After a year of debates about an apparently depoliticised electorate and attempts by candidates to rally the ‘invisible’ voters to their cause, the French National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) has come up with a timely study. Last month it published a tally of voter registration and turnout in 2012, based on a representative sample of 300,000 eligible voters (read the report in French here). The abstention rate reached 20% of registered voters in this year’s presidential election and more than 40% in the parliamentary elections that followed soon after. With two rounds of voting each, these ballots gave the French electorate a total of four opportunities to go to the polls. The figures show that between the unregistered and those who consistently stayed home, one in five French citizens did not vote in any of this year’s elections.
Education level, social class and age are known determinants of electoral participation. What’s new about these figures, published on September 6th, is what they say about participation among foreign-born French citizens. It turns out that this group is somewhat less likely to register to vote than the rest of the population. Once registered, however, they actually vote in the same proportions as their French-born counterparts.
When in comes to joining the electoral roll, 7% of those who turned old enough to vote this year did not bother to register at their local town hall. Despite automatic registration for 18-year-olds of known residence, this age group didn’t turn out out in full force. This was largely due to the fact that many of them moved after taking part in the obligatory 'citizenship day' - journée défense et citoyenneté – that French teenagers have to attend and which records their addresses.
Socio-professional disparities in registration figures are still pronounced, showing an 11% gap between those with and without a higher education qualification. Registration levels are lower for blue- and white-collar workers than for senior and managerial staff, and lower still for the unemployed.
But the gap is even wider between foreign- and native-born French citizens. The most reticent to register are those born in Portugal or Turkey, only 60% of whom are on the electoral roll, which the authors of the INSEE study, demographers Xavier Niel and Lilian Lincot, put down to education levels. As for Italian-born French citizens, who are more likely to be registered to vote, the report explains: “French people born in Italy are also among the least educated, but they stem from earlier waves of immigration. So they are older and more often already listed on an electoral roll.”
Registration among African-born French nationals, averaging 77%, depends a great deal on nationality at birth: 87% of those born French in Algeria, Morocco or Tunisia signed up to vote this year, as against 65% of those whose nationality at birth was North African.
But registration isn’t everything. One also has to actually go to the polls on election day. In 2012, 12% of those registered didn’t vote in a single round of national elections, which is 2% more than in 2007. Voter turnout in the presidential election that year was considered exceptionally high, in the wake of the widespread mobilisation during the second round of the 2002 election to thwart the challenge of the leader of the far-right Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen, to Jacques Chirac.
Once registered, the foreign-born vote just as often
The oldest and youngest segments of the electorate are over-represented among the abstainers. The abstention criteria in general are comparable to the socio-economic and ethnic determinants of registration. All other things being equal, the less educated you are, the less likely you are to vote. The unemployed and housewives abstain more than those in employment.
On the other hand, the difference according to nationality at birth disappears. Once they’re registered, French- and foreign-born citizens vote in the same proportions. And the gap between children born to immigrants and the rest of the nation has also closed.
Other factors do need to be taken into account. Public-sector employees vote more than their private-sector counterparts: their civil servant status, according to the authors of the study, reinforces their vested interest in elections. Moreover, couples vote more than singles, “perhaps by virtue of mutual encouragement between the spouses”. Meanwhile, residents of urban agglomerations, although more educated on average, tend to abstain more than the rest of the population.
Outside these urban areas, the authors did not observe any particular disparity between the suburbs and rural communities: their abstention rates are roughly equivalent. According to the report, the very low rate of abstention among farmers (3%), as “observed in every election”, has more to do with their profession than their place of residence.
With regard to French citizens of foreign birth, the study does not address the political orientation of their votes – a question that comes up again every time it looks as though the nation is going to have another debate over whether to enfranchise foreigners. For a look at how they vote, see Vincent Tiberj and Patrick Simon’s research (in French) published by the Institut National d'Études Démographiques (INED) in January 2012, based on the INED’s 2008 demographic study Trajectoires et Origines (‘Trajectories and Origins’). Tiberj and Simon come to the conclusion that non-European immigrants to France and their descendants here clearly vote more to the left than the ‘majority’ population. And that is not only for reasons related to their social standing and education levels, but also because they often feel reduced to their ethnic origins and discriminated against in French society.
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English version: Eric Rosencrantz
Editing by Michael Streeter