Suzanne Berger

Representation in Trouble

Over the period 2002–2004 France experienced two electoral earthquakes. For political scientists who believe that the forces shaping the electorate mainly change gradually, with the entry of new generations of electors, new issues, and new contenders for power, and only infrequently change radically, in elections of critical realignment, this is one earthquake more than the usual accounts can manage. The puzzle this chapter hopes to unravel is how the same underlying factors could produce such contradictory results as those of the 2002 presidential elections and the 2004 regional elections. More generally, it explores the stalled reform of French politics which lies at the origin of this apparent fickleness of the electorate. In the case of each of the elections, there were a host of contingent events like school holidays, misleading polls, and multiple candidacies that might explain outcomes. That these accidents could produce such wide variance in the results, however, reflects the underlying weaknesses of the structures linking society to politics in France today. With the disappearance of the old anchors of religion and class, the preferences of the electors now swing along with the tides of political discontent and distrust. This chapter starts, then, from the two elections; it goes on to propose, not an electoral analysis, but some ways of understanding the break-down in the system of representation. It is this break-down that makes the support of citizens for their elected representatives so tenuous and fragile.

The Problem of Reform in France: The Political Ideas of Local Elites

The French circle of political stagnation, crisis, and return to administrative politics has once again revolved a full cycle. Like the political hopes raised at the Liberation and at all those moments in French history when political routine and bureaucratic order disintegrate, the posssibilities that the crisis of May-June 1968 seemed to open for a radical reform of politics and society already appear to be beyond the capacity and will of the restored regime. The missed opportunities of the May crisis have brought into sharp focus the lag between the political and social systems and the resilience of those features of the political system which insulate it against external disruption and internal reform. Since the war France has missed the opportunities which crises produce, and more important, has failed to exploit the possibilities for political reform latent in the profound social and economic changes of the last twenty years. The political institutions, al-

Dualism and Discontinuity in Industrial Societies.

Originally published in 1980, the essays in this volume analyse a family of phenomena in advanced industrial societies for which neither liberal nor Marxist theories provide a systematic explanation. Berger and Piore argue that these phenomena represent a structural solution to the economic and political problems of distributing economic uncertainty and preserving political stability. The discontinuities in industrial societies are not the product of incomplete modernisation but of political and economic choices that perpetuate and recreate segmentation to protect critical political and economic mechanisms. Studies by Piore examine the labour market and its relationship to technological innovation and capital investment, whilst those by Berger explore the social foundation of political parties and the formation of state policy as it emerges from competitive political forces.