Do neighborhoods empower or disenfranchise? Coethnic concentration, spatial disadvantage, and voter registration in France

Ethnoracial inequalities in political participation are a key feature of advanced democracies. Prior research suggests that the socioeconomic and ethnoracial composition of citizens’ local communities could be driving these disparities. Drawing on the case of France, this article uses two unique data sets to explore the role of neighborhoods in shaping voter registration. In both data sets, we show that living in a deprived neighborhood hinders the likelihood of registration among most citizens. Yet the effect of spatial proximity to coethnics increases registration among citizens of sub-Saharan, north African, and other non-European origins, while depressing it among European-origin citizens. Applying panel data allows us to control for individual heterogeneity to better disentangle neighborhood effects from residential self-selection. The complementary use of survey data further points to discrimination and marginalization as the driving mechanisms of African-origin citizens’ propensity to register in coethnic-dense neighborhoods.