Patrimonial voting: Refining the measures q Martial Foucault a, * , Richard Nadeau b , Michael S. Lewis-Beck c a Department of Political Science, University of Montreal, Science Po Paris, Montreal, Canada b Department of Political Science, University of Montreal, Canada c Department of Political Science, University of Iowa, USA article info Article history: Received 4 May 2013 Accepted 4 May 2013 Keyword: Economic voting abstract Several studies have shown the importance of patrimony on voting for the right in French, British, and American national elections. However, these studies have only taken into account the diversity of patrimony and not their value. We propose to fill this gap in the literature with the “Mode de vie des Français” dataset that contains information on the savings and patrimony of French voters and was collected before the May 2007 presi- dential election. The results show that including measures that take into account the value of survey respondents’ patrimony does not change the conclusions of previous studies that have demonstrated the existence of a strong relationship between holding a risky patri- mony and support for the right. Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. During the 2007 French presidential campaign, then- candidate Nicolas Sarkozy proposed a generous fiscal measure for first-time home owners, before later stepping back from this proposal in 2010 due to a crisis in public finance. This promise was clearly aimed at convincing left- wing voters to support right-wing Sarkozy, by making them believe that their material situation could somehow be improved under his presidency. The fact that the average French person spends on average 35% of their disposable income on housing expenses made this proposal very tempting. The use of this strategy raises several questions about the place of income and patrimony on vote choice. Is patrimony, which includes both financial assets (such as stocks) and non-financial assets (such as a house), a more useful variable than income for understanding voters’ ideological positioning? If yes, how can a “patrimony vote” fit into economic voting theory? Several studies have already shown the importance of patrimony as a determinant of support for the right in national elections in France (Nadeau et al., 2010; Foucault et al., 2011), the UK (Lewis-Beck et al., 2013), and the US (Lewis-Beck and Nadeau, 2011). However, these studies have only taken into account the diversity of patrimony and not its value. Therefore, we propose to fill this gap in the literature with the “Mode de vie des Français” dataset that contains such information on the savings and patrimony of French voters and was collected before the May 2007 presidential election. 1. Theory of patrimonial voting While economic voting has been much studied, almost all of the work has been based on the classic reward- punishment model, which treats the economy as a valence issue (Lewis-Beck and Stegmaier, 2007). The basic argument assumes a reward-punishment perspective from which the electorate reacts to the state of the economy, supporting the party/candidate responsible for favorable economic conditions. Indeed, the economy is a valence issue, but it is much more than that. A second strand of economic voting theory states that the economy is a posi- tion issue (Stokes, 1963; Kiewiet, 1983). Voters express their preferences for a set of positional issues on economic policy such as market regulation, income redistribution, and tax policy. A final and new dimension of economic q Authors thank the Canadian SSHRC for its financial support. * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: martial.foucault@sciences-po.org, martial.foucault@ gmail.com (M. Foucault). Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Electoral Studies journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/electstud 0261-3794/$ – see front matter Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.electstud.2013.05.004 Electoral Studies 32 (2013) 557–562