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What is left for parties? An overview of party mandate in France 1981–2009

  • Review Article
  • Published:
French Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

The review draws on the author’s recent book to explore the long-standing question of the influence of partisanship on policy implementation. Partisanship is traditionally expected to exert an influence on policy implementation, because, on the one hand, citizens perceive their vote as an expression of preference towards a certain set of policies, whereas, on the other, parties conceive policies as tools to differentiate themselves from one another in the electoral market. However, the consistence between parties’ preferences and the policies they enact is often questioned. I argue that party mandate is best understood as the correspondence between partisan and institutional agendas. Drawing on the Comparative Agendas Project data on Party Manifestos, Communiqués du Conseil des Ministres and passed legislation (1981–2009), I show that party preferences matter but their influence on public policy is weak. Moreover, this study confirms that the institutional configuration has an impact on party mandate but exclusively with respect to the executive agenda. Finally, this research shows that French mainstream parties follow electoral business cycles, and party mandate appeared to be stronger in pre-electoral periods. The present research holds important implications for the study of the influence of parties on policymaking, on policy change and more in general for studies dealing with the quality of representative democracy.

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Notes

  1. Pioneer studies in this field are Rose (1980) and Castles (1983).

  2. In this research, alternation is defined as a change of government partisanship (Mair, 2008), that is, the shift from a Socialist to a RPR-UMP PM and vice versa.

  3. On the coding of the Communiqués, see Froio et al (2009).

  4. This study considers exclusively the CAP policy domains that have a policy content and a level of attention >1 per cent in the legislative, executive and partisan agendas over the whole time span (1981–2009). Thus, we do not consider the code 99=no policy content, and the following policy domains: 8=Energy, 18=Foreign trade, 21=Public lands and water management. Table A1 in Appendix details the major codes of the French Agendas Project.

  5. The detailed results of Model 1 and Model 1a are included in Table A2 and Table A3 in Appendix.

  6. The detailed results of Model 2 and Model 2a are included in Table A4 and Table A5 in Appendix.

  7. There is a difference of 12 per cent points between the R2 of the two models.

  8. In this figure, the continuous line represents the correlation values. Every electoral year (1986, 1988,1993,1997, 2002 and 2007) generates two values. The first value indicates the correlation between the preferences of the party of the incumbent PM with the institutional agenda of the pre-electoral period. The second value indicates the correlation between the preferences of the party of the incumbent PM with the institutional agenda of the post-electoral period. For example, 1986 generates two values: 1986.1 that begins on the 1 January 1986 and ends on the 16 March 1986 that is the date of the elections; and 1986.2 that begins on the 17 March 1986 and ends on the 31 December 1986.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Isabelle Guinaudeau and Simon Persico with whom I had many interesting discussions on this work. This research has benefited from the comments of my master supervisor Nicolas Sauger, from my colleague of work and research at Sciences-Po Quentin Harada and from the support of the French Agendas Project and in particular of Emiliano Grossman and Sylvain Brouard. Through the years, I have benefited much from their experience. I wish to thank in particular Emiliano Grossman for the opportunity to conduct research as an undergraduate. All mistakes remain mine.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. European University Institute, Political and Social Sciences, Badia Fiesolana – Via dei Roccettini 9, San Domenico di, Fiesole, I-50014, Italy

    Caterina Froio

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Additional information

This article summarizes an argument made by Froio in 2012. The original findings have been published and enriched in a paper by Persico et al in 2012, from which the book is directly inspired.

Appendix

Appendix

Table A1

Table A1 The codes of the French Agendas Project
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Table A2

Table A2 Model 1: The influence of PM’s party preferences on the executive agenda (1981–2009)
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Table A3

Table A3 Model 1a: The influence of PM’s party preferences on the legislative agenda (1981–2009)
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Table A4

Table A4 Model 2: The influence of institutional configuration on party mandate in the executive agenda (1981–2009)
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Table A5

Table A5 Model 2a: The influence of institutional configuration on party mandate in the legislative agenda (1981–2009)
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Froio, C. What is left for parties? An overview of party mandate in France 1981–2009. Fr Polit 11, 98–116 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/fp.2013.3

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