Jérôme-Speziari, Véronique <br/><br/>
The Municipal Elections of March 2001: Reward or Punishment Vote? 

 -  2002.<br/>							 
<br/><br/> 69 
<br/><br/> In analyzing French municipal elections, politico-strategic determinants and economic variables have seldom been used simultaneously. The permanence of the state’s unitary character, in reinforcing the specificity of local polls, requires an evaluation of the degree of autonomy local communities enjoy. Studies on interactions between politics and economics at the local level were formerly confined to the political business cycle of municipal economics, omitting the citizen-voter’s reaction. We present an empirical test for the French case using a municipal vote function and a pooled time series for 236 communes with over 30,000 people from the 1989–1995 electoral years. Explanatory variables of the vote for the outgoing municipal administrations were gathered into three (3) units (“economics,” “previous elections,” and “strategy and electoral consolidation”), taking into account the interactions between local and national levels. The econometric results revealed the factors influencing the vote by distinguishing, on average, those that generated an electoral boost from the ones that led to an electoral loss to the outgoing municipal officials. Among the forecasting errors, one out of two communes could be correctly predicted by incorporating, first, recent break-ups as well as long-term trends and, second, shifts in local spheres of influence and the wearing effects on leadership. Generally, the political economy model performed well for 198 out of 236 communes but, since it could not conclude on the reward-punishment hypothesis, we can only say that the 2001 vote seems to have been marked by a kind of grievance asymmetry.