Partisan Dealignment and the Blue-Collar Electorate in France

Sally Marthaler

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030354640
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030354657
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: European Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book explores partisan dealignment in France between 1978 and 2012, with a particular focus on the blue-collar electorate and its relationship with the political parties of the established left (the Socialist Party, or Parti socialiste, and the Communist Party, or Parti communiste français). It highlights the distinctiveness of blue-collar partisanship in a context of significant political, social and economic change and compares it with patterns of partisanship in the wider electorate. The voter-party relationship is self-evidently a bilateral one which can be modified both on the demand side, because voters change, and on the supply side, because parties change. Four factors are identified as playing a key role in partisan dealignment: value change, policy convergence, political sophistication and political trust. There is compelling evidence that while each of these makes a contribution, it is changes in the behaviour of the parties that are driving partisan dealignment among blue-collar workers in France. 

© The Author(s) 2020

S. MarthalerPartisan Dealignment and the Blue-Collar Electorate in Francehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35465-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Sally Marthaler¹

(1)

School of Law, Politics and Sociology, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

Sally Marthaler

Keywords

PartisanshipDealignmentVotersPolitical partiesBlue-collar electorateFrance

End Abstract

The relationship between citizens and the political elite lies at the heart of the democratic process. Partisanship, understood as a psychological bond between voters and political parties which has both cognitive and affective elements, plays a key role in the stabilisation of party systems by integrating citizens into the political order and providing parties with firm and reliable support bases. Partisan loyalties thus serve an important function in providing cues which help to structure and inform citizens’ engagement with politics and to simplify the complexities of political life. However, since the late 1960s an erosion of the traditional ties between parties and their voters has been observed in many western industrialised democracies including France.

1.1 The Concept of Partisan Dealignment

Partisan dealignment,¹ defined by Dalton (1984: 233) as “a decay in the pre-existing mass bases of support for the political parties” manifested in a “decrease in the party-affiliated portion of the electorate”, is also signalled by changes in voting behaviour such as a decline in support for the established parties, falling turnout, an increase in voter volatility, and the greater electoral success of new alternative parties. The phenomenon was first observed in the USA in the late 1960s, before manifesting itself in other parts of the post-industrial world.

Partisan dealignment emerged later in France than in other comparable advanced industrial democracies and the reasons for this are illuminating in a number of ways. They shed light both on some of the general factors underlying partisan dealignment and on domestic political developments in France since the 1970s. While the right had been dominant since the beginning of the Fifth Republic in 1958, to the extent that it found it difficult to conceive of itself not holding power (Furet et al. 1988), the left-wing parties still represented a possible alternative and held out the prospect of radical change. The strength of the communist party also marked France out from most other advanced capitalist nations, as did the fact that the socialist party, unlike many of its European counterparts, did not adopt a social-democratic line until the 1985 Congress of Toulouse, and even then somewhat half-heartedly. When the phenomenon began to emerge in France in the 1980s, its principal manifestation was a loss of support for the four main parties as turnout fell and the vote for more peripheral parties increased, particularly on the radical right. This prefigured the subsequent success of populist parties in many other European democracies and indicated a growing dissonance between the mainstream parties and their traditional constituencies.

A breakdown of voting trends in legislative elections between 1978 and 2017 (Fig. 1.1) shows catastrophically declining support for the parties both of the established left (from 35.4% to 5.1%) and right (from 34.4% to 9.3%). In the first round of the 1978 legislative elections, 69.8% of the registered electorate voted for one of the four established parties.² In 2017, the figure was 14.3%. At the same time, support for the alternative³ parties has almost trebled (from 3.3% to 9.3%), as has abstention, from 16.8% to a massive 49.8%.

Fig. 1.1

Vote in French legislative elections , 1978–2017, 1st round, % registered electorate (inscrits), mainland France (France métropole). (Source: French Ministry of the Interior)

In all, five of the indicators of partisan dealignment (declining party identification, a decline in support for the established parties, a rise in support for alternative parties, falling turnout and increased voter volatility) have been observed in France. Furthermore, previous research (Marthaler 2006) has shown that partisan dealignment in France is a differential phenomenon, in both political and socioeconomic terms, being most marked among left-leaning, especially blue-collar voters (i.e. skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled manual workers), some of whom have transferred their support from the left to the alternative parties, while others have stopped voting altogether. The greater prevalence of this kind of voting behaviour among blue-collar voters is accompanied by other differences: in their perception of policy convergence, in their issue priorities and values, in their levels of political sophistication and political trust. These differences are the focus of this book.

1.2 The Causes, Characteristics and Consequences of Partisan Dealignment

Partisan dealignment has been attributed to a cluster of factors associated with societal modernisation. Post-war economic growth and the development of the welfare state, greater geographical and social mobility, structural changes in employment patterns, rising levels of education , secularisation and the explosion of the mass and digital media have led to both system-level and individual-level changes (Inglehart 1990: 6).

At the system level, these changes have had a powerful impact on cleavage structures. New demographic patterns and social convergence mean that there has been a weakening of the link between class and voting patterns. As the demographic groups which once represented the core constituencies of political parties have lost definition, the social and religious cleavages associated with them have also been eroded. In this perspective, the declining loyalty of voters to their ‘natural’ party and the declining role of the political parties in the electoral arena can be traced back in part to the waning relevance of the traditional cleavages.

These system-level changes reflecting social change have been accompanied by individual-level changes reflecting cultural change (Inglehart 1990: 6). Higher levels of education and greater public access to information in the media mean that the electorate’s cognitive resources have grown, encouraging new modes of political participation which challenge traditional forms of representation. The post-industrial era has also witnessed a value change among the electorates of advanced industrialised democracies towards what Inglehart (1977) terms postmaterialism. As the interests of the public change, postmodern or ‘quality of life’ issues, such as immigration or the environment, appear on the political agenda and these cut across the traditional economic cleavages, blurring class and party lines.

There is a strong generational element to these changes. Their impact is most powerful among a new citizenry of younger, more highly-educated and potentially more independent voters whose ties with the political parties are looser and more shallowly rooted than those formed by older generations. In this perspective, dealignment results from the growing redundancy of the political parties, many of whose traditional functions, such as the aggregation of interests and c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. The Blue-Collar Electorate and La condition ouvrière in France
• 3. Blue-Collar Partisanship
• 4. Policy Convergence
• 5. Value Change
• 6. Political Sophistication
• 7. Political Trust
• 8. Conclusion
• Back Matter