Economics and Politics in France: Economic Performance and Mass Political Support for Presidents Pompidou and Giscard d'Estaing

During recent years the state of the economy has been a very salient issue for the mass publics of the industrial democracies, and the French electorate is no exception. In this article the influence of inflation, unemployment and real income growth performance on popular ‘satisfaction’ with Presidents Pompidou and Giscard d'Estaing is analysed. The empirical analyses are based on a model of qualitative political responses. The most important features of the model are that people evaluate a President's economic performance relatively rather than absolutely, and that the weights placed upon current and past performance in the formation of contemporaneous political judgments decline geometrically. The empirical results indicate clearly that a President's standing with the mass public depends primarily on the performance of the real economy (in particular, the real income growth rate), rather than on nominal economic conditions (the inflation rate). This suggests that deflationary macroeconomic policies sacrificing employment and real output and income growth in order to achieve price deceleration are not likely to enhance a President's support in the French electorate.