the responsible party model

The Responsible Party ModelAuthor(s): Jean CharlotSource: Legislative Studies Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 2 (May, 1987), pp. 237-241Published by: Comparative Legislative Research CenterStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/439921 .

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Converse and Pierce on Representation in France:

The Responsible Party Model

JEAN CHARLOT Institut d'Etudes Politiques

Any French political scientist who has the ambition to write The French Voter to match the American study will now have to take into account Converse and Pierce's monument, Political Representation in France. Not only does it tell us a great deal about the subject treated, it also in the first five hundred or so pages deals at the highest intellectual level with both the common and the original traits of voting behavior, of parliamentary behavior, and of demonstrating behavior in France. It is a rare achievement of professional skill and political culture.

The least inspiring part of the book was added to the initial project and deals with the unexpected events of May 1968. The variations in the number and origins of the demonstrators and of the strikers comes as no surprise, nor does the idea that they included many people who had never demonstrated or gone on strike before. The paradox of the June electoral tidal wave in favour of the government is classically explained by the excesses of a movement which was far from unpopular at the beginning. The responsiveness of the political elites once everything had returned to normal is also well known. Two interesting points, neverthe- less, are worth noting. The first is that 40% of the electorate thought that the risks of a civil war were high, as against 31% only 10 years earlier, during the Algiers crisis, when a military rebellion put an end to the Fourth Republic. The second point is that the striking difference between the election results in March 1967 and those in June 1968 was due to the 16%7 of voters who changed their votes, of whom 7 out of 10 went from left to right.

The finest part of this impressive book is the first half, devoted to the French parties and voters. It leaves no stone unturned and provides some convincing answers to many questions we have long asked ourselves. The unequal visibility of the parties in the French system is nicely matched with the expectations of the voters, who want an ideal system of some three or four parties. Such a system would force the parties to ally for the presidential contest and for the general election,

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Jean Chariot

through a bimodal fight for electoral victory within the left and right at the first ballot, between the left and right at the second ballot. The difficulty the French have in identifying their numerous political parties is convincingly attributed not to the voters' special lack of ability but to the system itself, in which the manifest identity of parties changes rapidly and on-going fractionalization makes it difficult for loyalties to mature. One has just to remember that, with the sole exception of the Parti Com- muniste Francaise (founded in December 1920), the parties of today were all formed in the 1970s: the Parti Socialiste in 1971, the Front National in 1974, the Rassemblement pour la Republique in 1976, and the Union pour la Democratie Francaise in 1978. The great party of the Third Republic, the Parti Radical, has now been reduced to two small adverse groups which have lost virtually all political influence; the great Christian Democratic party of the immediate postwar period, the Mouvement Re'publicain Populaire, was disbanded in 1966; the party which had dominated the right under the Fourth Republic, the Centre National des Independants et Paysans broke up in 1962 and has dis- appeared from the front of the political scene. No wonder that the French people need some reference points other than the parties to help them find their bearings in the political landscape.

Converse and Pierce have carefully studied all these other reference points: the left and right dimension, the gaullist-antigaullist stand, religious practice as an indicator of political culture. Among their many findings, the most striking is that persistent party identification, after all, provides most of the long-term stability in mass electoral choices. Par- tisan attachments develop with great difficulty in France, but when they do (for one voter out of two) they grow harder and stronger, absorbing and subsuming all rival forces. The left and right identification, though more comprehensive than party identification, is less powerful; many voters in fact locate themselves on this axis without being able to say what the labels "left" and "right" mean politically (a rediscovery of the "Marais" phenomenon demonstrated by Deutsch, Lindon, and Weill, 1966).

Converse and Pierce document the French MPs' tendency to locate themselves to the left of their own parties, just as within their families they see themselves to the left of their fathers. In this, they confirm Andre Siegfried's (1930, p. 74) idea of a "mystical attraction to the left" in French political culture. They explain that the mass electorate locates the giscardian party, the Rfpublicains Inddpendants, to the left of the gaullist party, the Union pour la Defense de la Republique, because the RI is less visible. Because it is less well known, it is given a 50-point centre score by many of those who do not know what it is; the elite sam-

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Party Model

pie, who know the party better, locate the RI to the right of the UDR. Converse and Pierce's explanation will please the old gaullist elite. It would be more convincing if it also explained the difference in the elite and mass location of the SFIO (Section Francaise de l'Internationale Ouvriere) and FGDS (FEderation de la Gauche Democrate et Socialiste), but it does not.

The only weakness of Converse and Pierce's careful explanation of French electoral behavior is that it may be at least partially invalidated in the 1980s. Considering the increase in party identification in the period of their fieldwork, they concluded that the volatility of the votes was due to decline; such a decline is quite obviously not the case today. They attributed a strong influence to the gaullist-antigaullist divide in 1967- 1969 and saw the class factor as a rather weak influence in voting. But this was less obvious once General de Gaulle had ceased to blur the class divide and once a strong Socialist Party had emerged on the left. A return to the old left-right divide was facilitated. We may question too whether issue voting is now weak, as Converse and Pierce observed it to be, when we see the upsurge of the National Front and the politicization of the immigration and law and order issues. One of the latent dysfunc- tions of long, complex, carefully drawn out studies like this is that they may well be outdated as soon as they are published. On the other hand, Converse and Pierce's conclusions on how important party identification is, when it can grow, and how religious affiliation and practice affect voting are still valid today.

