(This article was originally published at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and syndicated at StatsBlogs.)
Consider a national election with the following four major candidates, from right to left:
– Populist far-right nativist
– Religious conservative
– Center-left technocrat
– Populist anti-corporate leftist
In the first round of the 2017 French presidential election, these four candidates received 21%, 20%, 24%, and 20%, respectively.
In the United States, these candidates were named Trump, Cruz, Clinton, and Sanders, and in a four-way race (with a bunch of minor candidates splitting the remaining 15% of the vote) they might well have garnered the very same proportions as above.
In the U.S. runoff, the populist nationalist and the center-left technocrat split the vote evenly, whereas in the French runoff, the center-left technocrat won two-thirds of the vote.
There are lots of differences between French and American politics, but I think the key factor here is party identification. The two major political parties in the United States are despised but they’re the only game in town, and once things got to the runoff, almost all the partisans voted for their party’s candidate. In France, though, one of the runoff candidates came from a fringe party and the other had no traditional party ties. Remember that, before being chosen as the Republican party nominee, Donald Trump had huge negatives among Republican voters, and he wasn’t so popular among Democrats either. In the U.S. general election of 2016, the Republican Party needed Donald Trump’s voters, but Trump needed the Republican Party. Together they managed to get the 49% they needed. In France there was no mainstream political party to do this job for Marine Le Pen.
The post What’s the difference between the French and U.S. presidential elections? Political parties. appeared first on Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science.
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