Popularity Functions for the French President and Prime Minister (1995-2007)

In this article, we study popularity functions for the French President and Prime Minister. We show that the responsibility hypothesis is validated for the unemployment rate but not for the inflation rate. We also show that voters have not a behavior compatible with the rational expectations hypothesis for the Prime Minister's popularity, and that voters have an asymmetric behavior for the unemployment rate. We show the influence of political variables which can depend on Prime Minister changes, the domestic political situation and international political events.