The Impact of Local Elections on National Elections: Evidence from France

• In Event: Historical Local Party Politics: Determinants and Consequences

Abstract

The geographic distribution of votes for parties competing in national election has recently received renewed scholarly attention. In this paper, we develop and test a novel theoretical argument about what drives within-country vote polarization. Specifically, we argue that how parties fare in national elections within a given territorial unit is shaped by the character of local elections. If locally embedded political entrepreneurs are incentivized to attach themselves to national party brands they can attract the support of a significant coalition of activists and voters. This, in turn, affects the extent to which this party fares well in national elections in that same geographical area.

We test whether partiers running in national elections have an advantage in territorial units where they have a strong local presence? We answer this question using national and local election results at municipality level from France between 2001 and 2022. In France, party lists are only used in localities above a certain population threshold. Furthermore, this threshold has shifted in 2014 from 3,500 to 1,000 allowing us to implement a difference-in-differences analysis in which we first ascertain the effect of the electoral reform on the formation of national parties charters in the localities affected by the reform, as well as the success of these parties in local elections. We then use this exogenously driven variation in the affiliation of local candidates with national parties and their success in local elections to predict the success of national parties in national elections.

Authors

• Jan Teorell, Stockholm University

• Kare Vernby, Stockholm University

• Emanuel Coman, Trinity College Dublin