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West European Politics
ISSN: 0140-2382 (Print) 1743-9655 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fwep20
The Evolution of the French Political Space and
Party System
Simon Bornschier & Romain Lachat
To cite this article: Simon Bornschier & Romain Lachat (2009) The Evolution of the
French Political Space and Party System, West European Politics, 32:2, 360-383, DOI:
10.1080/01402380802670677
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402380802670677
Published online: 10 Mar 2009.
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The Evolution of the French Political
Space and Party System
SIMON BORNSCHIER and ROMAIN LACHAT
New structural potentials related to the processes of globalisation and European
integration have produced far-reaching changes in the structure of opposition in the
French party system. Whereas the newly designed institutions of the Fifth Republic
progressively brought about a ‘bipolar multipartism’ in the first two decades of their
existence, the rising prominence of new cultural conflicts and of the issue of European
integration have led to an increasing disunity of the parties within the left and right, to
the emergence of the Front National as a powerful new actor, as well as to a general
process of party system fragmentation. On the basis of four electoral campaigns
between 1978 and 2002, this article analyses the transformation of the ideological
dimensions underlying party competition and the positions of parties within this space,
and assesses the implications for the electoral success of parties and for the general
make-up of the party system.
Within the first two decades of its existence, the newly designed institutions
of the Fifth Republic did progressively bring about a much more stable
pattern of ‘bipolar multipartism’ than had been characteristic of the Fourth
Republic. The existence of two antagonistically related ideological camps,
however, was dependent on the close association of the two major lines of
cleavage, pitting against each other a secular socialist/communist and a
Catholic anti-communist subculture. Since the late 1970s, however, the
party system has been transformed in significant ways. The balance of
power among the main left-wing and right-wing parties has changed. The
Communist party and the Union pour la De
´mocratie Franc¸aise (UDF) have
lost ground to the Socialists and to the Gaullist RPR, respectively. Then,
starting in the mid or late 1980s, the traditional pattern of opposition
between the left-wing and right-wing blocs has also been altered by the
electoral gains of the Front National. This party has appeared as a powerful
new actor on the political space, giving rise to a ‘tripolar’ pattern of party
Correspondence Address: siborn@ipz.uzh.ch; mail@romain-lachat.ch
West European Politics,
Vol. 32, No. 2, 360–383, March 2009
ISSN 0140-2382 Print/1743-9655 Online ª2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/01402380802670677
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competition. Finally, the fragmentation of the party system has also
increased, at least temporarily, within the traditional left-wing and right-
wing ideological blocs. Although no single explanation can account for this
phenomenon, we claim that the fragmentation of the party system is at least
to some degree related to the emergence of new conflicts that fit uneasily in
the traditional structure of oppositions represented in the party system.
We argue in this paper that these developments are consequences of a more
general transformation process in West European democracies. As shown by
Kriesi et al. (2006, 2008), globalisation and the process of European
integration lead to the emergence of a new structural conflict at the national
level.
1
A new divide can be observed in several democracies, opposing those
who benefit from the opening up of borders to those who feel threatened by
the economic, cultural, and political integration. While the former support
further international integration, the latter groups of citizens defend national
boundaries in a strategy of demarcation. In the process, new issues, such as
European integration and immigration become more salient and are
integrated into the traditional lines of cleavage. In general, the parties who
appeal to the preferences of the ‘losers’ of globalisation constitute the driving
force of this transformation of the party system. As one of the oldest right-
wing populist parties, the Front National has been among the first to adopt a
discourse of ‘differentialist nativism’, which stresses the need to preserve
distinct national traditions (Betz 2004; see also Rydgren 2005). Earlier than
in other countries, the electoral success of the populist right in France has set
in motion the transformation of the dimensional structure and the
repositioning of the established parties within the transforming structure.
The redefinition of cultural conflicts as well as the emergence of the issue of
European integration on the political agenda has produced far-reaching
changes in the structure of oppositions in the French party system.
While this conflict between ‘integration’ and ‘demarcation’ is not a French
idiosyncrasy, its impact on the political space and party system has been
conditioned in part by the institutions of the Fifth Republic. The two-round
majoritarian system employed since 1958 has not impeded this evolution,
because it creates weaker incentives than a pure majoritarian system for
voters to desert candidates with no real chances of winning the election (see
Blais and Loewen, 2009). The strategies pursued by the mainstream right in
shaping the articulation of the new cultural division between integration and
demarcation also have played an important role. In many ways, the RPR
paved the way for the later success of the Front National by first putting
cultural protectionism on the political agenda in the 1970s and early 1980s,
and then moving closer to the political centre thereafter. In particular, the
convergence of the established right with the parties of the left on a pro-
integrationist stance in the 2002 election seems to have boosted the populist
right’s electoral fortunes.
In this paper, we analyse the transformation of the French political space
and the strategic positioning of parties within it by focusing on parties’ issue
The French Political Space and Party System 361
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positions during electoral campaigns. Our data come from content analyses
of the newspaper coverage of election campaigns in 1978, 1988, 1995, and
2002 (Kriesi et al. 2006; 2008). Based on this data, the main dimensions
structuring the political space and the party positions within this space are
determined using multidimensional scaling.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows. We first review the changes
in the electoral strength of the various parties and ideological groupings
since the new institutions of the Fifth Republic have been put into place in
1958. Then we discuss in more detail our hypothesis on how globalisation
affects the main dimensions structuring party positions, and how these
developments may explain some of the observed changes in party strengths.
In the following section, we introduce the dataset and methods used for our
empirical analysis. Next comes the presentation of the corresponding
empirical results. In the discussion of these results and of the transformation
of the party system associated with globalisation, we pay particular
attention to the mediating role of the electoral system and to the
consequences of party strategies. Finally, we conclude by discussing how
Nicolas Sarkozy’s partial appropriation of the right-wing populist agenda in
the 2007 election may have impinged on Jean-Marie Le Pen’s meagre
showing in those elections. By assessing how durable the Front National’s
presence in the French party system is likely to be, we derive predictions on
whether the configuration of political parties is likely to remain tripolar, or
if a bipolar pattern of oppositions is likely to re-emerge after the
transformation of the political space is consolidated.
