Social Cleavage and the Revival of Far Right Parties: The Case of France's National Front
Abstract
Does the left-right cleavage still structure citizen political behavior? What are the explanatory limits of cleavage politics? These questions are examined in light of support for a contemporary far right party, France's National Front. Though the predominance of former moderate right voters testifies to the cleavage's enduring influence, the weight of former left voters (especially those from the non-Communist left) indicates the importance of citizen concern with crosscutting political issues. Beyond voter movement from left and moderate right parties alike, however, explanation of far right success must also attend to the contribution of previous non-voters as well as the emergence of a new partisan loyalty.
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1 A post-1918 party is classified as far right if it is extremist and opposed to the left. Both disloyal and semiloyal opposition (char acterized by conditional or ambiguous loyalty to democracy) are forms of extremism, for they fail to treat what is essentially a means of allocating and checking authority - democracy - as an end in itself (Linz 1978:27-38).
2 Dealignment here means the erosion of voter loyalty to older, more established parties, whereas realignment means growth in loyalty to new or hitherto marginal parties.
3 On systemic relevance, see Sartori (1976).
4 Survey data on the FN's supporters must be treated with caution. Early data are scarce, in part because the FN's break through caught pollsters by surprise (Lacroix 1985:555). Further more, sociological profiles and previous patterns of electoral behavior must be extrapolated from heterogeneous and incomplete data series because French political polls are not standardized (Ysmal 1994:367-370). Finally, respondents hide their support for the FN (Mayer & Perrineau 1990:169). Le Pen won 14.6 per cent of the vote in 1988, for example, but only 10.9 per cent of respondents in a national survey said they had supported him (Husbands 1991: 396,413).
5 The relationship between new far right support and other parties' previous share of the vote need not be zero-sum, however. The rising popularity of a far right party may increase the turnout by activating far right support among previous non-voters; or by provoking previous non-voters, whose alarm at the rise of right- wing extremism leads them to support other political forces.
6 The main moderate right parties of the past two decades (the Gaullists and the non-Gaullist moderate right) were founded after the FN, but in the following analysis they are considered older parties because they federated or replaced parties with similar leaderships, ideologies, organizations and electorates. More gener ally, voting for the older, non-Communist parties is aggregated to avoid an inflated calculation of electoral volatility due to 'frequent splits, reunifications, electoral alliances, and change in party names' (Bartolini & Mair 1990:316).
7 Levels of non-voting are therefore established by aggregating two kinds of French electoral data: abstention rates, and rates of invalid (i.e., spoilt or blank) ballots. Though this method misses voters who were eligible to vote but not registered, only an estimated 2 per cent of French citizens fall into this category. Note also that abstention does not necessarily indicate a lack of interest in politics: citizens who abstain often care about politics, but not for the available alternatives. Most citizens abstain at one time or another, so 'non-voters' or 'previous non-voters' includes otherwise regular voters (Subileau & Toinet 1993).
8 The data cannot be interpreted with greater precision because non-voters and 'no responses' are lumped into one category.
9 On the FN's internal organization and discipline, see Bire nbaum (1992); Marcus (1995).
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