Florence Haegel

The Presidentialization of Dominant Parties in France

On the matter of presidentialization, France has been considered a “quasi-experimental case” (Samuels, 2002, p. 463) in so far as it shifted from a parliamentary system during the Fourth Republic to a presidentialized one during the Fifth Republic. Introduced in 1958, the process of presidentialization has developed step by step and differently affected political parties. To what extent did institutional change impact the French party system? What forms did presidentialization take? This chapter addresses both of these questions by focusing on two major French parties, the Socialist Party (the Parti Socialiste, PS) and the neo-Gaullist Party (the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, UMP). Even though their domination over the presidential race has been challenged in 2002 by the extreme right Front National (FN) (its leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, overtook Lionel Jospin in the presidential first round), they still prevail over the others (Grunberg and Haegel, 2008): since 1981 every President of the Republic, Francois Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, and Francois Hollande, came from one of these parties.

Reflections on Design and Implementation

Generally speaking, we believe that the scientific character of social research mainly depends on the reflexivity involved in the research design and its implementation. So, we have decided to dedicate a whole chapter to methodological issues. More particularly, we aim to discuss, and we hope to cast light on, a recurring difficulty of cross-national qualitative methodology: the comparability of the data on which the analysis is based.

Concepts and Theory: Political Sociology and European Study

Citizens’ reactions to European integration have attracted a good deal of attention from social scientists over the last decades. Work conducted by researchers in the academic field of european studies has partly been inspired by the search for ways to solve Europe’s so-called democratic deficit. In most of this work, citizens’ opinions of the European Union (EU) or the integration process are analysed in relation to expectations regarding citizens’ support and legitimating attitudes (Van Ingelgom, 2010). Our standpoint in this book is mainly empirical, although it also takes into account the implications of sociological analysis of citizens’ political understanding and behaviour for democratic theory. European studies largely relied on statistical analysis of survey data before undergoing a qualitative turn by the end of the 1990s. Mixed methods are usually received positively in this field, as in other public opinion research areas (Risse, 2010). But, with regard to European attitudes, the discrepancy between the findings from the two distinct methodological traditions has become so striking that work is needed to reconcile them. This book aims to take a step in that direction. Contrary to other recently published works based on qualitative research (White, 2011; Gaxie, Hube & Rowell, 2011) Overlooking Europe was not conceived as an alternative to statistical research but rather as a complement to it.

Conclusion: Citizens Talking about Europe

Between December 2005, when our project really began in Paris, and June 2006, when the last of our focus groups was carried out in Oxford, 411 people applied, or volunteered, to take part in our groups, and in the end 172 actually participated (including those in the groups which have been discarded from this analysis) (See Table 6.1). Since January 2006, the European Commission has probably interviewed more than 800,000 Europeans. Eurobarometer surveys are conducted in all member countries every six months. This raises some obvious questions. What justifies our spending so long on our corpus of data – even though the 133 participants in the 24 groups whose data we have analysed translate into 3,000 pages? One reason why Europe is a good topic for in-depth interview or focus group research is that a lot of stuff happens there, so citizens and other participants are frequently cued for attentiveness and opinion formation. But the stuff that has happened since the financial crisis of 2008 might be thought to be game changing – hasn’t our research effectively been made obsolete?

Do survey respondents always say the same thing?: Matches and mismatches between questionnaire responses and contributions to collective interviews

Abstract This article compares responses to questionnaires and contributions to focus groups carried out in 2005-2006 as part of research on attitudes toward European integration. It also compares the stances taken on Europe with those taken on two other issues, the welfare state and immigration. It therefore addresses questions about both the variability of opinions and the specific contribution of focus groups. It demonstrates a certain congruence between the two techniques as well as the existence of subtle shifts. These shifts are not attributable to individuals as such but to topics and to the contexts of discussion. This exploration provides evidence that focus groups are particularly useful to understand how citizens – and among them those with fewer social and political resource – are taking a stand.

Right-wing Parties in France and in Europe

Political parties to the Right of the political spectrum in France have changed considerably since 2002. The UMP (Union pour un mouvement populaire), was created from what was the RPR (Rassemblement pour la Republique). It has become the uncontested leader of the right-wing camp, renewed its leadership with the election of Nicolas Sarkozy as its president in November 2004, and has shown a clear desire to break with the Chirac years. In parallel, the UDF (Union pour la democratie francaise), has jettisoned its radical and liberal components, affirmed its autonomous strategy and centered itself on the promotion of Francois Bayrou’s candidacy for the Presidency. The UDF claim to be a centrist party that is a dangerous position to adopt in a bipolar system. It has been suggested that these changes signify the end of the specific character of the French Right. Starting with the postwar period, this specificity essentially stemmed from the central role played within it by Gaullism and its affiliated organizations. The hypothesis that a kind of European convergence is taking place can be justified if one considers that in France, a clearly dominant conservative strand has progressively come into being on the Right. This strand has been nurtured by the fading of Gaullism and the emergence of a “new” UDF makes it more easily identifiable within the current of Christian democracy which is solidly implanted in the history of right-wing parties in Europe. In order to test such a hypothesis, a comparison between the French Right and its European counterparts is needed.