From Bipolar Multipartism to Tripolar Competition
In the years after 1958, the two-round majoritarian formula used in
presidential and parliamentary elections at the national level brought about
a more stable pattern of ‘bipolar multipartism’ (Parodi 1989; Knapp 2002)
than the fragmented party system of the Fourth Republic had known.
Progressively, the various parties of the non-Gaullist right merged into a
federation of parties under Vale
´ry Giscard d’Estaing’s leadership, leading to
the establishment of the UDF in 1978. At the same time, Jacques Chirac’s
newly founded Gaullist RPR firmly institutionalised itself and progressively
gained weight within the right after 1976. With the left dominated by the
Communists on the one hand and Franc¸ois Mitterrand’s re-launched
Socialist party on the other, the 1970s saw an institutionalisation of the
party system. As a result of the electoral rules, a bipolar pattern of
opposition emerged, where both major parties within each block joined
together to support a candidate of the left or the right, respectively, in the
second round of the presidential elections (Parodi 1989).
The changes in the vote shares of the major parties are presented in
Figure 1, for the legislative elections, and in Figure 2 for the presidential
contests.
2
Actually, these figures show a simplified version of this story, by
362 S. Bornschier and R. Lachat
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FIGURE 1
SCORE OF FIVE MAJOR PARTIES AT LEGISLATIVE ELECTIONS, 1958–2007
Source: Caramani (2000), Bornschier (2008a).
FIGURE 2
SCORE OF FIVE MAJOR PARTIES AT PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS, 1965–2007
Source: Caramani (2000), Bornschier (2008a).
The French Political Space and Party System 363
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grouping together from the beginning the various parties and movements
that have later resulted in the formation of the Parti Socialiste (PS), the
UDF, and the RPR (later Union pour un mouvement populaire, UMP).
Only the Parti Communiste (PC) already existed at the beginning of the
Fifth Republic. The other three main parties were created after a complex
series of splits and alliances, and numerous changes of names. By focusing
on the five main parties or party groups, however, we can identify more
easily some significant changes in the balance of power and the cleavages
underlying party divisions. Among left-wing parties, we see that the
Communists had a slight electoral advantage over the PS in legislative
elections until the late 1970s. In this period, the PC also won a larger vote
share in the 1969 presidential elections, where candidates of both the
communist and non-communist left were running. With the 1978 legislative
and 1981 presidential elections, however, the balance shifted in a dramatic
way. The PC has continuously lost ground since then, while the PS ended at
the first or second overall rank in all but two subsequent elections.
The balance of power has also changed among right-wing parties. The
Gaullists largely dominated the legislative and presidential elections of
the 1960s, during de Gaulle’s presidency. In the 1970s, on the other hand,
the UDF and RPR (or their forerunners) were of about equal strength in
legislative elections. In the presidential contests, Vale
´ry Giscard d’Estaing
fared significantly better than the Gaullists Jacques Chaban-Delmas and
Jacques Chirac in 1974 and 1981, respectively. From the 1988 election
onwards, however, the RPR (or UMP) clearly took the upper hand first in
the presidential elections, and more recently also in parliamentary elections.
Up to the mid-1980s, thus, the political landscape was dominated by two
parties or party groups on the left and two on the right. Electoral
competition was mainly structured by a left–right dimension, opposing the
PC and PS, on the one hand, to the UDF and RPR, on the other. Most
important, this left–right dimension corresponded to both religious and
class cleavages. Citizens’ attitudes and party preferences were strongly
related to their social class and to their degree of religiosity (Boy and Mayer
1997; Mayer and Schweisguth 1989; Michelat and Simon 1989). This
conferred a high degree of stability to the pattern of bipolar multipartism
characteristic of this period – at least as long as the traditional cleavages of
class and religion were salient.
However, in the last two decades, the dominance of these four party
groups has been called into question. Since the mid-1980s, the Front
National (NF) has emerged as an important new force on the electoral stage.
In addition, we observed more recently a trend toward a higher level of
fragmentation, with a strengthening of the Greens and of parties of the
radical left, and a multiplication of the number of candidates in presidential
elections. While the latter trend has been reversed in 2007 and could prove
to have been only temporary (see also Blais and Loewen 2009), it highlights
an important feature of the institutions of the Fifth Republic. While the
364 S. Bornschier and R. Lachat
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two-round electoral system creates incentives for strategic voting, these may
also encourage voters to support in the first round candidates with little
chances of victory (Blais and Loewen 2009). Consequently, the system does
not reduce the number of parties fielding candidates as strongly as a purely
majoritarian system, and allows new political formations to compete that
have little chances of winning a seat in the Assemble
´e Nationale, let alone
the presidency. The institutional setting, as well as the personalised nature of
presidential contests, thus allows for the emergence of new parties, such as
the Front National. At the same time, as the electoral formula is still a
majoritarian one, it remains difficult for challenger parties to succeed.
Other institutional factors may also have facilitated the strengthening
of the populist right, however. Elections using proportional representation
take place at various levels, such as the municipalities and the regions, as
well as in the elections for the European parliament. In fact, the Front
National achieved its electoral breakthrough in a number of second-order
elections in the early 1980s, first in a number of municipalities, and then
in the 1984 European elections. Furthermore, the Socialist government
changed the electoral system to proportional representation for the 1986
parliamentary elections so as to divide the right and prevent a victory of
the RPR-UDF coalition, which is likely to have helped the Front
National’s institutionalisation in the French party system. However,
despite substantially reduced chances of winning office when the two-
round majoritarian system was reintroduced, the party’s voter share did
not recede after 1988. In this context, it is worth mentioning another
feature of the French political system: when the president does not have a
majority in parliament, and the system switches to cohabitation, it takes
over certain traits of more consensual systems. In fact, the first
occurrence of cohabitation in 1986 allowed the Front National to take
advantage of the possibility of portraying itself as the only ‘real’
opposition.
To sum up, institutional features of the Fifth Republic, as well as parties’
strategic decisions, have provided a context in which the FN could reach
significant electoral gains. However, it is of course not the institutions or
parties’ strategies which ‘caused’ such transformations in the party system.
