Contemporary developments in political space in France

The emphasis of the book thus far has been on individual parties and coalitions. Nonetheless, the demand side of the equation also provides an important context to party success because it helps define the political space in which parties must compete for voters. In this chapter, then, we focus on French political space over the last fifteen years as defined by the socio-demographic and attitudinal profiles of the voters. We build upon findings from the two major studies of French voters in the last ten years, namely L’électeur français en questions (Boy and Mayer, 1990) 1 and L’électeur a ses raisons (Boy and Mayer, 1997). The first of these studies was based upon SOFRES data from the 1988 presidential post-election survey and depicted the French electorate as occupying a bidimensional space defined by economic liberalism – state intervention versus laissez-faire – and cultural liberalism – libertarian versus authoritarian – axes. The latter used the 1995 presidential survey to update the analysis and presented a new model of political space at the electoral level – a tripartition into left, moderate-right and extreme-right political blocs – representing a radical departure from the traditional quadrille bipolaire, and exploding the bidimensional account into a series of cultural subdimensions. Employing these two datasets, together with the CEVIPOF legislative post-election survey from 1997 to update the analysis, we consider changes in the social and attitudinal determinants of political space since 1988. Our analysis takes into account the two principal partisan developments during this period – the growth and implantation of the FN and the more recent establishment of the gauche