Campaigns, Political Preferences and Turnout: An Empirical Study of the 1997 French Legislative Elections

The purpose of this paper is to assess the importance of electoral campaigns for explaining turnout, and to evaluate more precisely the influence of electoral expenditures and of the multiplication of candidatures. The study of these two determinants also proposes to control for the influence of the structural determinants of the vote, notably standard socio-economic variables, as well as for the influence of the voter partisan preferences, whose impact on turnout is rarely taken into account. After a theoretical analysis of the determinants of electoral abstention, we propose an empirical analysis of the participation at the legislative constituency level for the French elections of 1997.