Dr Anne Jadot: "What drives French voters to the polls?"

Part of the series of lectures “Politics in Europe”

Date: 13.01.2025
Time: 16:30-18:00
Place: Bld. B3 1, lecture hall 1

The presentation is held in English

Event at LSF

Summary

Turnout is the key to understand electoral results: it is fundamental for a party (or a candidate) to persuade its sympathizers to keep going to the polls, or to remobilize those who previously abstained. This politically differential mobilization, which fluctuates given the political context of a specific contest, help explain why France registered several political alternations, sometimes only a very few years apart, or even results leading to a so-called ‘cohabitation’. This perspective is also fruitful if one wants to understand the turnout surge registered at the called in advance general elections of June-July 2024, reaching a record level since several decades.

This conference will advocate it is especially important to tackle participation paths at the individual level, applying a longitudinal perspective. Indeed, citizens are not divided into 2 groups, on the one hand those who would always vote and on the other hand those who would never go to the polls. It is far more heuristic to question why a given person sometimes votes and sometimes abstains. All the more since intermittent participation has become somehow a new norm, also among citizens who are however equipped with a minimum of political interest and markers.

This perspective will lead us to present the variety of empirical data one can use to first measure, then statistically explain or qualitatively understand, such participation paths. Hoping to be useful for a (young) foreign researcher who would like to study the French case, we’ll present each source with its merits and limits. One can first use information from voting registers (even if it is not possible in our country to undertake a ‘validation study’), either locally grounded from the work of individual researchers, or with a nationally representative sample thanks to the INSEE “Participation Studies”. Those are crucial to establish socio-economic cleavages without declaratory biases linked to the perception of a civic duty to vote, but lack a grasp on political variables’ effects. That’s why closed questions included about habitual voting in major academic studies can be crossed with all the respondents’ characteristics. But it is even more fruitful to triangle this wealth of information with open-ended questions about their reasons to vote or abstain. Collecting such verbatim, to which textual analysis packages can be applied, emphasizes structural or contextual motivations to turn out. Last but not least, in-depth qualitative interviews are useful in order to put light on the still high symbolic value of the voting act in France, leading to a somehow paradoxical investment in purposely blank or void ballots.