Marsilio Simone (Università Vita-Salute San Raffaele, Milano) – French Voters’ Attitudes toward Voting Methods: New Data from Three 2022 Experiments

During the first round of the 2022 French Presidential election, a framed-field experiment in Strasbourg (N = 933), an online survey with a representative sample (N = 2,122), and an online survey with voluntary participation (N = 2,308) have been held to test alternative voting methods. Since 2007, similar studies have included questions about voters’ satisfaction with the tested rules, showing that French voters mostly prefer an alternative to the current method. As participation was mostly voluntary, samples were often not representative. Thus, these data could be questioned if any incorrectly represented characteristics positively correlate with a preference for the status quo. In the 2022 experiments, alternative methods were not preferred when considering the representative sample and some strong correlations have been found between supporting alternative methods and both voters’ age and their official vote: older voters and voters whose favorite candidate used to perform well in the current system tended to prefer the status quo.