A Reexamination of the Coattail Effect Created by the President-Elect: The Case of 2017 Elections in France

• Main Authors: Wu, Wen-Yu, 吳文煜
• Other Authors: Weng, Vivianne Yen-ching
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2018
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/w9h7ku

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 政治學系 === 106 === The French presidential election in 2017 was the very first time in the history of the Fifth Republic that the traditionally major political parties from both left and right wings failed to advance to the final round. The candidates who reached the final round were Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen. The former, a dissenting Socialist, had created his new centrist party, La République En Marche! (LREM), whilst the latter ran her campaign as head of the far right party, Front national (FN). Labelled as “anti-far-right president”, Macron collected more than 60% of the votes, making him the new French president in May 2017. Following this personal victory, his LREM also won more than 50% of the seats at the end of the legislative election held one month later. The coattail effect of the president-elect under the French Fifth Republic has been extensively studied, especially from 2002 onwards. The "honeymoon” voting schedule has successfully triggered consecutive unified governments and therefore prevented the cohabitation from happening again. The deciding factor that has driven the electorate’s votes is whether or not to support the president-elect. As such, the National Assembly candidates would only need to rely on votes from supporters of the president-elect to win more votes. The 2017 elections have produced a new phenomenon. Only the traditionally major parties had benefited from the president-elect’s coattail effect in the past. The weight of these parties could weaken the president-elect’s personal influence on the following National Assembly election. However, I argue in this thesis that the coattail effect does not stop with traditional right-left cleavage. In the case of 2017 elections, I found that the president-elect did have the power to collect sufficient votes for a unified government under the “honeymoon” voting schedule. The 2017 French elections reveal that the president-elect’s “coattail” does have an impact on the legislative electorate beyond the traditional right-left cleavage. Thus the outcome of presidential election is crucial. Major parties that failed in the presidential election would lose the power of discourse in the legislative election. The “honeymoon” voting schedule was the key in explaining why LREM could become the majority in the National Assembly. It has benefited from a low turnout rate and the anti-cohabitation electorate. Moreover, the fact that more than 200 incumbents announced not to defend their seats in 2017 has also reinforced the coattail effect. The legislative election could further be reduced to the president’s “third round” voting. In this thesis, I approached “content analysis method” and “case study method” to justify my hypothesis; the coattail effect of the French president-elect does have a generalizability under the “honeymoon” voting schedule. I tested all the 577 French legislative constituencies as the “unit of analysis” to check whether the election result would meet the assumption and used the “case study” to observe what might have weakened the coattail effect. I found that as long as the “honeymoon” voting schedule remained unchanged, the president-elects of France would keep their “coattail effect” to secure a solid majority in the National Assembly. In other words, the chance of cohabitation is slim, no matter who the president-elect is, his/her party will very likely be a majority in the National Assembly.