Jean-Yves Dormagen

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.

Aging of Registered Voters and Voter Turnout in France: A Study of 17 Voting Rounds between 2002 and 2012

Older people should be a central focus of electoral sociology. They are increasingly numerous in aging Western societies. Most importantly, they vote more than the average and are thus over-represented among voters. This is a very important issue because older people are characterized by specific political choices: they are likelier than the average to vote for right-wing candidates. Despite this, there has been no explicit study of this question in France during the last decade. Our research aims to fill this gap. For this, we use large databases covering the period 2002-2012. These databases consist of a representative panel of 40,000 registered voters. Whether or not these individuals voted in any given election can be directly verified on voter lists. We study three presidential elections, three national legislative elections, and various local elections held during the last decade. These databases also include a survey panel of 4,000 voters interviewed four times during the 2002 and 2007 presidential elections. We also use large survey databases for the most recent presidential election in 2012. Analysis of these data allows us to accurately describe the quality of registration, the participation and the electoral choices of the elderly. More importantly, it allows us to model their behaviour and thereby to establish the various factors (wealth, income, religious practice, election issues...) that can explain the particular characteristics of elderly voters.

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.

Le Duce et l'état-major du fascisme : contribution à une sociologie de la domination charismatique

A partir de l’experience du fascisme italien,l’auteur cherche a analyser les modalites de production d’un mode de domination charismatique. Il examine les conditions structurelles et les techniques mobilisees dans l´exercice du pouvoir qui favorisent la subordination complete de l’etat-major du regime a la personne du Duce.L’instauration d’un dispositif politico-administratif en etoile au centre duquel se trouve le Secretariat Particulier de Mussolini et l’extreme personnification des relations dans le cadre d´une patrimonialisation des charges etatiques assurent la concentration de l’autorite dans la figure d’un Chef devenu ainsi tout puissant.Une telle configuration offre un cadre particulierement favorable a l’emergence d’un leadership authentiquement charismatique typique des societes totalitaires.