ABSTRACT
The study of participation has tended to concentrate on elections, not least because of the accessible and comparable nature of the available data. It is one of the most developed areas of French political science, and has been dominated by two models which have competed with each other in the search for an explanation of patterns of voting behaviour. These are ‘social determinism’ and ‘rational choice’. Social determinism stresses the importance of the ‘demand side’ of electoral decision-making, focusing on the social categories which make electoral choices. The rational choice model focuses on the various components of the ‘supply side’ and how these influence individual voter-consumers. The social determinist model posits that voting preferences are determined by certain sociological factors, the most important being class, wealth and religiosity. It was the dominant model during the 1970s and appeared able to account for changes in electoral behaviour since the Second World War, relating these changes to socio-economic and cultural change. Economic growth, urbanisation, the growth of the tertiary sector, the decline in religious practice and the mass entry of women into the labour market were all seen as factors contributing to an increase in the number of potential left-wing voters, and the Socialist victory of 1981 seemed to confirm the hypothesis. However, after 1981, the declining support for the left amongst the very categories which had brought it to power, the rise of parties outside the parliamentary system, such as the Front national and the Verts, and the changing allegiances of voters from one election to the next, favoured the competing explanatory model: that of the informed voterconsumer, who based his/her rational decision on the salient issues of the moment (Mayer and Perrineau 1992: 84). According to this model, voters are influenced by factors such as the issues on which campaigns are run, the discourse of the candidates, and the electoral promises of the parties. The symbolic representation, or image, of a particular candidate can also influence voting choices, particularly between presidential candidates who may try to rise above left/right divisions and present themselves as, for
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While the rational voter model dominated during the 1980s, especially around the time of the first ‘cohabitation’ between a right-wing parliamentary majority and a Socialist president (1986-8), it did not go unchallenged. A study conducted by Daniel Boy and Elisabeth Dupoirier for CEVIPOF in 1988, for example, demonstrated that the political orientation of 70 per cent of the electorate had remained stable in the four rounds of voting in the legislative election of 1986 and the presidential election of 1988 (Mayer and Perrineau 1992: 86). They found that the floating voters were largely those who were least well inserted economically, politically and socially: the young and poorly educated, those who were least interested in politics. They found that, despite significant social change since the 1960s, the effects of class, religion and property ownership were still relevant to electoral choice (Mayer and Perrineau 1992: 87-9). In a more recent study, Boy and Mayer (1997) reject the hypothesis that better access to education, the growing influence of the media, the spread of post-materialist values and the declining importance of class and religion have favoured political emancipation and the emergence of a new category of individualist, rational voters, who are better informed, more politicised and less dependent on the parties. They found that in the 1995 presidential elections, Catholicism still correlates strongly with voting behaviour and that the degree of religiosity translates into a sliding scale of voter preference for the right (Boy and Mayer 1997: 106). They argue that, although class cleavages have shifted, the main difference now being between the self-employed and the employed, they have not disappeared. The third significant variable, they claim, is the variety of assets (rather than the amount). In 1995, a wide variety of assets was most likely to predict a vote for the moderate right, whereas an absence of assets predicted a vote for the left or the Front national. These main cleavages are cut through by others, such as employment in the public or private sector, and education, which seems to be a particularly salient factor in predicting the FN vote (Boy and Mayer 1997: 122-3, 137).