The study of the electoral process is as rich as is the analysis of the voters' behavior. The visibility cycle of French legislative candidates, with the considerable importance of incumbency, is quite new. The fact that only the Communist voters remember the party they vote for better than the name of the party candidate is less surprising. The personality factor in French politics has certainly been accentuated by the presidential election system, but it was already there in the political fabric, alongside a certain negative image of the parties. The old problem of the real professional status of MPs is pushed a step further than usual, and it is quite illuminating to discover that 70% of the exworkers who have become Communist MPs spontaneously describe themselves, at the time of the survey, as professional politicians-as they really are, in fact. The hypothesis that upward mobility through a political career-more often the case on the left than on the right-makes you feel more of a professional politician than anything else you may have been before is very convincing and well supported by the data.

Converse and Pierce have contributed three chapters to one of the oddities of the French electoral system, the second ballot. It is a

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"forced-choice situation," in which half the candidates disappear between the two ballots, thus making it impossible for a quarter of the voters to repeat their first-ballot choice. Converse and Pierce confirm the strength of negative voting and abstaining, especially as a "neighbor- loathing" attitude, in such a situation. Their data may be somewhat outdated in the France of today: the Socialist vote against the Communist candidates has probably not diminished, but the Communist vote against the Socialist candidates is due to prosper; on the right of the electoral spectrum, the extreme-right negative voting has replaced that of the opposition centre and is making the success of Jacques Chirac or Raymond Barre more uncertain in the next presidential election. But the main conclusion of these three chapters is more valid than ever: "Most voters . . . are prepared to follow the advice of their first-choice candidates. It is up to the candidates to render that advice unambiguously and emphatically" (p. 411).

When it comes to the main subject of the study-the French political system of representation-the two authors break new ground. The French contributions on the subject, from Dogan to Parodi, have been centered on the sociology and socialization of the parliamentary elites or on the constitutional aspects of the parliamentary system. Con- verse and Pierce, following Miller and Stokes, rightly remind us that there is a difference between representativeness in a sampling sense and representation according to interest.

The main finding is that, of all the models of representation, the best-fitted to the French system is the responsible party model, a para- doxical conclusion in a political culture traditionally oriented against the parties and in a Fifth Republic which was supposed to put an end to party rule. But the conclusion is inescapable when party discipline at parliamentary level attains as high a level as that documented in this study: at most 9% of all individual votes dissenting from the party posi- tion, only 3.5% if one allows for the permission of abstaining on a con- troversial issue. Such discipline is most impressive if one takes into account how easily the right could dissent from 1968 to 1973, when the gaullist and giscardian MPs held an enormous majority.

So, Converse and Pierce do demonstrate that "the grand archi- tectonics of the French political system . . . is the political party that is the 'designed vehicle' for political representation." The parties are the best vote aggregators, they perform the programmative function, and are the best predictors, if not the only ones, of parliamentary votes in the National Assembly. From a democratic point of view, this conclusion is not necessarily a pessimistic one. Party discipline, when the power comes through the ballot box in a majority system, is better than what Maurice

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Party Model

Duverger (1965) called "the democracy without the people" that charac- terized the Fourth and the Third Republics. Weaker and undisciplined parties were then practically unaccountable to the voters; the division between majority and oppositions in Parliament was uncertain, and fundamental changes occurred without recourse to new elections. Con- verse and Pierce rightly acknowledge the subtleties of the system of representation in the Fifth Republic, with its numerous and ever chang- ing parties channelled through the two-ballot majority electoral system and its other constitutional devices for efficiency. Their picture could have been completed by a study of the presidential election and presidential power, a crucial cohesive force in a centrifugal system. Although every political scientist is bound to agree that such a complex system of representation is more efficiently used by the rather thin stratum of the most attentive citizens, as the authors say, one may disagree with the idea that this most sensitive instrument is out of the reach of the common man.

At a time when education is more widespread, women's politicization greater, and the search for personal autonomy more intense, the electors' power-through the polls, through street demonstrations, and through issue voting-tends to call into question the long-term depend- ency models of mass electoral behavior.

Jean Charlot is Professor of Political Science, Institut d'Etudes Politiques, Paris, France.

REFERENCES

Deutsch, Emeric, Denis Lindon, and Pierre Weill. 1966. Les Familles politiques: Aujourd'hui in France. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit.

Duverger, Maurice. 1965. Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State. New York: Wiley.

Siegfried, Andre. 1930. Tableau des partis en France. Paris: Bernard Grasset.

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