The impact of economic and political factors on popularity for France (1981-2014)

In this article, we study a popularity function for the French popularity political parties (1981Q2-2014Q4). We suppose that voters have a retrospective behaviour according to the responsibility hypothesis and we study if voters are naive or sophisticated. We show that, the unemployment rate has a significant influence on the popularity of the French political parties (closed economy, opened economy). We do not clearly show the interest for taking into account the openess of the economy. We also found unfavourable results for the asymmetry hypothesis. Then, we found slightly favourable results for the sophisticated voters hypothesis (assuming that voters distinguish trends and cycles for each economic variables). For the political variables, we show the significant influence of the honeymoon effect, the second order elections (regional or European), and the congresses of the Socialist party