Rather, the change that brought about the observed developments, we
argue, is the process of globalisation and of European integration. The next
section develops this hypothesis in more detail. Whereas Grunberg and
Schweisguth’s (2003) analysis has revealed a tripartite structure of value
orientations in France, we focus on how these values are anchored in a
changing social structure as well as on the mobilisation of these attitudes by
political parties. In an analysis of the transformation of the political space,
we then test the hypothesis that these processes have led to the rise of the
Front National and to the emergence of a new cultural line of conflict in the
French party system, resulting in a tripolar pattern of oppositions that
closely resembles the attitudes of voters.
The French Political Space and Party System 365
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New Structural Potentials and the Emergence of an
‘Integration–Demarcation’ Divide
Globalisation can be conceived as a process of ‘denationalisation’ (Zu
¨rn
1998; Beisheim et al. 1999), as a transformation and weakening of national
borders. These developments are not entirely new phenomena; there are
earlier examples of phases of intense economic and cultural exchanges.
However, such evolutions have accelerated in the last two or three decades
and the ‘actual phase’ of globalisation surpasses both quantitatively and
qualitatively those of earlier epochs (Held et al. 1999: 425). Most important
for understanding the potential impact of this process on national politics is
to see that its influence on citizens is not homogeneous. Some segments of a
national community benefit from new opportunities, while others have more
to lose and perceive the changes associated with globalisation as a threat.
Globalisation leads to new oppositions, new disparities, and to the formation
of groups of potential ‘winners’ and ‘losers’. These new oppositions result
from at least three forms of competition: economic, cultural, and political
(for a more detailed discussion, see Kriesi et al. 2006; 2008).
First, at the economic level, globalisation is linked with a growing pressure
towards deregulation. This leads to an opposition between different sectors
of a national economy. Firms and employees in sectors that have
traditionally been ‘sheltered’ from international competition by protec-
tionist measures are opposed to firms and employees who are mainly
oriented towards international markets. The latter favour deregulation as
the weakening of national borders is beneficial to their international
competitiveness, while it threatens the privileged position of the former on
national markets. Second, immigration can be interpreted as an aspect of
globalisation, which leads to a cultural opposition. Immigration and cultural
diversity are perceived by some citizens as a threat to their national or
cultural identity and to their standard of living and social status.
Individuals’ education level is most important for understanding how they
perceive immigration. Citizens with a low level of education are not only in
more direct competition with immigrants on the labour market, but they
also usually have less tolerant, less multicultural values. Higher education,
on the other hand, has a ‘liberalising’ effect, and is associated with
universalistic values. Opposition against multicultural society can thereby be
exploited by political actors to rally a broad counter-rebellion of lower
skilled individuals against the libertarian and universalistic values of the
New Left. At the political level, finally, the most important development is
clearly the process of European integration. The creation of a supranational
arena of decision-making and the increasing role of European-wide
regulations is perceived as a loss by part of the citizens. Most important
here is the degree of attachment to one’s national identity. Those who feel
strongly bound to their national community should perceive a weakening of
the state’s autonomy or sovereignty as a loss. Individuals with a more
366 S. Bornschier and R. Lachat
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cosmopolite identity, by contrast, should be more favourable to this
process – at least if it leads to the creation of a new system of regulation at
the European level.
Thus, the process of globalisation leads to the formation of a new
structural conflict, opposing those who benefit from this process to those
who tend to lose in the course of events. Generally, we expect ‘losers’ of the
globalisation process to seek to protect themselves through protectionist
measures and through an emphasis on the maintenance of national
boundaries and independence. ‘Winners’, by contrast, should support the
opening up of the national boundaries and the process of international
integration. The emergence of social groups that have diverging interests
due to their location in the social structure leads to political potentials for
the politicisation of a new antagonism between ‘integration’ and ‘demarca-
tion’ by political actors.
To the degree that established or new political parties articulate this new
conflict by tying it to concrete political issues such as economic
protectionism, opposition against immigration, or resistance against
supranational integration, the structure of electoral competition will change
and processes of realignment will be initiated. If parties try to mobilise
segments of the electorate on the basis of issues linked with globalisation, we
would expect the joint transformation of the main dimensions that structure
the political space and of the configuration of party positions within this
space. There are various scenarios of how parties may mobilise the new
political potentials, and the outcome will depend both on the strategic
reaction of the established parties to the new issues as well as on the strategic
context created by the electoral system. Generally, we expect the division
between integration and demarcation to be most pronounced where new
right-wing populist parties succeed in breaking into the party system or
where established parties undergo a transformation that makes them
virtually indistinguishable from parties of the populist right, as it has
occurred in Switzerland and Austria.
Furthermore, the ‘space’ available for new conflicts is determined both by
the strength of the existing cleavages, as well as by the relationship between
old and new conflicts. How, then, does the new antagonism between
integration and demarcation relate to the traditional conflicts that have
characterised politics in Western Europe? In terms of economic policy-
making, the differing preferences between integration and demarcation have
reinvigorated the established state–market divide. Because the winners and
losers of globalisation and of the strategy of economic liberalisation pursued
in the European Union differ from the social groups hitherto divided into a
pro-market and a pro-state position, however, the social-structural basis of
this conflict has been transformed. Rather than the traditional class
cleavage, which opposed the working class and the better-off classes, this
conflict may today be more adequately labelled a state–market cleavage that
cuts across these two groups. In terms of the cultural dimension of conflict
The French Political Space and Party System 367
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in Western European party systems, which had traditionally been stamped
by the religious cleavage, the redefinition of conflicts has been even more
far-reaching, and has involved the emergence of new ideological conflicts. It
has in fact been the waning of the religious cleavage that has opened the way
for a two-fold transformation of political space and the emergence of a new
cultural divide (Kriesi et al. 2008).
The first transformation of the party political space has been triggered by
the appropriation of the agenda of the new social movements of the left by
New Left and Ecologist parties in the 1970s and 1980s, as Kitschelt (1994)
has laid out. In the French case, the withering away of the religious cleavage
is mirrored in the decline of the UDF at the expense of the Gaullist RPR and
(later) the Front National, which we discussed in the preceding section.
