Mathieu Vieira

France: Regional Elections as ‘Third-Order’ Elections?

Regional elections have not received a lot of academic interest in France. Specialists in French electoral studies have generally preferred to focus on presidential and legislative elections. The scientific coverage of the regional level of government even reached a low point in 2010. Contrary to what had previously occurred, there were no special issue of the Revue francaise de science politique and no book1 devoted to the 2010 regional elections. The only analyses consisted of some articles (Gougou and Labouret, 2010; Martin, 2010; Muxel, 2010) and a special issue of the Revue politique et parlementaire. This lack of interest from French scholars in regional elections is probably due to the weak institutional power of regions and the low territorial diversity in election results. Even more striking to us is the scarcity of discussions around the regionalization of regional elections. Although this trend has been identified on a limited scale, that is tenuous and restricted to few regions (Dupoirier, 2004), the dominant approach tends to interpret regional elections as ‘intermediary elections’ (Parodi, 1983, 2004). The notion of intermediary elections reflects the perceived subordinate nature of regional elections to the national electoral arena. In this theoretical framework, which echoes second-order election model, regional election results are expected to be driven by national forces, especially when the government is unpopular.

The Unfinished History of the Social Democratic Family

In this introductory chapter we first present the rationale for systematically culling the latest data available on contemporary social democratic parties. We then review at length the historical trajectory of social democracy and its constituent principles. Thereby, our readers will be able to contextualize the pan-European panorama of social democratic parties offered in this Handbook, which is focused on the period of 2000–12. We finally describe the four dilemmas faced by European social democracy at the beginning of the 21st century. These represent different ways of understanding the crisis running through this political family.