Introduction

The Swiss political system is often viewed as an example of stability. The consensual style of politics, the unusual longevity of the grand coalition which forms the federal government, the high level of cooperation between social partners and the state, are all factors that explain or have contributed to this image. Further, such a perception is not only the point of view of outside observers. Kerr (1975), for example, emphasized in the 1970s that Switzerland had not faced any major political change since the late nineteenth century. This image is even reinforced by data from opinion surveys in this period, showing that Swiss citizens, in comparison with citizens of other European countries, are among the most satisfied with the state of their economy and political system (Sidjanski 1975).

Yet, over the last decades, Swiss politics have been marked by important developments. The transformations may seem to be less impressive, less dramatic than in neighbouring countries. But, at least by Swiss standards, they are significant and indicate deep changes in the social and economic basis of political cleavages. The single most important development is certainly the rise of the Swiss People's Party (SVP). A traditionally rural and Protestant party, it gradually changed its political orientation in the 1980s and early 1990s and has now become one of the most potent examples of the success of the populist right (Kriesi et al. 2005).

According to our assumptions outlined in the previous chapter, the political potentials created by the new cleavage are rather similar from one Western European democracy to the other. All these countries are characterized by increasingly comparable social, economic and cultural context conditions. Defined in most general terms, the relevant societal context characteristics which determine the political potential of the new cleavage in a given country include the relative strength of the country's traditional cleavages, the overall level of its economic and human development, its traditional openness to the world markets and its integration into the global community, its current economic difficulties, and its definition of the national community and the perceived threat to this community by processes of denationalization. While insisting on the broadly similar societal contexts of our six countries, we shall also point out some variability with regard to these general context characteristics, variability which mainly depends on the size of the countries. Three of our six countries belong to the small European democracies – Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands in that order – while our three other countries – France, the United Kingdom and Germany – are the three largest European democracies. In this chapter, we shall first consider one by one the societal context characteristics before moving on to a presentation of the more political context conditions.

Introduction

In their introduction to Dutch politics, Andeweg and Irwin (2005: 19) put the accent on the Netherlands as ‘a country of minorities’, without any doubt, as they maintain, ‘the single most important characteristic of Dutch politics’. During the nineteenth and early twentieth century, although a numerical minority, the Liberals had dominated Dutch politics thanks to franchise restrictions. As the franchise was enlarged, however, they were gradually crowded out of political power and became a minority among others. Those other minorities have been structured by religion and class. Andeweg and Irwin argue that a socio-economic left–right dimension and a religious–secular dimension have always been and still are of crucial importance for the structuration of Dutch politics.

As far as religion is concerned, the Catholics, who corresponded to about one-third of the population in the late nineteenth century, did not constitute the only minority, since the Protestants were divided into a more orthodox and a more mainstream current. The religious groups all created their own parties: in addition to the Catholic party (KVP), the religious differences gave rise to two major Protestant parties – the more orthodox Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP) and the more mainstream Christian Historical Union (CHU) – next to a host of additional small parties. The class based minority – the working class – entered the political arena relatively late due to the late industrialization of the country.

Introduction

This appendix presents supplementary information on the data collection process, on the operationalization of the variables and on the statistical methods used in this volume. This information is divided into five sections. In the first section, we explain how the data on the positions of parties during electoral campaigns were collected, and we present the criteria used to sample newspaper articles. The second section gives the detailed references of the individual-level datasets. The next two sections present the procedures used to operationalize individual-level variables, first in the case of social-structural variables (class, education, religion), then with respect to citizens' issue-positions. Part of the information on these operationalizations cannot be presented here for reasons of space. This concerns the tables indicating the recoding procedures for social-structural variables, as well as the detailed discussion of the measures of voters' attitudes. This information is, however, available from the website of the project (www.ipz.uzh.ch/npw/). In the fifth section of this appendix, finally, we turn to the statistical methods used in this volume and give more detailed information on multidimensional scaling and on the various indices and summary measures used in the comparative chapters.

Analysis of the supply side of electoral competition: data collection

All analyses of the supply side of electoral competition are based on an original dataset collected for this project on the content of mass media during electoral campaigns. We selected in each country a quality newspaper and a tabloid (or equivalent if there were no ‘true’ tabloids).

Introduction

All countries explored in this book face similar challenges due to globalization processes. Different reactions to these developments are the result of several contextual factors as well as of the strategies of political parties. But Germany has to deal with one additional major challenge that sets this country somewhat apart from the others: the ongoing struggle to complete reunification. Despite or maybe because of the astonishing and unexpectedly rapid development that ended with political reunification on 3 October 1990, the social and economic differences between the western and the eastern part of the country have remained a major problem. The East Germans have had to adapt themselves not only to liberal democracy and the market but also to an economy that became increasingly globalized in the 1990s.