While class voting has not declined markedly, Knutsen (2004: 108–9) reveals
a declining impact of the religious cleavage since the late 1970s, which is a
consequence of the demise of the communist and Catholic subcultures. The
long-term trend of secularisation has hit the Communist party and the UDF
especially hard. The shift in the balance of power within the left and the right
blocs – from the Communists to the Socialists and from the non-Gaullist
right to the RPR – can therefore be interpreted as concomitant to the
transformation of the cultural divide. Both developments took shape
between 1981 and 1984, where new political issues such as immigration,
law and order and multiculturalism arose, resulting in a realignment that
involved significant voter shifts between the established parties of the left and
right, as well as in the breakthrough of the Front National (Martin 2000).
Most research concurs in the assessment that the rise of the Front
National is tied to the exclusionary conceptions of community and fears
related to multicultural society, as well as a counter-revolution to the New
Left (e.g., Perrineau 1997; Mayer 2002; Ignazi 2003; Betz 2004). While the
party is most firmly anchored in the working class, recent analyses have
shown that the preservation and defence of the traditional national
community, coupled with a deep distrust of the established political parties,
is much more important than economic grievances in triggering the right-
wing populist vote in France and elsewhere (Oesch 2008). Whereas Kitschelt
(1995) had argued that the Front National also thrived on neo-liberal
sentiments in the 1980s, these have largely lost their relevance since the party
has become strongly anchored in the working class (Bornschier 2008a). In
the late 1980s and the 1990s, we thus expect a second transformation of
political space to have occurred, this time driven by the successful
mobilisation of cultural issues by the extreme populist right. The next
section presents an empirical analysis of this transformation process.
The Transformation of the French Political Space
We analyse the transformation of the French political space by examining
parties’ issue positions during national electoral campaigns, and then
368 S. Bornschier and R. Lachat
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determining the broader dimensions that underlie parties’ policy statements.
National campaigns constitute a crucial moment for observing changes in
electoral alignments (Martin 2000). These periods of intense political debate
offer unique opportunities to see how parties and candidates respond to new
issues, voters’ demands, and to the strategies of the other contenders. Our
analysis focuses on four elections: the 1978 legislative election and the 1988,
1995, and 2002 presidential races. We include several recent elections, as we
expect the realignment process linked with the integration of new issues and
the mobilisation of the new potentials to unfold gradually, rather than abrup-
tly during a single campaign. By also considering an election from the 1970s,
we add a reference point to make comparisons over a longer period of time.
3
In order to investigate the discourse of parties and candidates during these
campaigns, we performed a content analysis of all articles related to the
electoral campaign or to national politics, published during the two months
preceding the election in a quality newspaper (Le Monde) and in a popular
newspaper (Le Parisien). In this analysis, we coded the direction of all
relationships between political actors (parties and candidates) and political
issues, using a five-point scale ranging from 71toþ1.
4
For the purpose of
this analysis, these issues are grouped into 11 general categories. These
include economic issues (support for the welfare state, budgetary rigour,
economic liberalism), cultural issues (cultural liberalism, European integra-
tion, culture and education, restrictive immigration policy, national defence,
law and order), as well as a few additional categories (environmental
protection, institutional reforms).
5
This means that we have data on the
average positions of parties and candidates regarding these various issues, as
well as on the frequency with which each actor addressed (or was brought
into relation with) a given topic during the campaign.
6
The number of issues
for which we have information, however, varies across parties and elections.
Some issues were addressed only in part of the campaigns and not all parties
took position on all issue categories.
7
This data provides central information that allows us to determine how
the political space is structured and which positions parties take in this
space. Our aim is thus to determine how many dimensions are needed to
provide a satisfactory representation of the positions of parties and issues.
We rely for this on multidimensional scaling, a statistical method that makes
possible a graphical representation of the positions of objects in a space,
based on information regarding the distances or dissimilarities between
these objects (Kruskal and Wish 1978; Borg and Groenen 1997).
8
The
corresponding results are presented in Figure 3.
Each of the panels shows the configuration of issue and party positions
for one election. In order to highlight what the main results relevant for our
research question are, we have connected the issues categories that we
interpret as the poles of the economic and cultural dimensions, respectively.
9
These axes are not part of the solution, but are simply added in order to
facilitate to some extent the interpretation of the results. Consequently,
The French Political Space and Party System 369
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these dimensions may be more or less integrated, depending on the way
parties combine their position regarding economic and cultural issues.
It should be pointed out that due to our restricted focus on the supply side
of politics, we do not study cleavages directly in this article, which would
require the inclusion of demand-side data to determine the social structural
underpinnings of voter alignments, according to Bartolini and Mair’s (1990)
definition. The dimensions underlying parties’ programmatic positions that
we focus on represent the political manifestation or the ideological
component of the underlying cleavages.
In all four elections, we find that the appropriate representation of
the political space is two-dimensional.
10
Welfare as opposed to economic
FIGURE 3
THE STRUCTURE OF THE FRENCH POLITICAL SPACE, 1978–2002
370 S. Bornschier and R. Lachat
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liberalism invariably emerges as one dimension of conflict, corresponding to
the traditional state–market cleavage. At the same time, we witness a
transformation of the cultural dimension, i.e. its ideological content evolves
between 1978 and 1988. In 1978, this dimension is formed by cultural
liberalism and budgetary rigour, which can be interpreted as a divide
between the progressive position of the New Left on the one hand, and a
neo-conservative position on the other. The latter is liberal in economic
terms, but traditionalist in cultural matters (Habermas 1985; Eatwell 1989).
From 1988 on, then, immigration forms the counter-pole to cultural
liberalism on what can now be interpreted as an integration–demarcation
divide. Despite the somewhat unusual relationship between the economic
and cultural dimensions in 1995, this opposition, and thus the structure of
political space, is remarkably stable. In other words, while the two
dimensions are more strongly related in 1988 and 1995 than in 2002, the
nature of the two dimensions and the basic two-dimensional structure
represent lasting features after the transformation of the cultural dimension.
