Urbanization and electoral success: lawyers and workers in interwar France

Abstract

This study argues that urbanization altered the relationship between candidates’ occupation and their electoral success. To identify the causal effect of local variation in urbanization, we exploit exogenous changes in the boundaries of electoral constituencies in the 1928, 1932, and 1936 French parliamentary elections. We find that urbanization was detrimental to the electoral success of lawyers, but beneficial to that of employees and workers. This effect was concentrated on the left of the political spectrum, whereby left-wing employees and workers crowded out left-wing lawyers.