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Public Opinion Quarterly 2004 68(4):602-622; doi:10.1093/poq/nfh042
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Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 68 No. 4 © American Association for Public Opinion Research 2004; all rights reserved.

Review

The Polls in the 2002 French Presidential Election: An Autopsy

Claire Durand, André Blais and Mylène Larochelle

CLAIRE DURAND is a professor of sociology at Université de Montréal. ANDRE BLAIS is in the Department of Political Science at Université de Montréal. MYLENE LAROCHELLE is in the Department of Sociology at Université de Montréal. We wish to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for its financial support. We also wish to thank the numerous academics, pollsters, and former pollsters for their help in explaining the methods used by French Pollsters. We particularly wish to thank Michel Brûlé, Jean-François Tchernia, and Loïc Blondiaux for their much appreciated help. Finally, our sincere thanks to the reviewers who greatly helped us improve the original manuscript.

Address correspondence to Claire Durand; e-mail: claire.durand@umontreal.ca.

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The first-round results of the 2002 French presidential election came as a shock to both French voters and people around the world. The French presidential election is a two-round system: it takes an absolute majority of the vote to be elected in the first round and, whenever no candidate is elected in the first round, a second round opposes the top two candidates of the first round two weeks later. In the months preceding the election, polls asked about not only voter intentions for the first round but also voter intentions for the second round, offering a choice between Jacques Chirac, the incumbent president, RPR (Rally for the Republic, right) and Lionel Jospin, incumbent prime minister, PS (Socialist Party), the obvious candidates for the second round. What happened on the first-round election day was not forecast by the polls: contrary to predictions, Jean-Marie Le Pen, FN (National Front, an extreme . . . [Full Text of this Article]


   How to Determine if the Polls Have Gone Wrong: Assessing Poll Accuracy
 

   How Did the Polls Fare Overall?
 

   How Did the Pollsters Fare Individually?
 

   Comparing the 2002 French Presidential Election with the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election
 

   What Went Wrong in the Polls’ Estimation of Le Pen?
 

   Sampling and Mode of Interview
 

   Question Wording and Proportion of Non-Disclosers
 

   "Adjustments"
 

   How Can We Know Whether There Are Sampling-Related Problems?
 

   Conclusion
 

   Appendix
 


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