Romain Espinosa, Chercheur CNRS en économie au CIRED

Cette semaine, le séminaire de recherche habituellement programmé le jeudi est décalé à vendredi 6 novembre 2026.

Nous accueillons Romain Espinosa, Chercheur CNRS en économie au Centre international de recherche sur l’environnement et le développement, CIRED.

Ses thèmes de recherche :

• Économie du bien-être animal
• Droit et économie
• Économie de l'environnement
• Choix public : votes, préférences politiques

Titre de sa présentation : Why Do Parties Not Endorse Popular Policies? Measuring the Electoral Return to Policy Endorsement

Résumé : Opinion surveys often show broad support for policies that governments never adopt. This gap can reflect either a failure of political representation or the fact that support in a survey does not translate into votes. We estimate the electoral incentive behind this gap, defined as the vote share a party would gain by endorsing a policy it has not yet endorsed. We develop a method that combines a discrete choice experiment, which randomizes platform content, with respondents’ actual votes in the last general election. The vote data anchor experimental utilities to real vote choices, and party fixed effects and a correlated random effect account for non-policy affinity with parties. Compared with experimental-only approaches, the method achieves greater external validity, because it does not assume that experimental utilities share the scale of real votes or that party characteristics play no role. Compared with observational-only approaches, it achieves greater internal validity, because randomization identifies preferences for policies that no party endorses and breaks the link between platforms and vote choices. We decompose the gain into swing-voter density, aggregate demand, and the preferences of swing voters relative to the population. We apply the method to three animal welfare reforms (a ban on intensive farming, a phase-out of animal experimentation, and restrictions on imports that threaten wildlife habitats) in the 2024 UK general election. 

 
Le séminaire a lieu à 11h15, au GAEL.