Spatial Voting Models for the French Fifth Republic*

Howard Rosenthal and Subrata Sen

American Political Science Review, 1977, vol. 71, issue 4, 1447-1466

Abstract: In this study formal spatial models are applied to cross-sectional analysis of district results on the second ballot of French legislative elections. A model of probabilistic spatial voting better accounts for the data than either standard “ecological” models or a model of deterministic spatial voting. There are three substantive findings concerning voter behavior. First, the adjustment of voters to external information can be largely viewed as a shift in the spatial (Left-Right) distribution of voters. This shift, plus decisions by parties and candidates as to which districts parties will contest, determines the first ballot outcome. In arriving at second ballot choices, voters then appear to utilize decision rules that have a substantial degree of temporal stability. A second and related finding is that the second ballot can be reasonably accounted for by a single Left-Right dimension. Third, in those districts with three or more candidates on the second ballot, there may be substantial strategic voting with voters switching from candidates close to their ideal points but unlikely to win to more distant candidates who are more likely to win. The existence of strategic voting is suggested by the finding that models based solely on spatial preferences perform well for two-candidate districts, but less well for three- or four-candidate districts.

Date: 1977
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cambridge.org/core/product/identifier/ ... type/journal_article link to article abstract page (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cup:apsrev:v:71:y:1977:i:04:p:1447-1466_26

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in American Political Science Review from Cambridge University Press Cambridge University Press, UPH, Shaftesbury Road, Cambridge CB2 8BS UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kirk Stebbing ().