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Developmental Change and Electoral Cleavage in France: Government and Opposition in the Fifth Republic*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2009

Vincent E. McHale  and
Dennis Paranzino
Vincent E. McHale
Affiliation:
Case Western Reserve University
Dennis Paranzino
Affiliation:
Chase Econometric Associates
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Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , September 1975 , pp. 431 - 453
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Political Science Association (l'Association canadienne de science politique) and/et la Société québécoise de science politique 1975

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References

1 For background material and further discussion, see Mass Politics, ed. Allardt, Erik and Rokkan, Stein (New York 1970)Google Scholar; Cleavages, Ideologies and Party Systems, ed. Allardt, Erik and Littunen, Yrjo (Helsinki 1964)Google Scholar; Party Systems and Voter Alignments, ed. Lipset, Seymour M. and Rokkan, Stein (New York 1967)Google Scholar; and Rokkan, Stein, Citizens, Elections, Parties (New York 1970).Google Scholar

2 See “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems and Voter Alignments: An Introduction,” in Lipset and Rokkan, Party Systems and Voter Alignments, 1–64.

3 Ibid., 54

4 Ibid., 22–3

5 Kerr, Clark et al., Industrialism and Industrial Man (3rd ed.New York 1969), 14–29Google Scholar

6 “The Changing Class Structure and Contemporary European Politics,” Daedalus 93 (Winter 1964), 271–303

7 Riggs, Fred W., “The Dialectics of Developmental Conflict,” Comparative Political Studies I (July 1968), 197CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 The late 1960s witnessed the emergence of a new genre of sociological literature which challenged the linear progression and unidimensional concept of development and developmental change. For example, see Brown, Bernard E., “The French Experience of Modernization,” World Politics XXI (April 1969), 366–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Goldthorpe, John H. et al., The Affluent Worker: Political Attitudes and Behavior (London 1968).Google Scholar

9 See McHale, Vincent E., “Religion and Electoral Politics in France: Some Recent Observations,” this JOURNAL II, no. 3 (September 1969), 292–311.Google Scholar

10 For a discussion of the renewed importance of communal nationalism in the industrial democracies and its potential for violence, see Rose, Richard, Governing Without Consensus (Boston 1971).Google Scholar

11 See McHale, , “Electoral Traditions and Opposition-Building in France,” Comparative Politics III (July 1971), 499–516.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12 Past and Emerging Political Cleavages,” in Party Systems, Party Organizations and the Politics of the New Masses, ed. Stammer, Otto (Berlin 1968), 66–74Google Scholar

13 Ibid., 71

14 See Janowitz, Morris and Segal, David R., “Social Cleavage and Party Affiliation: Germany, Great Britain and the United States,” American Journal of Sociology LXXII (May 1967), 601–18Google Scholar; and McHale, Vincent E. and McLaughlin, John E., “Economic Development and the Transformation of the Italian Party System: A Reconsideration,” Comparative Politics VII (October 1974), 37–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 “Past and Emerging Political Cleavages”

16 Affluence and the French Worker in the Fourth Republic (Princeton 1967), 276–98

17 See Allardt, “Types of Protest and Alienation,” in Allardt and Rokkan, Mass Politics, 45–63

18 Huntington, Samuel P., Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven 1968), 47–59Google Scholar

19 Class and Class Conflict in Industrial Society (Stanford 1959), 378

20 The classic study is Lipset's Political Man (New York 1960). For a series of country studies, see Electoral Behavior: A Comparative Handbook, ed. Rose, Richard (New York 1974).Google Scholar

21 See Capecchi, Vittorio et al., Il Comportamento elettorale in Italia (Bologna 1968)Google Scholar; Goguel, François, Modernisation économique et comportement politique (Paris 1969)Google Scholar; Lewin, Leif et al., The Swedish Electorate 1887–1968 (Stockholm and Uppsala 1972)Google Scholar; and David R. Cameron, “Consociation, Cleavage, and Realignment: Postindustrialization and Partisan Change in Eight European Nations,” paper presented at the 1974 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association, Chicago.

22 See the various reports in Société française de sociologie, Tendances et volontés de la société française (Paris 1966).Google Scholar

23 “The French Experience of Modernization”

24 France: Steadfast and Changing (Cambridge, Mass. 1959), 36

25 Keeble, D.E., “Models of Economic Development,” in Socioeconomic Models in Geography, ed. Chorley, R.J. and Haggett, P. (London 1970), 243–302.Google Scholar See also McHale and Paranzino, “Postindustrialism, Inequality and the Structure of Mass Politics: A Spatial-Temporal Perspective,” paper presented at the 1975 Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, Washington, DC.

