ASSESSMENT OF THE INFLUENCE OF EDUCATION LEVEL ON VOTING INTENTION FOR THE EXTREME RIGHT IN FRANCE

Abstract

In France, the Front National has been a growing political party in the last 30 years. After years of stagnant economy, French voters have come to mistrust the political elite, and have been increas- ingly receptive the Front National straight-talking approach. The most consistent findings in social research on ethnic attitudes is the negative association between educational attainment and ethnic prejudice: People with higher education are less prejudiced toward ethnic out groups than those with lower education. We might expect, then, that high education will generally prevent people from vot- ing for the extreme right, regardless of their position in the labor market. This point of view, however, is not unanimous and there is an intellectual elite within the extreme right, especially among angry academic white males who are uneasy with the gains of feminism and believe in a left-wing media conspiracy. Hence the link between Extreme Right voting and education is not so obvious. The aim of this paper is first to build a model which takes into account the causality structure of variables
(Bayesian Network) and secondly to assess the influence of education on the voting intention for extreme right-wing party by taking into consideration all the possible confounding variables.