The Shape of Politics to Come? Intra-European Migration in a Rural French Community

Abstract

Comparing political values across national boundaries always runs the risk that national political settings act as a filter that distorts responses differentially across countries. Holding electoral procedures and electoral issues constant should bring into sharper focus culturally shaped political preferences. European local elections in a small French village with significant intra-European migration created a rare opportunity to compare different political mindsets within the context of the same institutional framework. Taking advantage of this opportunity and drawing on survey data collected using a variety of techniques, this paper seeks to determine whether the dispersion of political opinion in one national group is significantly different from that of another. In this way, we wish to draw the debate away from the globalization literature that looks at socio-economic phenomena in today's world purely in terms of macro-economic flows of capital, goods, labour, which inevitably tend to discount national and individual variances. Our work relates back to real people the broad events that have formed the focus of that literature, which paints a portrait of a near-complete dissolution of pre-existing nation-states' social structures. The findings indicate that national identities and cultures are alive and well in the lives of people who carry with them the heritage of their cultures' political and social assumptions and experiences.