Studying French political culture through surveys

How to Study Political Culture Without Naming It
Oxford Handbooks Online

Nonna Mayer and Vincent Tiberj
The Oxford Handbook of French Politics
Edited by Robert Elgie, Emiliano Grossman, and Amy G. Mazur
Print Publication Date: Nov 2016 Subject: Political Science, European Union, Political Behavior
Online Publication Date: Jan 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199669691.013.15
Abstract and Keywords
The boom in survey research, the increasing internationalization of political science, and
the development of large-scale comparative projects have renewed the study of political
culture and invalidated the notion of a French exceptionalism. But French scholars,
influenced by Marxism, social history, and Bourdieus legacy of critical sociology, still
have a different understanding of political culture, and prefer to use other concepts such
as ideology. After a rapid overview of the founding studies and debates, this chapter
shows how French research on political culture or cultures in the plural developed in its
own way, and outlines the major challenges it is facing today on issues such as race and
ethnicity, gender, globalization, and poverty.
Keywords: post-materialism, cultural studies, political socialization, cultural distinction, cultural voting, political
culture
FRENCH politics and culture have long been considered as an exceptional case. In the
1960s Philip Converse and George Dupeux (1962: 1) wrote:
The turbulence of French politics has long fascinated observers, particularly when
comparisons have been drawn with the stability or, according to ones point of
view, the dull complacency of American political life. Profound ideological
cleavages in France, the occasional threat of civil war, rather strong voter
turnout, the instability of governments and republics, and the rise and fall of
flash parties like the R.P.F. in 1951, the Poujadists in 1956 and the U.N.R. in
1958 have all contributed to the impression of a peculiar intensity in the tenor of
French political life.
Following on from this, some of the authors of In Search of France (Hoffmann et al.,
1963), like Jesse Pitts, although explicitly focusing on the transformation of post-war
France, still conveyed the idea of an irreducible national character.
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The boom of survey research; the increasing internationalization of political science; and
the creation and the development of comparative projects such as the Eurobarometers,
the European and the World Values Surveys (EVS/WVS), and more recently the European
Social Surveys (ESS) and the International Social Science Program (ISSP), have renewed
political culture studies and invalidated the notion of a French exceptionalism. But
French scholars have a different understanding of political culture, and prefer to use
other concepts (Schemeil, 1985: 2318). After a rapid overview of the founding studies
and debates, this chapter shows how the French research on political culture developed
following its own path, and outlines the major challenges it is facing today.
Milestones in the Comparative Study of

