Participation in the 2010 French regional elections: The major impact of a change in the electoral calendar.

This article studies the impact of the calendar change, which caused the vote for the 2010 French regional elections to take place in isolation, instead of occurring concurrently with another election, as was the case for the previous regional elections. This calendar change created the conditions for a quasi-natural experiment to study the impact of the institutional context on the behavior of the voters with regard to electoral participation. This study highlights the various existing theories to explain the fluctuations in participation. It also examines the literature on second-order elections in the rarely studied context of a local and French election. An empirical analysis provide an evaluation of the factors that contributed to voters" abstention in the regional elections, as well as an explanation of how the change in electoral calendar impacted the participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]