The democratic challenges of electoral representation and populism : an empirical approach[Les défis démocratiques de la représentation électorale et du populisme : une approche empirique]

This dissertation aims at improving our understanding of two important phenomena in contemporary democracies: imbalanced electoral representation and the rise of populism. To do so, it explores empirically several natural experiments in different countries and settings.The first chapter explores the consequences of electing a dynastic politician on subsequent public policies. It shows that dynastic politicians have different characteristics compared to other politicians and that they manage their budget in a more opportunistic way.The second chapter focuses on gender-discrimination from voters in politics, by exploiting a natural experiment in the French départementales elections of 2015, where candidates had to run by gender-balanced pairs. Using the fact that the order of appearance of candidates on the ballot is as-good-as-random, it shows that right-wing ballots where the female candidate was listed first received lower shares of votes and were less likely to make it to the second round. This discrimination is driven by ballots on which no information is reported, which suggests that it is statistical.The third chapter studies the link between migration inflows and the rise of populism. Using as a natural experiment the dismantling of the Calais migrant camp in France between October 2015 and October 2016, it shows that municipalities which temporarily received a small amount of migrants following this event had a lower growth rate of Front National vote between the presidential elections of 2012 and 2017.