Party, Ideology, and Vote Intentions: Dynamics from the 2002 French Electoral Panel

The debate over the relative importance of ideology versus party for vote choice in France is enduring. Resolution of the debate would have much value, for the light shed on sources of stability and change in multiparty electoral systems generally. The main reason the debate continues is that previous studies examining that question have been plagued by difficulties pertaining to variable measurement, model specification, election type, and research design. We address these problems and provide new evidence from the 2002 French Electoral Panel. Most notably, these data allow stronger causal inference because party identification and ideological identification are both measured in the first wave of the survey, that is, before the declaration of vote actually occurs. We estimate a multi-equation model of first-round legislative vote intention-as measured in the second wave of the panel-using two-stage least squares, ordered logit, as well as binomial and multinomial logit techniques. The results indicate that ideological identification systematically outweighs party identification in shaping the French voter's choice.