English

Marine Le Pen can breach her glass ceiling: The drastic effect of differentiated abstention

Physics and Society 2017-03-16 v1

Abstract

Ranges of differentiated abstention are shown to reverse an "exact" poll estimate on voting day allowing the minority candidate to win the election. In a two-candidate competition A and B with voting intentions at IaI_a, Ib=1IaI_b=1-I_a and respective turnout at xx and yy, there exists a critical value IacI_{ac} for which Iac<Ia<12I_{ac}<I_a<\frac{1}{2} yields an actual election outcome va>12v_a>\frac{1}{2}. The reversal may occur without any change of individual choices. Accordingly, for a set of turnouts xx and yy the minimum voting intention IacI_{ac} required for A to win the final vote can be calculated. The various ranges of xx and yy for which IAcI_{Ac} is smaller than the expected 50\% barrier are determined. The calculations are applied to the coming 2017 French presidential election for a second round scenario involving the National Front candidate Marine Le Pen against either the Right candidate Fran\c{c}ois Fillon or the Center candidate Emmanuel Macron. Several realistic conditions are found to make Marine Le Pen win the election despite voting intentions about only 40-45\%.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1703.04643,
  title  = {Marine Le Pen can breach her glass ceiling: The drastic effect of differentiated abstention},
  author = {Serge Galam},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1703.04643},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

14 pages, 5 figures