Abstract
Though the territorial dimension of ministerial recruitment has been explored in several countries, it remains a blind spot in France. Nevertheless, the geography of political elites matters, since it tends to channel debates and national policies around specific areas. Therefore, this research note aims to fill this gap by investigating the regional origin of cabinet ministers under the Fifth Republic through an original data set entitled GeoMin. This descriptive analysis stresses the existence of three concentric circles in terms of ministerial appointments: Paris (overrepresented), mainland regions (underrepresented) and peripheral territories (almost absent). The sharing of portfolios follows the same logic. Parisian ministers have occupied all the possible positions—especially the highest ones—but most ministers from mainland France have also led important ministries. Though the matching is far from perfect, some portfolios are more frequently attributed to ministers from a given region.
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Source: authors’ own elaboration
Source: authors’ own elaboration
Source: authors’ own elaboration
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Notes
The urban origin of Parisian ministers is also true for the rest of their counterparts. French ministers usually come from the préfecture (administrative capital) of their department.
A high proportion of French ministers born in foreign countries (8 per cent) come from former French colonies like Morocco (Dominique de Villepin, Elisabeth Guigou), Senegal (Ségolène Royal), Algeria (Pierre Pasquini) and Tunisia (Edgard Pisani).
The ERS considers the difference between the percentage of inhabitants from a given territory with respect to the whole French population (Ps,i) and the percentage of cabinet ministers from the same territory in the French cabinet (Pm,i). To simplify this operation, we did not take into consideration the 37 ministers born in foreign countries. The formula is:
$$ERS=1-\frac{1}{2}\sum \left|Ps,i-Pm,i\right|$$The Jacobin tradition and the Republican ideology promoting equality impede legally the consideration of the existence of minorities within the French population. As stated in article 3 of the Constitution of 4 October 1958: “No section of the people nor any individual may arrogate to him/herself the exercise [of National Sovereignty].”.
A closer examination incorporating junior ministers (secrétaires d’Etat and ministres délégués) could help to complete this picture by demonstrating the continuity of some sub-regional areas in the cabinet. This is the case of Alsatian ministers (concentrated in the Haut-Rhin and Bas-Rhin departments, in the Grand Est region) who have been present in almost all governments of the Fifth Republic except from 2012 to 2020 (Pierre Pflimlin, André Bord, Christiane Scrivener, Daniel Hoeffel, Jean-Marie Bockel, Adrien Zeller, Catherine Trautmann, Théo Braun, François Loos, Philippe Rickert and Brigitte Klinkert). These appointments raise the question of territorial representation and the existence of hidden geographic quotas for constituting a cabinet.
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Harguindéguy, JB., Ramirez Leiva, F.J. Where do French cabinet ministers come from? Towards representation and democracy. Fr Polit (2024). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41253-024-00246-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41253-024-00246-3