Turning to the positions of the parties in this political space, they are
characteristic of the situation after the rise of New Left issues in 1978. We
observe a differentiation between the Socialist New Left and the Old Left
position of the Communist party. The Socialist party is both strongly in
favour of the universalistic values that characterise the cultural liberalism of
the New Social Movements of the 1970s, as well as solidly leftist in economic
terms. The Communists, on the other hand, endorse welfare policies and
staunchly oppose economic liberalism, while their distance from cultural
liberalism indicates that their position regarding the cultural dimension is
more ambiguous than that of the Socialists.
The main transformation in the period under study, however, takes place
on the political right, resulting in a reconfiguration of the structure of
oppositions within the party system. As already discussed, this evolution
began in the 1970s, when Jacques Chirac re-launched the Gaullist party and
developed a culturally protectionist and Euro-sceptic discourse that helped
it outflank the centrist UDF. In the 1978 election, the Gaullist RPR has a
rather classical neo-conservative profile. It defends traditionalist values
against the culturally liberalist pull of the PS and combines this with a
decided advocacy of budgetary rigour. The UDF, on the other hand, lies
halfway between the left and the right, in economic as well as in cultural
terms. Although the Front National stood in this election, it was not
sufficiently present in the media to determine its position. In 1978, it is
clearly the RPR that is located at the extreme of the cultural dimension.
The second transformation of the political space, triggered by the
emergence of the immigration issue and the subsequent rise of the Front
National, occurred early in France, from a comparative perspective (Kriesi
et al. 2008). In the wake of the left’s victory in the late 1970s, which in 1981
gained power for the first time in the Fifth Republic, the RPR and UDF
pushed a radicalisation of political discourse by putting the immigration
The French Political Space and Party System 371
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issue on the political agenda. Their plan to repatriate immigrants provoked
a counter-mobilisation of the unions and the non-communist left, as well as
by parts of the right, leading the government to abandon the plan (Martin
2000: 256ff.). And the established right played with ideological polarisation
again after it found itself in opposition after 1981. When the Socialist
government under Mitterrand decided to regularise illicit immigrants and
abandon the death penalty, the right reacted promptly and radicalised its
discourse. On the other hand, the Socialist left promoted anti-racism as a
central issue to fill its ideological void, defending a multiculturalist
‘recognition of difference’ (Perrineau 1997: 49–50).
Ten years later, in the 1988 election, the RPR has moved to the centre and
the Front National has taken its place at the demarcation pole of the now
transformed cultural dimension. Opposing the cultural liberalism of the left
and advocating an exclusionary conception of community in opposition to
immigrants, the populist right occupies a distinct political space. While the
populist right is also located near to the law and order stances of the
‘security’ category, this is not what sets it apart from the moderate right.
On the other hand, there has been a convergence regarding the cultural
dimension both within the established left and within the established right.
Since the RPR has tempered its culturally protectionist stance, its position
now more or less corresponds to that of the UDF in cultural terms. On the
political left, the difference that was visible between PC and PS in 1978
almost vanishes after the transformation of the cultural dimension and the
emergence of the integration–demarcation divide.
Upon closer inspection, however, an additional divide between the
Communists and the Socialists is revealed. What makes the difference in
their positions in the 1988 and 1995 campaigns is their strongly diverging
stance regarding European integration (see also the issue positions in the
Table A1). While the PS is very strongly in favour of the integration project,
the PC decidedly opposes it. The RPR, in the 1970s critical of European
integration, has largely converged with the UDF on a pro-integrationist
position. With the Front National taking a strongly critical stance towards
the EU, the political space of the 1995 presidential election thus confirms the
hypothesis of a rift within both the left and the right caused by the integration
issue.
11
The two lines run between the Communist and the Socialist left on
the one hand, and the established and the populist right on the other.
Apart from the additional discord between the Communists and the
Socialists concerning the EU, the main components of the moderate left and
right blocs differ mainly in their positions regarding the state–market
cleavage. The Socialists are more liberal in economic terms than the
Communists, while the UDF is more centrist than the RPR. It is interesting
to note that the candidates of the radical or extreme left do not differ
markedly from the Communists in their position. In this sense, the
emergence of these actors in the 1988 campaign seems to owe a lot to the
loss of credibility of the Communists’ staunchly protectionist propositions
372 S. Bornschier and R. Lachat
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in the light of their participation in governments led by the Socialists in the
1980s, a hypothesis also put forward by Grunberg (2006: 234). The radical
left’s refusal to join governments led by the Socialists and Communists
makes them predisposed for a protest vote against the established left.
As far as the established right is concerned, Chirac led the Gaullist party
into more economically protectionist grounds in the 1995 election. Along
with a stronger correlation between the economic and cultural dimensions,
this explains the unusual configuration in that contest. The – albeit limited –
convergence along the economic dimension may well have rendered the
cultural antagonism more salient. Although the Front National leans more
towards economic liberalism than to the defence of the welfare state, it
seems rather ill-suited to mobilise along economically liberal lines. As
compared to the strongly neo-liberal party programme launched in 1985, the
Front National was already cultivating a less clear-cut position in the 1988
election campaign. This, together with the meagre showing of Alain
Madelin, candidate of the economically liberal De
´mocratie Libe
´rale in the
2002 elections, underscores that the economically liberalist potential
remains quite limited in France, and is unlikely to contribute to the success
of the Front National, as Kitschelt (1995) suggested.
As far as the established right’s strategy towards the right-wing populist
challenger is concerned, these have shown quite a degreeof variation, as a close
look at parties’ issue positions (see Table A1) suggests. From 1988 on, the
established right has attempted to win back some of the voters it had lost to the
Front National by issuing proposals against immigration. As a consequence,
the main difference between the Front National and the RPR and UDF is that
the latter approve cultural liberalism, and not so much their attitude regarding
immigration. The configuration of the 2002 campaign then shows a shift in the
strategy of the established right vis-a
`-vis the Front National.
