Thursday, December 23, 2021
A Fractured Electorate? French Presidential Election Forecasting for 2022
Ross E. Burkhart
School of Public Service
Boise State University
23 December 2021
France will experience its every-five-years presidential election next April. Political change has been the constant across France and its neighbors over the past five years, from the gilets jaunes unrest and COVID-19 vaccine protests in France itself to completion of the British Brexit to the conclusion of Angela Merkel's tenure as German Chancellor. Add to this general upheaval across the European Union regarding migration, economic decline, populist rise and the spread of COVID-19, and the chaotic continental political pattern continues.
Focusing on France, the destruction of the Fifth Republic establishment parties during the 2017 presidential election remains so. The Parti Socialiste candidate for the presidency, Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, received 5% support in the November public opinion polls and the Républicains candidate, Valérie Pécresse, received 14% support, well below the party standards from past election campaigns. Even the standard-bearer of the increasingly ascendant Rassemblement National (formerly National Front), Marine Le Pen, slipped below 20% support, with the slack taken up by the rank outsider on the extreme right, Éric Zemmour and his Reconquête movement.
Strangely enough, the most constant aspect of the current presidential campaign is the enduring 35-40% support for the insurgent 2017 presidential winner, Emmanuel Macron. An avowed centrist (and former Socialiste), Macron has studiously attempted to straddle the middle in navigating his presidency's way through a thicket of issues, from existential (the response to COVID-19) to identity-based (secularism). These political efforts have gained him at a modicum a grudging respect for surviving during these treacherous times, though there is the suspicion among many that rather than being a principled centrist, he instead is diving toward the center for the true Downsian median voter that in theory could propel him to a triumphal re-election.
How is Macron doing toward his quest? So far, reasonably well. The November polling showed him about ten points ahead of his nearest competitor, Le Pen, 28% to 18%. Of course, this level of support is nowhere near the majority support required to end the election at one round. Macron's strategy is surely to hew to the median center, survive to the second ballot, and receive the Arrowian voter second preferences on the second round to return to the Elysee Palace.
Of course, doing well today is no guarantee of success tomorrow. Hence, my French election forecasting effort attempting to foresee the election results. Is it possible to forecast French elections? The evidence suggests that it is possible. Stretching back to the pioneering work of Michael Lewis-Beck (1991), despite the small number of Fifth Republic presidential elections, they are remarkably well-behaved from the standpoint of hazarding a forecast of the impending election.
Visual evidence of this is from the figure below. (This even includes the extreme outlier election of 2017, during which the French political world was irrevocably rocked.) Along the horizontal axis are data of approval of the French president, six months prior to the election, stretching back to the 1965 election. Along the horizontal axis are data of the first-round vote for the presidential candidates on the ideological Left. (To make this graph work properly, the approval data are adjusted in the following way: for a president of the Left, the data are as is, while for a president of the Right, the data are 100 minus the approval data.) There is a definite upward slope to the data points, indicating a strong relationship between presidential approval and vote. This is confirmed by the Pearson correlation between incumbent popularity and Left vote, r = .84, N = 10.
To forecast an election result, three things are essential: a good theory of voting, an accurate forecast, and significant lead time for the forecast. A reasonable voting theory to consider for forecasting is the "reward and punishment" theory first put forth by the Harvard political scientist V.O. Key in his book The Responsible Electorate (1966). In this scenario, voters are the "vengeful gods" who will vote for a government that performs well and against a government that does not. It is a relatively broad calculation for the voters to make, but the evidence suggests that make it, they do (Kramer 1973, Tufte 1975, Lewis-Beck 1988, Stimson 1991).
If presidential approval is a good proxy variable for government performance, and the literature suggests that it is, then presidential approval with appropriate lead time prior to the election should serve as a strong cue to the voters on Election Day. The approval data, six months prior to the election, for 1965 – 2007 come from Nadeau, Bélanger, and Lewis-Beck (2012), and I have collected the data for 2012 and 2017.
A basic model proposed by Nadeau, Bélanger, and Lewis-Beck (2012) suggests itself, to be estimated with ordinary least squares regression:
Left Vote = a + b Incumbent Approval
The estimates are as follows:
Left Vote = 24.25 + .38 Incumbent Approval
(5.97) (4.80)
R-squared = .77 S.E.E. = 4.10 Durbin-Watson = 2.01 N = 9
Where the variables are measured as stated above, the figures in parentheses are absolute t-ratios, the R-squared is the percentage of variance explained in the Left Vote DV by the Incumbent Approval IV, S.E.E. is the error in prediction of the DV by the IV, Durbin-Watson is the Durbin-Watson statistic for autocorrelation, N is the number of elections in the dataset, and the estimation technique is Cochrane-Orcutt AR(1) regression via Stata.
For a forecasting model, the R-squared value is of primary importance, as the model must account for the vote as precisely as possible. R-squared values above .70 are generally acceptable models for an accurate forecasts, with the higher the value, the more accurate the forecast model.
With this model's R-squared of .77, this model is sufficiently strong enough to render an accurate forecast.
What is the forecast? We simply plug in the relevant current value for Incumbent Approval and solve the equation. The relevant approval for Emmanuel Macron in November 2021 is 43 percent. This approval is on the lower end of presidential approval ratings, but it is certainly not catastrophic as in was in 2017.
The toughest call here is to characterize Macron: is he of the political center or of the left? His conduct while residing in the Élysée Palace suggests a centrist hue to his tenure in office. He was the economics minister in the Hollande government, so he also has some left credentials. On balance, his ideology is on the center-left, not the right, so we can declare his incumbent popularity for the left vote.
To solve the equation, then, the results are as follows:
Left Vote = 24.25 + .38 (43)
Left Vote = 24.25 + 16.34
Left Vote = 40.59% of the first ballot vote
This tracks pretty well with the current levels of public support for the left candidates plus Macron, who together add up to around 45 to 49 percent of support. Despite all of the clamor associated with the far right, the forecasted vote for candidates on the left during the first round of balloting is likely to be substantial.
References
Lewis-Beck, Michael S. 1991. "French National Elections: Political Economic Forecasts." European Journal of Political Economy 7:487-96.
Lewis-Beck, Michael S., and Tom W. Rice. 1992. Forecasting Elections. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press.
Nadeau, Richard, Éric Bélanger, and Michael S. Lewis-Beck. 2012. “Proxy Models for Election Forecasting: The 2012 French Test,” French Politics 10:1-10.
Stimson, James A. 1991. Public Opinion in America: Moods, Cycles, and Swings. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
