Does France's Two-Ballot Presidential Election System Alter Candidates' Policy Strategies? A Spatial Analysis of Office-Seeking Candidates in the 1988 Presidential Election

With rare exceptions, spatial models of candidate strategies under plurality rule have analyzed single-stage plurality elections. In this paper, we explore whether the two-stage French presidential election system plausibly changes the major candidates' policy incentives, compared to what their incentives would be in a single-stage plurality contest. We report the results of counterfactual simulations on survey data from the 1988 presidential election, which suggest that the office-seeking candidates' strategies would be similar under two-stage and single-stage plurality rules.