12
Departing from
their accommodating stances with regard to the immigration issue, they have
switched to an adversarial strategy. Both the RPR (now UMP), as well as the
remaining parts of the UDF reject tough integration policies. As a result, the
structure of competition becomes more clearly two-dimensional again, and
presents a triangular configuration of party alternatives: the parties of the
established left and right primarily diverge in their postulations concerning
economic policies and not regarding the cultural divide. As a consequence, the
Front National now alone advocates cultural protectionism and differential-
ism. This change in the strategy of the mainstream parties of the right is
accompanied by an attempt at co-opting the security issue. In the 2002
election, not only the RPR and UDF, but also the PS and PC outflank the
Front National in their stipulation of law and order (see Table A1). But while
the parties of the left still put by far the strongest emphasis on welfare issues,
security becomes one of the prime questions addressed by the established right,
following the Front National’s intense treatment of the issue.
By and large, then, the new structural potentials caused by denationalisa-
tion have been assimilated into the conflicts resulting from the more general
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process of economic and cultural modernisation since the late 1960s. Either
they have been framed by political parties in terms of the old antagonism
between state and market, or by new ideologies that have emerged in
Western societies in the past decades (Bornschier 2005). In the 1970s, the
conflict between libertarian and authoritarian values has gained prominence
as a result of its politicisation by parties of the New Left. As the avant-garde
of the new right-wing populist party family, the French Front National
succeeded in developing what may be called a traditionalist-communitarian
counter-ideology to the universalism that is embodied in the cultural
liberalism of the New Left, and proved capable of mobilising broader
masses of citizens since the late 1980s. Earlier than elsewhere, the Front
National has adopted a discourse of ‘cultural differentialism’ or ‘ethno-
pluralism’ that does not claim the superiority of any nationality or race, but
rather the right of peoples to preserve their distinctive traditions (Antonio
2000; Betz 2004). The presence of immigrants as well as the processes of
globalisation and European integration endanger these cultural traditions,
and are thus seen as threatening.
More directly than in conflicts over cultural liberalism and immigration,
the antagonism between integration and demarcation has been reflected in
the issue of European integration. On the political right, scepticism towards
European integration has a long tradition due to a heavy emphasis on
national sovereignty going back to Charles de Gaulle, who boycotted the
Council of Ministers between 1965 and 1966. When the RPR reversed its
Eurosceptic stance in the 1984 elections for the European parliament, the
only party to remain sceptical of the integration process were the
Communists, which were already in precipitous decline. In the same 1984
election, the Front National achieved its electoral breakthrough with a list
led by Le Pen and entitled ‘Liste Front d’opposition nationale pour l’Europe
des patries’, which scored 11 per cent of the vote.
While this has not been part of their core ideology, right-wing populist
parties across Western Europe have adopted a Eurosceptic stance in the
1990s.
13
They have thereby integrated the issue of European integration into
their traditionalist-communitarian ideology of demarcation. At the same
time, parties of the extreme left oppose the European project for its
liberalising thrust in the economic domain. Consequently, cultural and
economically based forms of Euroscepticism are both conceptually and
empirically distinct (Evans 2000; Bornschier 2008b). In the French case, it
can be shown that economic Euroscepticism forms part of the state-market
cleavage at the voter level, while cultural fears related to European
integration form part of the cultural divide structuring voter attitudes
(Bornschier 2008a). Attitudes towards the integration process have
introduced a divide within both the left and the right. According to
evidence presented for the first time in analyses of the referendum on the
Maastricht treaty, the European issue crosscuts alignments based on the
traditional economic divide (Perrineau 1996).
374 S. Bornschier and R. Lachat
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Conclusion
Summing up, the significant developments resulting in a transformation
of political space and the rise of the Front National can be summarised
under three broad headings. First, between 1978 and 1988 we witness a
transformation of the cultural divide. Originally characterised by an
opposition between cultural liberalism and neo-conservatism, a new
demarcation pole has emerged, which combines culturally protectionist
and exclusionist stances. This is in line with our hypothesis that the issues
pertaining to the integration–demarcation divide are integrated into the
already existing cultural divide. In the course of this transformation, the
RPR’s programmatic profile has evolved from a culturally protectionist
and nationalist orientation to an acceptance of cultural liberalism,
levelling out the differences between itself and the centrist UDF. The
RPR thereby left unoccupied a political space that provided fertile ground
for the right-wing populist challenger, resulting in a reconfiguration of the
party system.
In the forefront of the 2002 presidential elections, large parts of the
remaining UDF then joined together with the RPR to form the UMP, first
standing for ‘Union pour une majorite
´pre
´sidentielle’, then renamed ‘Union
pour un mouvement populaire’ after the election. In part, this can be
attributed to a long-term convergence in programmatic profile. But it also
means that the parties of the right reacted more quickly than the left to the
challenge posed by party system fragmentation under the two-round
majoritarian formula (Grunberg 2006).
Second, regarding the strategies of the mainstream parties, the
established right consecutively reacted by attempts to challenge the Front
National’s ownership of the immigration question. However, this strategy
proved ineffective in pre-empting the Front National’s success, built on
the apparently more coherent combination of cultural protectionism and
anti-immigrant stances. Between 1995 and 2007, the established right has
repeatedly changed its position regarding the immigration issue. From an
attempt at accommodating the Front National’s prime concern, both
RPR and UDF switched to an adversarial strategy, distancing themselves
from the exclusionist stances of their challenger. This may well have
contributed to Le Pen’s unprecedented success in the 2002 presidential
elections.
France is therefore clearly a case that corroborates Ignazi’s (1992, 2003)
claim that the established parties of the right pushed an ideological
polarisation that right-wing populist parties later thrived on when the
moderate right moved back to the centre. However, as this analysis has also
made clear, the strategies of parties at the opposing pole of a political divide
also impinge heavily on the success of challenging parties (Meguid 2005;
Kriesi 2008). Early on, the Socialists contributed to the success of the Front
National by abandoning New Left positions and instead taking up the
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defence of multiculturalism, facilitating the populist right’s redefinition of
the main dimensions of opposition.
Finally, between 1988 and 1995 the question of European integration
emerged as a political issue. While the left had always been divided between
a Europhile PS and a Euro-sceptic PC, the reorientation of the Front
National introduced a similar rift within the right. After the Gaullist RPR
had abandoned its nationalist position early in the 1984 European elections,
opposition against supranational integration thrived in the sovereignist
political space from the beginning of the 1990s. While the question produced
various scissions within the established right, it also led the Front National
to abandon its originally integration-friendly position and staunchly oppose
the project.
