Regional Reform and Its Impact on the Electoral Behavior during 2012 and 2017 Presidential Elections in France

Abstract

The article deals with the 2015 territorial reform in France which reduced the number of regions and changed jurisdiction of the center and regions. In the paper the authors try to learn whether and how this reform affected electoral behavior in the regions during the first round of 2012 and 2017 presidential elections, whether there is a difference between them, and what are the voting patterns in French regions. The author used Moran’s index of spatial autocorrelation in order to answer the questions and analyze “neighborhood effect”. Besides the researcher employed multivariate explanatory data analysis to uncover the electoral patterns. Among the variables underlying the patterns the author selected socio-economic and demographic ones, as well as the number of criminal acts against Muslim-migrants in the context of the 2015 migrant crisis in Europe. The scholar concludes that territorial reform mitigated the neighborhood effect in regional electoral behavior which indicates the process of decentralization. As for electoral patterns, it is in the Eastern regions where the citizens vote for Marin Le Pen given high levels of migration and unemployment there. In the West where migration and unemployment are low people tend to choose a candidate whose agenda is not centered around migrants. The winner usually gets support from the capital region where migration and unemployment are low but many criminal acts against Muslim-migrants were reported. Consequently, the reform itself did not change electoral patterns in the regions which indicates the tendency towards recentralization and leaves the capital region in the center of political process.