(p. 330)
Political Culture
There is a long tradition of studies about political culture in the European social sciences,
from Emile Durkheim defining collective consciousness as the system of beliefs and
sentiments ensuring the social cohesion of a society, to Max Weber analyzing the cultural
legitimacy of power and the spirit of capitalism. But in the aftermath of the Second World
War this field of study developed further in the United States, with the development of
survey research.
The Civic Culture and its Posterity
The Civic Culture (Almond and Verba, 1963) was the first large-scale comparative survey
on political culture. Its objective was to identify the factors of democratic stability.
Drawing from Harold Lasswells psychology of the democratic character, Talcott
Parsons sociology of culture, and the work of psycho-anthropologists such as Ruth
Benedict and Margaret Mead, the authors defined political culture as the cognitive,
affective, and evaluative orientations toward the political system and its inputs and
outputs, and toward the role of the self in politics. Based on samples drawn in United
States, Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and Mexico, the study sketched out three ideal
types of political culture: the participant culture (more developed in the first two
countries), the subject culture, and the parochial one. The civic culture congruent with
democracy was a balance between the three types, and was a mix of activism and
indifference. Civic attitudes were mainly learned in non-political settings; at school, at
work, in the family, and above all in voluntary associations, breeding trust and self-
confidence.
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The book inspired many follow-up studies, from Robert Putnams analysis of declining
social capital, defined as social networks, and the norms of reciprocity and
trustworthiness that arise from them and make democracy work (Putnam, 1993; 2000) to
Russell Daltons survey-based approach of changing political values and norms in
advanced industrial democracies (Dalton, 2008a; 2008b). But it was also much criticized
for its US-centered and developmentalist perspective, its psychological definition of
political culture, its blindness to differentiated subcultural groups, its deterministic bent,
and its neglect of the social and gendered bias of participation (for a summary see
Almond and Verba, 1980). As a consequence, later research gave more attention to
political inequalities of participation and the specific impact of gender, race, and
ethnicity (Nie, Verba, and Kim, 1978; Verba et al., 1993; Burns, Schlozman, and Verba,
2001). But the focus of main reproach was the works static definition of culture.
The Post-materialist Turn
In the wake of the social unrest of the 1970s, two books marked a new approach centered
on cultural change and value conflict. The first was The Silent Revolution (Inglehart,
1977). (p. 331) The core argument, inspired by the theory of needs of psychologist
Abraham Maslow, was that a process of intergenerational value change was gradually
transforming the political and cultural norms of advanced industrial societies, shifting
from materialism (giving priority to physical sustenance and safety) to postmaterialism
(giving priority to self expression and quality of life) (Inglehart, 1990: 66). Drawing from
comparative cross-sectional surveys (Eurobarometers and World Value Surveys),
Inglehart showed that this value change concerned above all the generations born and
raised in the post-war context, who benefitted from mass education and an exceptional
level of prosperity and security. The shift was part of a larger cultural change reshaping
gender roles toward more equality (Inglehart and Norris, 2003), and promoting
secularization (Inglehart and Norris, 2004).
The second book came out of the comparative survey Political Action (Barnes and
Kaase, 1977; Jennings and Van Deth, 1990). It showed that in the US, Britain, Austria,
Germany, and the Netherlands, Protest potential or support of unconventional modes of
action (demonstrations, strikes, occupations, etc.) was on the rise and correlated with
youth, education, left-wing orientations, and Ingleharts post-materialism index. Its
conclusions have been confirmed by all the follow-up surveys (Jennings and van Deth,
1990; van Deth and Scarbrough, 1995; Dalton, 2008a; 2008b; Brchon and Gonthier,
2014). Each new generation seems more critical and prone to elite-challenging actions,
in contrast with the former elite-directed ones (voting, party membership). Hence the
burgeoning of the new social movements (feminist, environmentalist, anti-nuke, pro-
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civil rights, etc.) and the rise of new parties, like the Greens. The Contentious
French (Tilly, 1986) still appear a little more prone to illegal strikes and street
demonstrations than other countries (Mayer, 2013; Dompnier, 2014: 59), but differences
are fading. The French have adopted ways of protest that were specific to other political
cultures, such as petitions and boycotts, while elsewhere demonstrations have become
usual.
The Shortcomings of Post-materialism
Inglehart fought for the renaissance of political culture studies, against rational-choice
models based on economics and interests, to explain politics and democratic support (see
for the debate Eckstein, 1988; Inglehart, 1988). But his theory of cultural change as well
as his methodology were sharply questioned (for an inventory see Schweisguth, 1997;
Abramson, 2011). For Scott Flanagan (1987) post-materialism mixed up two distinctive
shifts, one from materialist to non-materialist priorities, the other from authoritarian to
libertarian values. The far-right parties that have flourished in Europe since the
mid-1980s reject the post-materialist revolution, but not in the name of material interests.
A vast research field has opened up on the so-called second or non-economic dimension
of politics; on how, contrary to the traditional left/right cleavage based on class, this
depends mostly on education, and on how it expands the audience of far-right parties
(Kitschelt and McGann, 1995; Hooghe, Marks, and Wilson, 2002; Kriesi, 2008; van der
Waal, Achterberg, and Houtman, 2008).
Another major critique came from the psychologist Shalom Schwartz (1992), who
suggested a loose definition of values, which he saw as desirable and trans-situational
(p. 332) goals serving as guiding principles in peoples lives, rather than just attitudes. In
line with Milton Rokeachs Inventory of human values, he outlined ten basic
orientations (achievement, hedonism, stimulation, self-direction, universalism,
benevolence, tradition, conformity, security, and power) which could be summarized
under two headings: the self-enhancement vs. self-transcendence dimension, placing
power and achievement values in opposition to those of universalism and benevolence;
and the openness to change vs. conservation dimension, placing values of self-direction
and stimulation in opposition to those of security, conformity, and tradition. Schwartz
considered his method superior to Ingleharts because it was not context dependent and
was less politics oriented. Thanks notably to its integration in the European Social
Survey, his work spurred a new block of research reassessing value change in Europe.
The basic value structure is the same in all countries, only their rankings change. In
France a supplementary divide was discovered, placing those who emphasize rationality
in opposition to those who emphasize intuition (Wach and Hammer, 2003).
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Cultural Studies and Beyond
In sharp contrast with this survey-based comparative political culture research is the
approach of culture as shared meanings and identities. This trend mixes many
intellectual traditions. The sociologist Herbert Blumer, founder of the symbolic
interactionism school, was one of the first to underline the artifactual and atomistic
nature of opinion polls. His followers at Chicago University, like Erving Goffman, Howard
Becker, Anselm Strauss, and Everett Hughes, focused on the interactions of ordinary
people in their everyday lives, accessed by life stories, in-depth interviews, or participant
observation. The constructivist school (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Schutz and
Luckmann, 1973) unveiled the mechanisms of the social construction of reality and of
culture, of which the researcher and his theories are part, and in which science is a
construction among others. Clifford Geertz, founder of the symbolic anthropology school,
building on his fieldwork on the state in Bali, stressed the political importance of
protocols, ceremonies, and symbols in the construction of public meaning. His seminal
work, The Interpretation of Cultures (1973), gave a dynamic and interactive ring to
culture, miles away from the once-and-for-all typology of Almond and Verba.
Emblematic of these trends is the British school of cultural studies that took shape at
the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, established in 1964 by Richard Hoggart
and Stuart Hall (for an introduction, see Chen and Morley, 1996) at the University of
Birmingham. With Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson, they founded a new
transdisciplinary, anti-positivist, and critical way to look at culture. They focused on
cultural domination, power and race relations, multiculturalism and post-colonialism; but
also on the resilience of dominated groups and popular publics, their capacity to decode
and recode the message of the media and mass culture, and to achieve a worldwide
influence (see also Neveu and Mattalard, 2008).
(p. 333) In Search of French Political Culture(s)

