School Brown Bag: Edoardo Cefala

The political consequences of mass repatriation

Abstract:   What happens when the electorate of a country is suddenly increased by 1 million new voters? How parties adjust their strategies after such an event? To address these questions I exploit the quasi-experiment represented by the arrival of about 1 million French repatriates from Algeria in 1962 (the so called pieds noirs). In order to study the causal impact of the pieds noirs on political voting, I instrument their location choice based on the average temperature by department. I find that the arrival of the pieds noirs increased the turnout and the vote share of far-right parties and decreased the vote share of the center-right parties in both legislative and presidential elections between 1962 and 1974. I also analyse how this shock affected the political strategies of the different French parties by looking at more than 10,000 political manifestos issued in the legislative elections between 1962 and 1973. I document that far-right parties behaved as a political entrepreneur and started to devote space of their political manifestos to the issue of the pieds noirs already from 1962. The other parties were then forced to adopt the same strategy in the following elections. I also show that the larger the exposure to the repatriates’ arrival, the larger the share of the political manifestos devoted to the pieds noirs. These findings, and the mechanism highlighted in this paper, are not relegated to an historical setting but can be relevant in explaining current parties’ behaviour. As in the case of the pieds noirs, ignored issues may still be captured by radical parties and used for their own political advantage. As a consequence, the mainstream parties will be dragged towards more radical positions.