Voting against in the 2017 French presidential election

Abstract

Do voters vote for the candidate they like or vote against their dislike? This paper aims to broaden the understanding of voting behavior and expand the scope of voting models by incorporating loss aversion, the central concept of the prospect theory, into the traditional proximity model. By testing the ‘vote-against model’ on the 2017 French presidential election data, this paper shows that the French electorate weighed the psychological losses more than gains in their final vote decision. Furthermore, this paper finds that the vote-against model explains and predicts the French electorate’s voting behavior better than the proximity model.

Predicted probabilities of vote choice based on the changes in the psychological distance from Macron

Citation

Kim, D.W. 2022. “Voting against in the 2017 French presidential election.” French Politics 20: 121–146. https://doi.org/10.18854/kpsr.2022.56.4.003