For the traditional parties, reunification and the integration of a 15 million strong post-communist electorate was a ‘unique challenge’ (Jeffery 1999: 112). But the election of 1990, the first in the reunited Germany, resulted in a triumph for West Germany's core parties, proving their organizational strength (Betz 1999: 32). As a consequence of the ‘electoral colonization’ (Jeffery 1999: 97) of the Eastern Länder (states), the party system of the reunified Germany is in general the party system of the old Federal Republic (Pappi 1994: 221). Therefore, after some early forecasts of a return to Weimar conditions, with extreme ideological polarization and a high degree of fragmentation, at least since the mid-1990s the development of German party politics has been interpreted as undramatic (Niedermayer 1998; Mielke 2001; Stöss 2000).

Introduction

France clearly is one of the countries whose political landscape has been profoundly altered in the past two decades. Although organizational stability has never been a defining feature of the French party system, the new institutions of the Fifth Republic established in 1958 did progressively bring about a more stable pattern of ‘bipolar multipartism’ (Parodi 1989; Knapp 2002). Since the early 1980s, however, cultural conflicts related to the different conceptions of norms that should be binding in society, of the way community is conceived, and of the balance of power between the nation-state and the European Union have emerged. The appearance of these issues on the political agenda, and the rising prominence of an integration–demarcation line of conflict lie at the heart of the transformation of the French party system that took place in the 1980s and 1990s.

As a driving force of this transformation, and as one of the most successful right-wing populist parties, the French Front National represents something like the ‘prototype’ or the ‘avant-garde’ of a new party family. Earlier than in other countries, the extreme populist right achieved its electoral breakthrough in a number of second-order elections in the early 1980s. According to our theoretical framework, the early success of the Front National in comparative terms must be analyzed in the context of the country-specific political potentials and context structures.

This study deals with changing conflict structures in West European societies and their mobilization by political parties. In general, there are two basic approaches to handling such a question: the first one concentrates on the changing relationships between political actors and often resorts to concepts of network analysis (Laumann and Knoke 1987; Laumann and Pappi 1976; Knoke et al. 1996; Scott 2000; Wassermann and Faust 1999). In this book, we follow the second approach and analyze issue-positions of parties as well as of voters, since we are especially interested in the thematic basis of political conflicts. This is not only the standard approach in political science (e.g. Kitschelt 1994, 1995) but has recently become even more important because of the growing significance of issue-based voting behaviour (Downs 1957; Key 1966; Budge and Farlie 1983a; Franklin 1985; Aardal and van Wijnen 2005). We expect the parties, the main political actors in West European democracies, to select the issues they articulate in party competition as well as their positions strategically. But we also look at the other side of this competition where we are interested in the changing issue-positions of the voters. However, contrary to pure rational choice or individualistic approaches, we combine the issue-based approach with a structural perspective which is focused on the political attitudes of groups. According to our point of view, membership in social groups still constitutes an important basis for the development of issue-preferences.

Tables B.1 to B.12 present the data used for the MDS analyses, that is, the positions of parties on the twelve issue categories, as well as the salience with which they addressed these issues. The average issue positions are measured on a scale ranging from –1 to +1, with positive values indicating support for the corresponding aim, as expressed by the name of the issue category (for economic liberalism, for the welfare state, etc.). The salience of an issue for a given party is the percentage of issue statements of this party regarding this issue. Thus, the saliencies presented in this table sum to 100% for each party in each election. We present saliencies in this way as they make it easier to compare the profile of different parties. For the MDS analyses, however, these saliencies were further multiplied by the percentage of issue statements of the corresponding party in a given election (which are indicated on the right hand side of the tables). In this way, the saliencies sum to 1 for each election and indicate the relative importance of a party × issue combination in the overall campaign.

Introduction

As we have observed in Chapter 1, the political mobilization of the latent structural potentials constituted by the challenge of globalization gives rise to two interdependent dynamics – the transformation of both the basic structure of the national political space and the parties' positioning within the transforming space. On the one hand, parties react to the political conflicts and the associated preferences developing in the electorate and articulate them in the political arena. In this way, they restructure the political space. On the other hand, the individual parties position themselves strategically within the emerging spatial configuration of their competitors in the transformed space. According to our basic hypothesis, the parties who appeal to the preferences of the ‘losers’ of globalization constitute the driving force of the current transformation of the Western European party systems. We propose that the initial electoral success of these parties set in motion the transformation of the dimensional structure and the repositioning of the established parties within the transforming structure, which, in turn, contributes to the ongoing transformation of the dimensions of the political space.

