Is Demonstrating against the Far Right Worth It? Evidence from French Presidential Elections

Nicolas Lagios, Pierre-Guillaume Méon and Ilan Tojerow

No 15589, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: We study the electoral impact of protesting against the far right by investigating the demonstrations held during the 2002 French presidential elections against far-right candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen. Instrumenting rally attendance with rainfall while factoring in that some municipalities never host protests, we find that larger protests reduced both the number of votes for Le Pen and the number of abstentions, while increasing the number of votes for Chirac. Regarding the mechanisms behind these results, we show that protests reduced the social desirability of voting for Le Pen, the support for his policies, and generated spatial spillovers through local media.

Keywords: protest; election; demonstration; far right; populism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 86 pages
Date: 2022-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm and nep-pol
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp15589.pdf (application/pdf)

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:iza:izadps:dp15589

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().