26 Tarrow, Sidney, “The Urban-Rural Cleavage in Political Involvement: The Case of France,” American Political Science Review LXV (June 1971), 341–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar

27 Evidence and discussion of French regional imbalances can be found in Delmas, Claude, L'Aménagement du territoire (Paris 1963)Google Scholar; Hansen, Niles M., French Regional Planning (Bloomington 1968)Google Scholar; and Lanversin, Jacques, L'Aménagement du territoire et la régionalisation (Paris 1967).Google Scholar

28 For cartographic evidence of the regionalization of French mass politics see Goguel, , Géographie des élections françaises de 1870 à 1951 (Paris 1951)Google Scholar; and Leleu, Claude, Géographie des élections françaises depuis 1936 (Paris 1971).Google Scholar The issue of regional equity demands has also resulted in certain changes in the electoral bases of the French party system. See Vincent E. McHale and Sandra Shaber, “From Aggressive to Defensive Gaullism: The Electoral Dynamics of a ‘Catch-All’ Party,” Comparative Politics (forthcoming).

29 The ancient Oc-Oil division of France is still reflected in electoral behaviour. See Grosclaude, Michel, “Deux comportements politiques,” in Le Sud et le nord, ed. Lafont, Robert (Toulouse 1971), 181–204.Google Scholar See also Sondages: Revue française de l'opinion publique 1 (1965), entire issue.

30 McHale has used the planning region to examine some of the socioeconomic correlates of electoral dissensus in “Mutamenti socio-economici e sistema partitico nella v Repubblica,” Rivista italiana di scienza politico II, no. 1 (1972), 97–124. Goguel has relied on the department for his analyses, and Dogan has focused some of his electoral research at the communal level. See Dogan, Mattei and Derivry, Daniel, “Unité d'analyse et espace de reférence en écologie politique,” Revue française de science politique XXI (June 1971), 517–70.Google Scholar

31 For a discussion of this issue in electoral sociology, see McHale, Vincent E. and McLaughlin, John E., “A Further Note on the Classification of Political Regions According to Electoral Behavior,” Quality and Quantity VI, 2 (1972), 303–26.Google Scholar

32 Comparative data on French urbanization can be found in Pinchemel, Philippe and Carriere, Françoise, Le Fait urbain en France (Paris 1963).Google Scholar

33 Data have been obtained from official government sources published by the Institut National de la Statistique et des Etudes économiques (insee) and the French Ministry of Interior. A comprehensive listing of official statistical sources in France can be found in INSEE, Répertoire des sources statistiques françaises (Paris 1962).Google Scholar In order to avoid possible disturbing influences, we have not included the Paris region or Corsica. Corsican data were incomplete and the Paris region is so unique as to represent a separate case for analysis. We realize this omission imputes a rural bias to our study. Our concern, however, is mainly with the mass political consequences of developmental variation outside of the Paris region, especially in the 1954–62 growth period. Our data base will consist of 87 metropolitan departments.

34 Jeffrey Williamson has argued that developmental convergence within nations will also be accompanied by a reduction in regional wealth or income inequalities. This is a debatable assumption. See his “Regional Inequality and the Process of National Development: A Description of the Patterns,” Economic Development and Cultural Change, 13, no. 4 (1965), part ii. See also Myrdal, Gunnar, Economic Theory and Underdeveloped Regions (London 1958)Google Scholar; and Hirschman, Albert O., The Strategy of Economic Development (New Haven 1958)Google Scholar, chap. 10.

35 For comparable data involving wealth and industrial development in the British Isles, see Hechter, Michael, “Industrialization and National Development in the British Isles,” Journal of Development Studies VIII (April 1972), 155–82.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Hechter concludes that there has been little convergence of these developmental phenomena in the British Isles between 1851 and 1961.

36 See Flanigan, W.H. and Fogelman, Edwin, “Patterns of Political Violence in Historical Perspective,” Comparative Politics III (October 1970), 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ivo, K. and Feierabend, Rosalind L., “Aggressive Behaviors within Polities, 1948–1962: A Cross-National Study,” Journal of Conflict Resolution X (September 1966), 258–62.Google Scholar

37 These relationships were computed from data presented in Blondel, Jean, “Party Systems and Patterns of Government in Western Democracies,” this JOURNAL I, no. 2 (June 1968), 190–1Google Scholar; and Rose, Governing Without Consensus, 424–5. Our correlations between gnp per capita, gnp growth, and anti-régime voting differ slightly from those of Rose because of our exclusion of Northern Ireland. Rose had sought to determine whether or not there was any relationship between social conditions and political discord (anti-régime voting) in Western polities. On the basis of a series of bivariate correlations, he concluded that no such relationships existed and dismissed strong positive correlations between anti-régime voting, tuberculosis deaths, and growth in gnp as being “theoretically” insignificant. Fortunately, Rose has published his raw measures and we are able to reproduce his entire correlation matrix. While the relationship between anti-régime voting and tuberculosis deaths was found to be somewhat higher than the one reported by Rose (r = +.55), even more important, the incidence of tuberculosis deaths was revealed to be highly correlated with several other socioeconomic indices such as infant mortality (r = +.68), low life expectancy (r = +.67), and lower levels of gnp per capita (r = −.52). Contrary to Rose, one could argue that on the strength of these relationships, anti-régime voting does bear a strong relationship to depressed conditions in Western societies.

