Céline Braconnier

Voter Registration Costs and Disenfranchisement: Experimental Evidence from France

A large-scale randomized experiment conducted during the 2012 French presidential and parliamentary elections shows that voter registration requirements have significant effects on turnout, resulting in unequal participation. We assigned 20,500 apartments to one control or six treatment groups that received canvassing visits providing either information about registration or help to register at home. While both types of visits increased registration, home registration visits had a higher impact than information-only visits, indicating that both information costs and administrative barriers impede registration. Home registration did not reduce turnout among those who would have registered anyway. On the contrary, citizens registered due to the visits became more interested in and knowledgeable about the elections as a result of being able to participate in them, and 93% voted at least once in 2012. The results suggest that easing registration requirements could substantially enhance political participation and interest while improving representation of all groups.

Does an ethnic divide structure voting behaviors in working-class neighborhoods?

Abstract This article presents the results of a field study carried out over seven years in a social housing complex in the northern suburbs of Paris. One of the conclusions of the study is that individual and collective identities as well as social relations are, in a neighborhood of this sort, largely structured by categories of race and ethnicity. We find that ethnicity itself, as understood and produced by voters, is one of the determinants of identity-based voting. The subjective relationship to national origin, and, more broadly, the “ethnicization” of cognitive frameworks, are keys to understanding why French citizens of African origin (who make up about half the population of the housing project in question) vote almost exclusively for the left, while a significant proportion of “native” French voters vote for the National Front or, in the most recent presidential election, for Nicolas Sarkozy.