Trade Shocks and Far-Right Voting: Evidence from French Presidential Elections

Clément Malgouyres

No 2017/21, RSCAS Working Papers from European University Institute

Abstract: The rise of radical right parties is a Europe-wide phenomenon. While many studies describe the individual or regional characteristics associated with high propensity to vote for the far-right, we know little about the causal impact of economic shocks on electoral support for the far-right. Over the period 1995-2012, we examine the impact of trade-shocks, measured as exposure to low-wage country import competition, on the local vote share of the National Front, the French main far-right party, during presidential elections. We use small communities (cantons) as units of observations and include province (département) fixed effects, so that the identifying variation comes from within-province change in imports exposure over time. We find evidence of a small but significantly positive impact of import competition exposure on votes for the far-right: a one standard-deviation increase in imports-per-worker causes the change in the far-right share to increase by 7 percent of a standard deviation. Further results suggest that this effect has been increasing over the time period considered. We conduct a simple sensitivity test supporting the notion that(i) omitting local share of immigrants is likely to bias our estimate downward, and that(ii) this bias is likely to negligible.

Keywords: Far-Right; Voting Behavior; Local Labor Markets; Trade; import competition (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (56)

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