38 French urban areas have generally voted conservatively. See Haumont, Antoine and Bauhain, Claude, “Quelques caractéristiques des agglomérations françaises de plus de 50,000 habitants en 1962,” Revue française de sociologie IX (April–June 1968), 236.Google Scholar

39 This possibility is suggested by Kim, Chong Lim in “Socioeconomic Development and Political Democracy in Japanese Prefectures,” American Political Science Review LXV (March 1971), 184–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

40 Olson, Mancur jr, “Rapid Growth as a Destabilizing Force,” Journal of Economic History XXIII (December 1963), 529–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Kornhauser, William, The Politics of Mass Society (New York 1959).Google Scholar

41 Hamilton, Affluence and the French Worker, 128, 261

42 “Deux comportements politiques,” 183

43 Modernisation économique, 83

44 “A Covariance Analysis of French Electoral Data,” in Quantitative Ecological Analysis in the Social Sciences, ed. Dogan, Mattei and Rokkan, Stein (Cambridge, Mass. 1969), 285–98Google Scholar

45 See McHale, “Religion and Electoral Politics in France,” 301–2

46 See Goguel, Modernisation économique

47 MacRae, , “Religious and Socioeconomic Factors in the French Vote, 1946–1956,” American Journal of Sociology LXIV (November 1958), 190–8Google Scholar; and LeBras, , Études de sociologie religieuse, Tome II (Paris 1955), 526–45Google Scholar

48 See Allardt, “Types of Protest and Alienation.”

49 Under the Fourth Republic, the phenomenon of Poujadism was certainly an important manifestation of protest and discontent with socioeconomic overtones. See Williams, Philip M., Crisis and Compromise: Politics in the Fourth Republic (Garden City 1966), 174–80.Google Scholar Various left-wing splinter groups have emerged periodically, but their appeal has been generally limited to the Paris area.

50 Although the department no longer served as the focal area for electoral politics under the Fifth Republic, electoral districts did not cross departmental boundaries.

51 Because the variance of several key variables is shared by both protest dimensions, there is some question as to the statistical appropriateness of our separation of electoral protest into two empirically distinct factors. An optimal solution would restrict protest to a single dimension for reasons of statistical parsimony. We find this approach to be of less value than a two-factor solution, which represents an interpretation of the data with greater substantive interest, and can also be defended on theoretical grounds. See Rummel, R.J., Applied Factor Analysis (Evanston 1970), 362.Google Scholar

52 The unstructured dimension appeared to follow the ancient contours of langue d'oil and langue d'oc, and the lines of the Catbar heresy in the southwest. See Brimo, Albert, Méthode de la géo-sociologie électorate (Paris 1968)Google Scholar; and Mattei Dogan, Political Cleavage and Social Stratification in France and Italy,” in Lipset nd Rokkan, Party Systems and Voter Alignments, 182–4. Certain sociodemographic changes have also affected political life in the southwestern region of France. Between 1954 and 1962, almost a half-million repatriates returned to France from former colonial areas and settled in the southern half of the country. Many were bitter at De Gaulle's decolonisation policies and threw their support to opposition groups. See Clout, Hugh D., The Geography of Post-War France (Oxford 1972), 11–13.Google Scholar

53 For example, one notes that the fidelity of the Communist electorate to their party is very marked, and is only disturbed by such events as Hungary in 1956, or Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Communist party soon regains its electoral strength after the initial shock has worn off. Support for Jacques Duclos, the Communist party candidate in the 1969 presidental election, revealed that the party was little affected by events in Czechoslovakia the year before.

54 Lindon, Denis et al., Les Families politiques aujourd'hui en France (Paris 1966), 109–12Google Scholar

55 It is interesting to note that the developmental bases of negative voting in the 1870 plebiscite were quite similar to the contemporary unstructured pattern. Consider the following equation involving the level of urbanization (1872), the level of industrial and commercial income (1870), and negative voting in the 1870 plebiscite:

Data have been obtained from the Annuaire Statistique; Annales du Sénat et du Corps Législatif, Tome III, Session de 1870; and Delefortrie, Nicole and Morice, Janice, Les Revenus départementaux en 1864 et en 1954 (Paris 1959).Google Scholar

56 Hechter suggests that regional development inequalities can become critical obstacles to the realization of national political stability. Perceptions of relative disadvantage or discrimination on the part of regionally specific populations are likely to result in anti-integrationist tendencies and political opposition to the central government. See Hechter, Michael, “Towards a Theory of Ethnic Change,” Politics and Society II, no. 1 (1971), 21–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For evidence of this phenomenon in the case of Belgium, see Frognier, André-Paul, McHale, Vincent E., and Paranzino, Dennis, Vote, clivages socio-politiques et développement régional en belgique (Louvain 1974), 81–149.Google Scholar

57 “Types of Protest and Alienation”