In sum, our analysis of party positions has revealed a tripartite
structure of opposition, as suggested by Grunberg and Schweisguth (2003)
in their analysis of voter attitudes, and called into question by Andersen
and Evans (2003). In the 2007 election, however, Nicolas Sarkozy has yet
again changed the strategy of the established right vis-a
`-vis its right-wing
populist challenger. As a consequence of his rapprochement to the
positions of the Front National, parts of the right-wing populist electorate
have abandoned Le Pen and voted for the candidate with the better
chance of enacting his political programme, as Mayer (2007) has shown.
In that election, Le Pen’s support base declined substantially, as we saw
earlier. This raises the question of how the new strategy of the UMP will
affect the pattern of electoral competition in the next elections. Could we
observe a return to bipolar multipartism? It is difficult to tell with
certainty as it depends largely on the future strategic moves of parties, on
the right and on the left. While the UMP has returned to a more radical
position on cultural issues, it has only closed part of the gap that
separated it from the FN. There is thus probably still a strong electoral
potential for culturally more conservative positions, which the FN or
another party could continue to mobilise in the future. This will also be
more likely if the UMP pushes further an agenda of economic liberal-
isation, which may alienate part of the culturally conservative voters. Such
developments would then bring the French party system back to a tripolar
configuration.
At the same time, a new configuration could result from changes among
left-wing parties. We have observed more intense divergences between the
PS and the PC on the economic consequences of European integration,
which may become more consequential as the saliency of this issue rises. The
gap within the left could further widen, especially if the PS moderates its
economic positions. Several prominent party members have called for such a
‘modernisation’ of the party positions, after the electoral defeat of Se
´gole
`ne
Royal. If the PS follows such a course, it may lose part of its current
voters to more radical left-wing parties, eventually bringing about a new
configuration of party positions.
376 S. Bornschier and R. Lachat
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Notes
1. This paper is a product of a larger research project on the national political consequences of
globalisation in West European countries. The theoretical arguments advanced here are
discussed in more detail in Kriesi et al. (2006, 2008). For the case of France, see in particular
Bornschier (2008a).
2. The results of the 1958 presidential election are not presented, as it was an indirect election,
by an electoral college. De Gaulle won by a landslide, with 79 per cent of the vote, against
13 per cent for the candidate of the PC and 8 per cent for the candidate of the non-
communist left.
3. The data we rely on was collected in the framework of a research project investigating the
national political consequences of globalisation in Western Europe (Kriesi et al. 2006,
2008). The decision to focus on a legislative election in the 1970s, rather than on the 1974
presidential election, for instance, was driven by reasons of data availability. One of the
aims of the project from which the data come is to compare changes at the levels of parties
to changes at the level of voters. Unfortunately, no election survey was conducted after the
presidential elections in the 1970s in France.
4. This method was developed by Kleinnijenhuis and his collaborators (Kleinnijenhuis et al.
1997; Kleinnijenhuis and Pennings, 2001). Most relationships were coded as either positive
(þ1) or negative (71). Neutral relationships (i.e., a value of 0) were relatively rare, and the
intermediary categories (70.5 and þ0.5) were used only for statements where the party
position is conditional or explicitly uncertain.
5. For a more detailed presentation of these categories, see Kriesi et al. (2006), or Dolezal (2008).
6. Tables with the average issue positions and issue salience by party can be found in the
appendix.
7. The number of observations by party and campaign, as well as the distribution of these
across issue categories, can be found in Table A2 in the appendix.
8. To be more precise, the analyses were performed with weighted metric multidimensional
scaling, where the party 6issue pairs were weighted for their salience during the
campaign. More details on the method used can be found in Dolezal (2008) and Lachat
(2008).
9. In order to facilitate cross-election comparisons, the solutions presented in Figure 3 were
rotated, so that the opposition between welfare and economic liberalism corresponds to the
horizontal axis. This has no impact on the substantial conclusions that can be drawn from
these solutions.
10. By representing issues and parties in a lower dimensional space, multidimensional scaling
inevitably distorts the original distances among these pairs of objects. This degree of
distortion is indicated by the ‘Stress–1’ statistic. The optimal number of dimensions
required to represent the political space is determined by looking at how a change in the
number of dimensions affects the value of Stress–1. We find here two-dimensional
representations, meaning that adding a third dimension would only marginally reduce the
value of this statistic.
11. In 1988, however, we find that the FN took a pro-European position. This may seem
surprising. But this issue had a very low salience for the FN in the 1988 campaign: indeed
we found a single newspaper article where the FN addressed the European question, though
in positive terms. Given the weighting procedure used for the statistical analyses, however,
this small number of observations has almost no impact on the positioning of the FN or of
the European issue in the solution of Figure 3.
12. Due to its limited presence in the media, the position of Me
´gret’s Mouvement National
Re
´publicain, which split from the Front National in 1998, could not be determined in the
2002 election.
13. Comparative data supporting this claim is presented in Kriesi et al. (2006, 2008). See
Perrineau (1997) for a detailed analysis of the French case and Bornschier (2008b) for a
comparative analysis of right-wing populist voters.
The French Political Space and Party System 377
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TABLE A1
ISSUE POSITIONS BY PARTY AND CAMPAIGN: AVERAGE DIRECTION OF THE CODED SENTENCES FOR THE 12 CATEGORIES OF
ISSUES
Welfare Budget
Economic
liberalism
Cultural
liberalism Europe Culture Anti-immig. Army Security Environment
Instit.
