February 2024
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74 Reads
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1 Citation
European Journal of Political Economy
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Publications (57)
January 2023
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3 Reads
SSRN Electronic Journal
November 2021
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331 Reads
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8 Citations
Political Studies
There is perennial debate in comparative politics about electoral institutions, but what characterizes this debate is the lack of consideration for citizens' perspective. In this paper, we report the results of an original survey conducted on representative samples in 15 West European countries (N = 15,414). We implemented an original instrument to elicit respondents' views by asking them to rate "real but blind" electoral outcomes. With this survey instrument, we aimed to elicit principled rather than partisan preferences regarding the kind of electoral outcomes that citizens think is good for democracy. We find that West Europeans do not clearly endorse a majoritarian or proportional vision of democracy. They tend to focus on aspects of the government rather than parliament when they pass a judgment. They want a majority government that has few parties and enjoys wide popular support. Finally, we find only small differences between citizens of different countries.
October 2021
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14 Reads
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3 Citations
Political Studies
A common explanation for electoral victories is that the winning candidate adopted issue positions that appealed to voters, implying that citizens’ choices are based on policy preferences. However, it is not straightforward to determine the causal direction between citizens’ issue preferences and their party choice. An alternative possibility, strongly supported by prior research, is that voters adopt the positions of the parties they vote for to rationalize their votes. The 2017 French presidential election offers a unique opportunity to address that question, as it saw the victory of a candidate who was not backed by one of the established parties. Using panel data, we show that policy preferences measured prior to Macron’s emergence as a candidate led voters with a particular bundle of preferences to support him. We conclude that policy preferences clearly do matter to vote choice and that this effect is most visible when a new party emerges.
June 2021
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439 Reads
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226 Citations
During international crises, trust in government is expected to increase irrespective of the wisdom of the policies it pursues. This has been called a ‘rally-round-the-flag’ effect. This article examines whether the COVID-19 crisis has resulted in such a rally effect. Using multi-wave panel surveys conducted in Austria and France starting from March 2020, in the article it is examined how government trust was affected by the perceived threats to the nation’s health and economy created by the pandemic as well as by the perceived appropriateness of the government’s crisis response. A strong rally effect is shown in Austria, where trust was closely tied to perceived health risks, but faded away quickly over time. Perceptions of government measures mattered, too, while perceived economic threat only played a minor role. In France, in contrast, a strong partisan divide is found and no rally effect. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1925017 .
May 2021
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10 Reads
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1 Citation
April 2021
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23 Reads
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1 Citation
Public Opinion Quarterly
We present a polling strategy to predict and analyze runoff elections using the 2017 French presidential race as an empirical case. This strategy employs rejective probability sampling to identify a small sample of polling stations that is balanced with respect to past election results. We then survey the voters’ candidate evaluations in first-round exit polls. We poststratify the voter sample to first-round election returns to account for nonresponse and coverage issues, and impute missing candidate evaluations to emulate campaign learning. Next, the votes for eliminated competitors are redistributed according to their supporters’ lower-order preferences. Finally, the predictions are validated against official results and other polls. We end with a discussion of the advantages and limitations of this approach.
March 2021
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7 Reads
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1 Citation
March 2021
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13 Reads
October 2019
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68 Reads
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15 Citations
The special issue introduced in this article presents the results of the Issue Competition Comparative Project (ICCP). The project uses issue yield theory to provide a general, comprehensive perspective on issue competition (party competition through issue strategy) that goes beyond the extant focus on specific parties or specific issues. Relying on voter surveys and Twitter data collected in the context of recent elections in six West European countries, we address several key research questions concerning issue competition: (a) whether the strategies of different parties are loyal to classic 20th-century ideological alignments or rather actively challenging them; (b) whether different parties opt for conflict-mobilization or problem-solving issue strategic approaches; (c) whether party adherence to the issue opportunities identified by issue yield theory are rewarded by better electoral performance.
