”

    Social Science Quarterly, September 89(3): 802-816. (with E. Montpetit and A. Blais). 2008.

    The article examines the factors that influence the frequency whereby scholarly articles published by Canadian political scientists are cited. We collected data on 1860 journal articles published between 1985 and 2005 by 758 Canadian political scientists and listed in the Social Science Citation Index. Using these data, we performed OLS and Tobit estimations to identify factors influencing citation frequency. The regressions show that the reputation of the journal in which the article is published, though important, does not explain everything. The gender of the author(s), the number of authors, the geographical focus of the article, the field and the methodology also matter. An article is more likely to be widely cited if it is published in a prestigious journal, if it is written by several authors, if it applies quantitative methods, if it compares countries and if it deals with administration and public policy or elections and political parties. Faculty members who belong to larger departments and women are more cited.

    | Paper | Data in dta

  55. “Le Royaume-Uni a-t-il les moyens de préserver son leadership militaire en Europe”.

    Arès, 12(58): 21-38. (with B. Irondelle). 2007.

    Paper | Data

  56. “How Useful is the « Cumul des Mandats » for Being Re-elected? Empirical Evidence from the 1997 Legislative Election”.

    French Politics 4(3): 292-311, 2006.

    This paper aims at estimating the impact of the cumul des mandats on the votes of incumbents in the 1997 French legislative elections. The model specifies the behavior of both the incumbent candidate and his/her direct challenger. Results show that holding a supplementary office does not increase the odds of re-election for an incumbent Member of Parliament (MP), except for the offices of MP-mayor or more slightly MP-regional councilor. The empirical estimates of the model do not validate a generally accepted idea that a local elected official derives a substantial increase in votes for future legislative elections.

    | Paper | Data

  57. “A Punctuated Equilibrium in French Budgeting Processes”,

    Journal of European Public Policy 13(7): 1082-1099. (with F. Baumgartner and A. François). 2006.

    We use data on French budgeting to test models of friction, incrementalism and punctuated equilibrium. Data include the overall state budget since 1820; ministerial budgets for seven ministries since 1868; and a more complete ministerial series covering ten ministries since 1947. Our results in every case are remarkably similar to the highly leptokurtic distributions that Jones and Baumgartner (2005) demonstrated in US budgeting processes. This suggests that general characteristics of administrative processes create friction, and that these general factors are more important than particular details of organizational design. The legendary centralization and administrative strength of the French state, especially when compared to the decentralized separated powers structure of the US system, where the theory was developed, is apparently not sufficient to overcome cognitive pressures causing friction. Further, our French data cover a wide range of institutional procedures and constitutional regimes. The similarity of our findings across all these settings suggests that administrative structures alone are less important than the cognitive reasons discussed in the original model.

    | Paper | Data

  58. “Europe de la Défense : quel processus d’allocation ?”

    Revue Économique 57 (3): 407-418, 2006.

    The European Union has decided to implement in 1999 an independent European security and defence policy (ESDP). As preferences in defence issues are strongly heterogeneous, it is required to determine the kind of allocation process for providing defence resources within this European space. By assuming European security as an impure public good due to spillin effects and considering an economics of alliance framework, this article aims at verifying whether a Nash-Cournot process or Lindhal process is better suitable for the ESDP. Based on an econometric analysis for the 1980-2002 period, it is verified that the Europe of Defence follows a Nash-Cournot process for 10 out of 15 European countries. This result emphasizes the difficulty for defining a fiscal price in defence.

    | Paper | Data

  59. “La politique influence-t-elle les décisions publiques locales?”

    Revue Politiques et Management Public 23(4): 79-100. (with A. François). 2005.

    | Paper | Data

  60. “Le rendement des dépenses électorales en France : le cas des élections législatives de 1997″

    Revue Économique 56(5): 1125-1143. (with A. François). 2005.

    This article aims at evaluating the influence of campaign spending on legislative vote share within a new French campaign finance law. From an empirical analysis derived from the 1997 French legislative election, we show that the electoral outcomes are sensitive to campaign spending. Using OLS and 2SLS methods and taking into account the bias of endogeneity, we demonstrate that the spending of incumbent candidates have a direct and positive effect whereas the spending of their challengers have an indirect and negative effect. In the context of the implementation of a new campaign finance regulation (characterized by both spending ceiling and public repayment), this result means that financial barriers to entry into political market are not entirely reduced. In conclusion, the return of French campaign spending is not quite different from those empirically verified within the American electoral process.

    | Paper | Data