Retelling the Story of the 2017 French Presidential Election: The contribution of Approval Voting

This paper contributes to the literature which questions the idea that the left-right axis still characterizes the political landscape, and challenges the view that the 2017 French election marked a sharp discontinuity in the development of French politics. It analyzes election outcomes using an original source of information on voters’ preferences using a method that leads to an alternative reading of the politics of the 2017 French presidential election. Firstly, the use of experimental data on approval voting enables us to provide a new narrative of the election process and outcome. Secondly, we introduce a procedure that generates an endogenous political axis, and construct indices revealing how and why the conventional approach opposing left to right is only partially relevant. In particular, the younger the voters, the less they conform to a left-right axis. However, we show that this does not represent a rejection of existing parties, as the official results would suggest, but an erosion in the voters’ minds of barriers between distinct political camps, and between traditional and populist parties.