Campaigning in an unprecedented election: issue competition in the French 2017 presidential election

Abstract

The 2017 French presidential elections featured an eventful campaign, produced astonishing results, and presented important signs of party system change. This paper analyses the main lines of divide of the demand and the supply side of electoral competition. It analyses the structure of citizens’ preferences, as well as the candidates’ strategic issue opportunities, relying on issue yield theory. To that end, it combines data from an original individual-level survey with information about the candidates’ Twitter messages. It is found that the traditional model of two-dimensional political space, characterised by an economic (left–right) and socio-cultural (integration–demarcation) dimension is largely challenged. On the supply-side, the analysis offers additional evidence for the central role played by the integration–demarcation divide, while showing that the traditional left–right conflict has not fully disappeared.

Keywords:

• Issue competition
• issue yield
• party strategies
• political space
• France

Notes

Acknowledgements

We thank Salomon Bennour who assisted with the coding of the data, Swen Hutter for sharing the data of the POLCON project, and the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In addition to five major candidates, two candidates ran for the Trotskyist left (Nathalie Arthaud and Philippe Poutou), two on the right of LR, campaigning strongly against the EU (Nicolas Dupont-Aignan and François Asselineau), and two other candidates with hardly classifiable ideological positions (Jean Lassalle and Jacques Cheminade).

2 Survey administered by Demetra SRL Italy, using predetermined quotas for age/sex combinations, level of education and geographical region, between 31 March and 10 April. The survey and Twitter data were collected in the framework of the ICCP project (https://cise.luiss.it/iccp/) and are available as GESIS study ZA7499, see De Sio et al. (2019).

3 Cohen’s intercoder reliability = 0.76. This can be interpreted as ‘moderately high’. Note that a very large majority of coding differences concerned the allocation of the categories ‘no issue’ and ‘other issue’, and had therefore only a marginal impact on the items used in the present analysis.

4 The survey includes 15 positional items. Before performing a factor analysis, however, we replace by additive scales two groups of items that tap into the same issue. This is the case for attitudes towards European integration (two items) and immigration (four items). For both of these, the Cronbach’s alpha is equal to 0.82.

5 Note that four factors have an eigenvalue larger than 1. However, it is very close to 1 for the last factor (1.05), and the screeplot points to a three-dimensional solution (see Figure A1 in the online appendix).

6 Immigration issues: immigration rules, welfare for migrants, refugees, Islamic veil. European integration: European Union, euro. Cultural liberalism: abortion, euthanasia, gay marriage, soft drugs. Nuclear: keep or abandon nuclear energy. Economic liberalism: job market, economic globalisation. Welfare: pension age, income differences. See Table A1 for the detailed list of issues.

7 Note that we only include in this table goals with issue-yield values of 0.20 or more.

8 The two candidates also have the highest issue yield on opposed goals regarding job-market regulation, although with an IY < 0.2 for Mélenchon, and therefore not reported in Table 4.

9 We also estimated models accounting for both the absolute and relative measures of IY (that is, the index included here, and measures of the between-candidates rank in yield). We specified such models by adding a rank measure, as well as an interaction between rank and IY. These models do not show any difference in the effect of IY between issues on which a candidate ranks higher or lower.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Romain Lachat

Romain Lachat is Assistant Professor of Political Behaviour at Cevipof, the Centre for Political Research at Sciences Po, Paris. His research focuses on the comparative analysis of electoral behaviour and on political representation. He is particularly interested in the impact of political institutions and party characteristics on individual-level behaviour. He has previously published in Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, the European Journal of Political Research, and Political Behavior, among others. [[email protected]]

Elie Michel

Elie Michel is a Postdoctoral Researcher and Lecturer at the University of Lucerne. He obtained his PhD in the Department of Social and Political Science at the European University Institute. His research interests include comparative political behaviour, political parties, and elections, with a specific interest in the populist radical right. His work bridges the sociology of the welfare state to electoral politics, looking at how welfare politics influences the electoral success of radical right parties in Western Europe. His current research focuses on party strategy and voters’ behaviour in European elections. [[email protected]]