Bread and butter à la française: multiparty forecasts of the French legislative vote (1981-2007)

It is well known that citizens tend to blame the government for economic hardship, and that they see legislative elections as an opportunity to “throw the rascals out”. However, while this mechanism has been thoroughly explored as a basis for election forecasting in the US and many Western European countries, research carried out on the semi-presidential case of France has only developed more recently. We employ a constrained model predicting votes for principal party groupings, rather than relying upon simple incumbent/opposition vote prediction. Building upon work by Auberger and Jérôme and Jérôme-Speziari, we adopt a time-series approach, using data from 1981 forwards to look for evidence of variation at the departmental level in support for party groups and economic indicators such as unemployment and GDP. We then assess the model’s efficacy in retrodicting first-round legislative election results in France.