As outlined in Chapter 2, there are a number of processes which contribute to the functional dealignment in Western European party systems, i.e. to a greater detachment of the voters from the parties in general. Thus, we agree with Kitschelt (2000: 164) and other authors that parties are, much more than they used to be, confronted with political preferences which result from exogenously determined, spontaneous developments in the electorate or from activities of independent media and political entrepreneurs who operate outside of the parliamentary arena.

The ‘reform of the state’ is one of the most powerful contemporary narratives in French politics, but it is deeply ambivalent. It rests upon the assumption that the state needs reforming, a diagnosis contested by public sector workers, mid-ranking civil servants and much of public opinion, but central to official reports such as the Picq report of 1994. In the largely constructivist French political science tradition, writers such as Rouban (1997, 2003) emphasise that a convincing discourse is needed to legitimise state reform in France, a discourse that is consistent with pre-existing ideational frames and institutional orders. Yet there is no commonly accepted overarching référentiel, or framework of ideas, in the field of state reform. In Chapter 2, three distinctive but interconnected versions of the reform of the state programmes are presented, based on administrative modernisation, contractualisation and budgetary reform. These cases each illustrate an important dimension of governance in France: the attempt by governmental elites to redefine the core of state activity to give a strategic sense to the centre under threat. The chapter begins by setting out in some detail the state-centric model in France and its limits. It then considers in turn administrative modernisation and instrumentation, contractualisation and budgetary reform as attempts by powerful actors at the core of the state to reaffirm their centrality. It concludes by relating the evidence from the state reform case to the framework of analysis defined in Chapter 1.

While ‘government’ evokes the sense of the regular exercise of hierarchical power across the whole range of areas of public policy, ‘governance’ describes a more mediated, context-specific process. The dynamics of public policy vary according to the nature of the policy problem, the characteristics of the policy sector, key historical junctures and path-dependent decisions and the configurations of the actors in play. For those analysts imbued with the concept, policy dynamics can best be understood by fine-grained comparisons of contrasting policy sectors. From this perspective, the dynamics in economic development, welfare or education are contingent upon the structural qualities of the sectors concerned, or, in a weaker definition, upon the structural context within which games are played or prevailing ideas or discursive registers diffused. Thus framed, policy sectors can be compared in terms of their ideational structures and discursive coalitions; their institutions, actors and networks; the exogenous or endogenous provenance of change therein; and their capacity for legitimising or resisting change.

Reasoning in terms of policy sectors, the approach adopted here for the sake of comparison, emphasises the contingent nature of power and process. Generalities, whether about power or the nature of the state, require fine-grained, meso-level analysis to be undertaken to provide support for or to falsify general propositions. Comparing distinct areas of public policy is a robust means of testing propositions about governance, as well as revisiting representations of France as a state-centric polity.

Governing as governance challenges core understandings of the traditional state-centric model, as the argument of the previous chapters has shown. Complex legal orders and interdependent relationships lay bare traditional beliefs about the supremacy of the state and the viability of a system of public law. Some interest groups have begun to shift the focus of their lobbying away from central government. The state itself now emphasises its own productivity as the key to future prosperity. Multi-level dynamics and the requirements of multi-actor coordination create new challenges for actors vested with public authority. The operation of the international political economy has produced metaphors of a hollow state that go to the very heart of the French statist model.

These various pressures are not simply accepted in a passive manner. This chapter shows how French academics and policy analysts have sought to understand and make sense of the changing environment in a way that is consistent with or builds upon accepted frameworks. It then argues that state officials view new management practices and organisational reforms through their own lenses as public servants and their own belief in the appropriate behaviour their professional status implies. Above all, the chapter suggests that the main national political parties and politicians attempt to make sense of their own activity and accord a pre-eminent role to politics and the state.

France's governors face key challenges in an age of state transformation and changing patterns of state–society relations. This book has embraced a critical version of the governance paradigm. Governance is best understood as a middle-range concept, rather than an overarching meta-narrative such as power or domination. Governance imposes a model on a complex reality. It identifies objects that are ontologically plural, and hence finds it difficult to identify precise dependent variables. Any framework for analysis must accommodate the contingent nature of governance itself, as well as its application to specific cases. This final chapter offers a series of concluding judgments about France's version of governance. Though the processes described throughout this book add up to very substantive change, there are countervailing and contradictory forces at play. The theme of governance is better at explaining change than continuity, but even change does not occur on a tabula rasa. It is processed, at least in part, by existing political institutions. It is interpreted by reference to sets of ingrained ideas and referential frames. It must brave the reaction of established interests. If the metaphor of governing as governance is central to the argument, governing can also take the form of resisting change. The second half of the book has presented much evidence of institutions, interests and ideas resisting the pressures for change that have been labelled collectively as governance.