Articles

1. “The Challenge of Burden-sharing”

   International Journal 67(1), 2012 (with F. Mérand).

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2. “Forecasting the 2012 French Presidential Election”

   PS: Political Science & Politics 45(2): 218-222 (with 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.

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3. “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.

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

   British Journal of Political Science. (with M. Lewis-Beck and R. Nadeau). 2012, forthcoming.

   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.

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5. “Decentralisation in Africa and the nature of local governments’ competition: Evidence from Benin”

   NBER Working paper. (with E. Caldeira and G. Rota-Graziosi). 2011, under review.

   Decentralization has been put forward as a powerful tool to reduce poverty and improve governance in Africa. The aim of this paper is to highlight the presence of spillovers resulting from local expenditure policies and to identify the nature of the induced strategic interactions among local governments. A two-jurisdiction model of public expenditure is developed which di¤ers from the literature by capturing the extreme poverty of some local governments in developing countries through a generalized
   notion of Nash equilibrium: the constrained Nash equilibrium. We show how and under which conditions spillovers among jurisdictions induce strategic behaviours of local officials. By estimating a spatial lag model for a panel data of the 77 communes in Benin from 2002 to 2008, our empirical analysis not only establishes the existence of interactions between local governements, but also defi…nes the nature of such interactions by highlighting strategic complementarity of jurisdictions’ public spending. This result raises the issue of coordination among local governments and more broadly it questions the efficiency of decentralisation in developing countries in lines with the Oates’ theorem.

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

   Canadian Journal of Political Science. (with E. Montpetit). 2012, fortcoming.

   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.

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7. “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.

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

   French Politics. (with R. Nadeau and M. Lewis-Beck). 2011, forthcoming.

   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.

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

   French Politics, Culture and Society. (with G. Mallard). 2011, forthcoming.

   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.

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10. “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.

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11. “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.

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12. “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.

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13. “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.

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14. “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.

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15. “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.

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16. “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.

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17. “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.

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

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

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19. “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.

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20. “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.

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21. “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.

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

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

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23. “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.

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24. “Innovation et brevet : une comparaison transatlantique”

    Revue internationale et stratégique 55: 99-107. (with C. Ben Lakhdar) 2004.

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