Citations (45)
... AV provides voters with more possibilities to express their preferences compared to PV. The fact that PV severely constrains voters in this respect creates frequent and transparent incentives to misrepresent preferences (Balinski and Laraki 2020;Lachat and Laslier 2024). Hence, future research should consider other methods which allow voters to express their preferences in greater detail than PV. ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
February 2024
European Journal of Political Economy
... Furthermore, people are used to seeing electoral outcomes, and they update their political attitudes following the announcement of results (Anderson et al. 2005). The electoral outcomes that citizens find good for democracy do not neatly conform to the proportional or majoritarian vision of democracy, (…) but to the efficiency/legitimacy of the government (Blais, et al. 2021). ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
November 2021
Political Studies
... However, there is more diversity when looking at countries individually. By contrast to Italy, the Netherlands or Austria, in France, no rally effect was observed during COVID (Kritzinger et al. 2021, Schraff 2021. That may be caused by different use of restrictions and police tactics, France adopting a more aggressive stance (Terpstra et al. 2021). ...
- Citing Article
- Full-text available
June 2021
... N ational elections in France have been an object of scientific forecasting efforts since the 1980s (for a review, see Jérôme and Jérôme-Speziari 2010), with an initial deployment of political-economy models based on regression analysis. Later, these models were rivaled by publicopinion polling approaches that emphasized the use of vote intentions to foretell election outcomes (e.g., Jérôme, Jérôme, and Lewis-Beck 1999;Selb, Göbel, and Lachat 2020). Other theoretical efforts occasionally emerged (e.g., Nadeau, Bélanger, and Lewis-Beck 2012), but the dominant approaches have been structural models versus vote-intention polls. ...
- Citing Article
April 2021
Public Opinion Quarterly
... Concern Analysis Concerns, meanwhile, represent key topics discussed by Twitter users, and have analogues to topic modeling (Mei et al. 2007;Eisenstein, Ahmed, and Xing 2011;Jelodar et al. 2019), framing (Card et al. 2015), as well as position issues (Stokes 1963) that divide voters. Among the many possible topics, we focus on those discussed by the French presidential election (Lachat and Michel 2020). ...
- Citing Chapter
March 2021
... For instance, parties of the left have issue ownership over social security and environmental issues, while right-wing parties tend to own immigration and crime (Seeberg, 2017: 484). Issue ownership becomes most electorally rewarding when parties can own a policy that delivers the greatest 'issue yield': an issue that allows parties to retain their voter base while broadening their appeal to new voters (De Sio and Lachat, 2020;De Sio and Weber, 2014). Housing being an example of an issue with a high yield for Sinn Féin in the South (Moore, 2023: 266). ...
- Citing Article
October 2019
... The 2017 French presidential elections were marked by significant shifts in the political landscape, with the traditional governing parties being disqualified early on (Durovic, 2019). The campaign saw a departure from the traditional left-right divide, with a focus on the integration-demarcation divide (Lachat & Michel, 2020). This election also saw the rise of Emmanuel Macron, a political outsider, who ultimately won the presidency (Kuhn, 2017). ...
- Citing Article
October 2019
... Moreover, challenger parties have entered the mainstream and are often involved in coalition governments, while mainstream parties are losing ground. So far, the literature has explored the salience of old and new economic and non-economic issues in Western European electorates (De Sio & Lachat, 2020), as well as the electoral composition of traditional party families (Knutsen, 2018), populist parties (Rooduijn, 2018), radical-left parties (Gomez, Morales, & Ramiro, 2016), and radical-right parties (Bornschier, 2018;Ivarsflaten, 2008;Rydgren, 2007). Little attention has been paid to the ideological similarities between voters of mainstream and challenger parties, and between the challenger parties themselves. ...
- Citing Article
September 2019
... Approval voting with a runoff is effectively used in several cantons in Switzerland for committee elections. The precise rules vary from one canton to the other so that the second round is sometimes almost unused, as in the canton of Zurich ([Laslier and Van der Straeten, 2016], [Van der Straeten et al., 2018]). requiring pairwise comparisons between all pairs of candidates just means that we need each voter's ranking of candidates, and requiring her approval set means that this ranking comes with a threshold that separates approved candidates from disapproved candidates. ...
Reference:
Approval with Runoff
- Citing Book
November 2018
... The supporting points for this argument are structured below in two respects: assumptions to data collection, and type of questions. Firstly, Oscar Fernández et al. (2023) provide an important example of how data collection processes can be problematically built on certain assumptions (also Okyar and Güneş 2016;Vrânceanu and Lachat 2021). They aim to measure how the European public reacted on security issues in the aftermath of Russia's invasion of Ukraine and its possible reasons (Fernández et al. 2023: 463). ...
- Citing Article
December 2018
Journal of Elections Public Opinion and Parties