reform
Radical left
1988 1.00 71.00 70.85 1.00 – 1.00 1.00 – 1.00 – 1.00
2002 1.00 0.25 71.00 – – – 71.00 – 70.33 – 0.33
PC
1978 0.94 70.44 70.94 0.46 – 0.82 – – 1.00 71.00 0.82
1988 0.91 70.75 71.00 1.00 71.00 1.00 70.80 – 0.20 – 0.92
1995 0.75 71.00 70.94 0.83 70.50 1.00 70.50 71.00 1.00 – 0.57
2002 1.00 0.33 70.87 0.60 – 0.60 71.00 – 1.00 – 71.00
PS
1978 0.71 70.35 70.86 0.76 – 0.46 – – 0.80 1.00 0.58
1988 0.72 0.21 70.48 0.98 1.00 1.00 70.46 – 0.29 – 0.49
1995 0.78 70.10 70.86 0.75 0.95 0.94 70.44 70.58 0.71 – 0.46
2002 0.63 0.34 70.67 0.46 – 1.00 71.00 – 0.92 – 0.65
Greens
2002 0.88 70.25 71.00 0.43 – 1.00 71.00 – 70.14 – 70.27
MRG
1978 0.77 0.17 70.58 0.20 – 0.50 – – 1.00 0.67 0.94
1995 0.56 0.00 71.00 1.00 1.00 – 71.00 1.00 – – 1.00
(continued )
Appendix
380 S. Bornschier and R. Lachat
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TABLE A1
(Continued )
Welfare Budget
Economic
liberalism
Cultural
liberalism Europe Culture Anti-immig. Army Security Environment
Instit.
reform
UDF
1978 0.23 0.84 70.37 0.07 – 1.00 – – 0.92 0.61 0.64
1988 0.16 0.87 0.30 0.82 1.00 0.94 0.78 – 0.76 – 0.84
1995 70.33 1.00 70.71 1.00 0.56 – 1.00 – 1.00 – 0.75
2002 70.22 0.64 70.28 0.40 – 1.00 71.00 – 1.00 – 0.71
RPR
1978 70.05 0.85 70.04 70.72 – 1.00 – – 1.00 0.33 0.04
1988 0.20 1.00 0.32 0.12 0.91 0.85 0.56 – 0.72 – 0.09
1995 0.24 0.60 70.47 0.26 0.59 0.90 0.76 0.55 1.00 – 0.45
2002 0.05 0.94 0.21 0.43 – 1.00 70.85 – 0.96 – 0.00
De Villiers
1995 70.14 1.00 70.33 71.00 71.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 1.00 – 1.00
FN
1988 70.05 0.88 70.71 70.79 1.00 70.14 1.00 – 1.00 – 0.73
1995 0.29 0.75 0.00 70.69 71.00 71.00 0.68 0.79 1.00 – 0.64
2002 70.13 1.00 0.41 70.71 – 0.71 0.83 – 0.77 – 0.80
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TABLE A2
ISSUE SALIENCE BY PARTY AND CAMPAIGN: FREQUENCY (%) WITH WHICH A PARTY ADDRESSED ISSUES OF A GIVEN CATEGORY
DURING EACH CAMPAIGN AND NUMBER OF OBSERVATIONS FOR EACH PARTY (N AND % OF THE CORRESPONDING ELECTION)
Welfare Budget
Econ.
lib.
Cultural
lib. Europe Culture Anti-immig. Army Security Environment
Instit.
reform N
%of
election
Radical left
1988 52.1 2.1 27.1 6.3 – 4.2 2.1 – 2.1 – 4.2 48 2.4
2002 36.1 13.1 34.4 – – – 1.6 – 4.9 – 9.8 61 5.9
PC
1978 27.7 11.1 28.5 17.4 – 4.7 – – 0.9 0.4 9.4 235 16.6
1988 38.2 4.8 17.0 9.1 4.2 7.9 12.1 – 3.0 – 3.6 165 8.3
1995 22.2 1.9 28.7 11.1 3.7 7.4 3.7 5.6 2.8 – 13.0 108 6.0
2002 43.2 8.1 20.3 6.8 – 6.8 8.1 – 4.1 – 2.7 74 7.2
PS
1978 34.5 10.2 24.8 10.6 – 4.3 – – 3.1 0.9 11.5 322 22.7
1988 23.4 4.2 19.2 12.5 8.7 15.4 6.3 – 3.8 – 6.6 745 37.7
1995 27.7 3.3 22.3 6.6 6.1 5.2 5.0 3.0 5.3 – 15.5 638 35.5
2002 31.1 13.2 12.6 10.8 – 7.8 4.5 – 15.0 – 5.1 334 32.3
Greens
2002 20.2 7.1 16.7 8.3 – 9.5 3.6 – 21.4 – 13.1 84 8.1
MRG
1978 26.3 4.7 34.2 7.9 – 6.3 – – 1.1 3.2 16.3 190 13.4
1995 23.1 10.3 20.5 15.4 7.7 – 15.4 2.6 – – 5.1 39 2.2
UDF
1978 20.0 5.5 23.0 17.3 – 5.5 – – 5.7 10.1 12.9 456 32.2
1988 19.1 9.4 18.8 6.1 8.0 18.5 2.5 – 9.9 – 7.7 362 18.3
1995 8.6 8.6 20.0 11.4 22.9 – 2.9 – 2.9 – 22.9 35 1.9
2002 20.7 12.6 18.4 11.5 – 4.6 8.0 – 16.1 – 8.0 87 8.4
(continued )
382 S. Bornschier and R. Lachat
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TABLE A2
(Continued )
Welfare Budget
Econ.
lib.
Cultural
lib. Europe Culture Anti-immig. Army Security Environment
Instit.
reform N
%of
election
RPR
1978 29.3 9.3 21.4 17.2 – 4.7 – – 6.0 1.4 10.7 215 15.2
1988 21.1 3.4 19.4 11.2 4.6 8.2 13.3 – 11.8 – 7.2 475 24.0
1995 20.8 10.9 20.1 7.0 9.8 6.3 2.1 3.9 4.4 – 14.7 816 45.4
2002 20.1 11.7 18.2 7.7 – 4.0 4.7 – 17.9 – 15.7 274 26.5
De Villiers
1995 15.2 6.5 13.0 6.5 17.4 2.2 8.7 6.5 13.0 – 10.9 46 2.6
FN
1988 10.4 7.1 3.8 11.5 2.7 3.8 33.9 – 14.8 – 12.0 183 9.3
1995 12.3 7.0 11.4 15.8 8.8 1.8 21.9 6.1 5.3 – 9.6 114 6.3
2002 13.4 4.2 14.3 11.8 – 5.9 20.2 – 21.8 – 8.4 119 11.5
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