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Introduction
Since Marine Le Pen's election to the presidency of the Front National in January 2011, the party has seen some unprecedented success. In terms of membership, the party tripled its membership from 22 000 members in January 2011 to 83 000 members in December 2014 (Le Figaro, 2014). In electoral terms, the Front National (FN) won its best electoral scores ever recorded in elections. For example, in May 2012, 1 year after she had been elected as the new FN leader, Marine Le Pen obtained 17.90 per cent of the votes during the first round of the French presidential elections. It was the highest share of votes the FN had ever achieved since its creation in 1972. In subsequent elections, the party consolidated this score (for example, in the 2014 European elections and the 2015 departmental elections the radical right-wing party gained 24.9 and 25.2 per cent of the vote, respectively). This electoral breakthrough has opened the door for a new wave of research about the FN (for example, Belot and Bréchon, 2012; De´ze´, 2012; Mayer, 2013; Perrineau, 2014), making it 'without any doubt the most studied party' in France (Hayot, 2014). In this article, we want to add to this renewed interest in the FN and ask the following research question: Has the FN vote base and the underlying structural factors changed from Jean-Marie Le Pen and Jean-Marie Le Pen? We hypothesize that if change in the FN vote is possible it should have occurred in the aftermath of Marine Le Pen taking over the presidency. Not only has Marine Le Pen given the party a new, modern and less radical outlook, the FN has also found propitious structural conditions such as an economic, political and social crises for its expansion. Have these changes opened up new constituents for the FN or has the party 'merely' become more successful among its traditional supporters?
To answer this question, we use data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) on the FN vote and relevant individual predictors of the radical right-wing vote for 2007 and 2012. In a second step, we match these individual data with structural data on unemployment, crime, population density and immigration for the 22 French administrative regions. Employing two separate...