What is left for parties? An overview of party mandate in France 1981–2009

Abstract

The review draws on the author’s recent book to explore the long-standing question of the influence of partisanship on policy implementation. Partisanship is traditionally expected to exert an influence on policy implementation, because, on the one hand, citizens perceive their vote as an expression of preference towards a certain set of policies, whereas, on the other, parties conceive policies as tools to differentiate themselves from one another in the electoral market. However, the consistence between parties’ preferences and the policies they enact is often questioned. I argue that party mandate is best understood as the correspondence between partisan and institutional agendas. Drawing on the Comparative Agendas Project data on Party Manifestos, Communiques du Conseil des Ministres and passed legislation (1981–2009), I show that party preferences matter but their influence on public policy is weak. Moreover, this study confirms that the institutional configuration has an impact on party mandate but exclusively with respect to the executive agenda. Finally, this research shows that French mainstream parties follow electoral business cycles, and party mandate appeared to be stronger in pre-electoral periods. The present research holds important implications for the study of the influence of parties on policymaking, on policy change and more in general for studies dealing with the quality of representative democracy.