Party Decline and Changing Party Systems: France and the French Communist Party

Abstract

France has produced numerous surprises in recent years, but few have been greater than the major change of its party system. The bipolarized multiparty system of the Gaullist 1960s, which had been greeted by many as a fitting and perhaps final rationalization of earlier partisan chaos, came apart beginning in the later 1970s. First Left, then Right coalitions disaggregated; the Socialists emerged as dominant players in the system; and finally, two new wild card parties broke through, the Greens and the racist Front National, who together with the declining Communist Party represented upwards of one-third of the electorate. This startling evolution is still underway.' The literature contains a number of ways of explaining such changes. The school, whose primary causal variables are found in social structures and the definitions of group interests flowing from them, finds much comfort in the French case: the relative decline of the French working class, the concomitant retreat of class concerns from political culture, growing concern with ethnicity, and the increased salience of postmaterial values bespeak basic changes in cleavage patterns.2 The functionalist approach, highlighting changes in the tasks that parties are called upon to perform, would also find considerable comfort: television and other media have assumed many of the tasks of political communication *which parties had earlier performed, opinion polling, honed in France to a subtle art form, has short-circuited party input functions, while various bureaucracies have increased their hold over policymaking and patronage dispensation. Finally, the bewildering variety of institutional changes which the French party system has had to face is enough to warm the hearts of institutionalists. A combination of important environmental developments and policy decisions affecting partisan activity has clearly promoted change in France's party system over the past two decades. There is some question, however, whether environmentalist theoretical perspectives can account for the outcomes. Environmental changes oblige parties to adapt outlooks and behaviors. But a party system's emerging from changing environmental factors can not be read out of these factors themselves. Put simply, environmental factors do not account for the ways in which parties as strategic actors perform the tasks of adaptation which the environment enjoins. The actual nature of party system change is best explained by an interactive perspective examining the interplay of general environmental factors and strategic partisan responses to them. This perspective, in which outcomes are a cumulative creation of responses on the part of such partisan actors, implies important methodological concerns. The nature of environmental challenge is never completely clear to partisan actors-or to anyone else, since the evolution of the social world is always uncertain and open-ended, shaped in