Open Access
Trade shocks and far-right voting : evidence from French presidential elections
Loading...
Files
RSCAS_2017_21.pdf (2.84 MB)
Full-text in Open Access
License
Cadmus Permanent Link
Full-text via DOI
ISBN
ISSN
1028-3625
Issue Date
Type of Publication
LC Subject Heading
Other Topic(s)
EUI Research Cluster(s)
Initial version
Published version
Succeeding version
Preceding version
Published version part
Earlier different version
Initial format
Author(s)
Citation
EUI RSCAS; 2017/21; Global Governance Programme-263; Global Economics
Cite
MALGOUYRES, Clément, Trade shocks and far-right voting : evidence from French presidential elections, EUI RSCAS, 2017/21, Global Governance Programme-263, Global Economics - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/45886
Abstract
The rise of radical right parties is a Europe-wide phenomenon. While many studies describe the individual or regional characteristics associated with high propensity to vote for the far-right, we know little about the causal impact of economic shocks on electoral support for the far-right. Over the period 1995-2012, we examine the impact of trade-shocks, measured as exposure to low-wage country import competition, on the local vote share of the National Front, the French main far-right party, during presidential elections. We use small communities (cantons) as units of observations and include province (département) fixed effects, so that the identifying variation comes from within-province change in imports exposure over time. We find evidence of a small but significantly positive impact of import competition exposure on votes for the far-right: a one standard-deviation increase in imports-per-worker causes the change in the far-right share to increase by 7 percent of a standard deviation. Further results suggest that this effect has been increasing over the time period considered. We conduct a simple sensitivity test supporting the notion that (i) omitting local share of immigrants is likely to bias our estimate downward, and that (ii) this bias is likely to negligible.