Do female and male candidates campaign differently, and why? Using individual political platforms from French legislative elections between 1981 and 2024, I combine computational text analysis with a regression discontinuity design that exploits the two-round structure of French elections to identify the causal impact of candidate gender on campaign content. Between the first and second rounds, female candidates increase the salience of security and foreign policy by 9.2 percentage points relative to male candidates, while differences in other topics are negligible. This strategic shift is concentrated in districts that have never elected a woman or where the gender wage gap is above the median, consistent with women anticipating voter bias. I show that women only adapt to the gender of their opponent in districts where the voters are more biased against women, and that once elected, gender differences disappear.
Nova SBE Applied Micro Lunch
ENS Lyon
Verona Early Career Workshop in Economics
3rd Junior Economists Meeting UniMi - JEM24
BoMoPaV Economics Meeting 2024
“Text-as-Data in Economics” Workshop at the University of Liverpool Management School
8th Monash-Warwick-Zurich Text-as-Data Workshop
Do mainstream politicians adopt the far-right's agenda when they face it at the ballot box? Focusing on French legislative elections (1988-2024), I implement a regression discontinuity design and compare leading mainstream candidates whose far-right opponent barely qualified for the runoff with those whose opponent barely missed the threshold. I first document that facing a far-right opponent raises the mainstream candidate's probability of election by roughly 25 percentage points - evidence of a front républicain in which voters consolidate behind the leading mainstream candidate. Given this selection effect, I bound behavioral responses using the regression discontinuity design with sample selection of Dong (2019). Adjustment occurs in office rather than on the campaign trail: candidates do not change their campaign agendas, but once in parliament, elected candidates who faced the far-right devote 8 to 10 percentage points more of their debate speech to far-right topics in the raw comparison.
(with José Tavares). Journal of Economic Geography, 2026.
Migration Studies, 14(2), 2026.