Research on political culture in France developed on parallel but somewhat different
tracks, drawing from an different epistemology to that of the pioneering American
studies. Influenced by Marxism, French social sciences give more importance to conflict,
class struggle, and domination than to civic attitudes, and prefer the term ideology to
that of political culture. There is no large-scale French study equivalent to The Civic
Culture, with the exception of a little book by Jean Meynaud and Alain Lancelot (1961),
immediately dismissed as behaviorist (Gerbet and Grosser, 1961). The first study
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devoted to political participation per se was Bernard Dennis doctoral dissertation in

1986. French scholars showed more interest in non-participation, whether in the form of
depoliticization (Vedel, 1962), abstention (Lancelot, 1968), refusal to answer questions
about politics in polls (Bourdieu, 1973; Michelat and Simon, 1982), political exclusion
(Gaxie, 1978), or disengagement (Fillieule, 2005). As for methods, the behavioralist
paradigm was not well received in the country of Auguste Comte and Emile Durkheim.
Although polling techniques were introduced early by Jean Stoetzel in 1938, and the first
electoral survey was conducted in 1956, at the National Foundation for Political Science
where he was a teacher, a strong opposition developed in university circles to opinion
polls. Sociologists like Georges Gurvitch or Georges Friedmann openly expressed their
hostility to a technique seen as too American, hyper-empiricist, and subject to political
manipulation. Criticism grew as the technique spread, and two articles by the sociologist
Pierre Bourdieu (1972 and 1973) marked the start of a lasting divide. Survey-based
research developed at Sciences Po, Paris, particularly at CEVIPOF, the Center for Studies
of French Political Life (Mayer and Sauger; 2011; Mayer, 2015), and beyond in the
network of the Instituts dtudes politiques. Elsewhere, however, the symbolic dimension
of politics was favored, and qualitative approaches were preferred to big surveys
(Billordo and Dumitru, 2006).
Two Antagonistic Subcultures
Classe, religion et comportement politique (Michelat and Simon, 1977) is the seminal
work on French political culture for political sociologists. Funded by the Communist
party, the study aimed at studying the meanings (systems of values, representations,
symbols, affective valorisations, etc.) that, associated with political behaviours, allow us
to make sense of them and understand their eventual evolutions (Michelat and Simon,
1977: 5). It combined in-depth interviews with a representative survey of French voters
conducted in 1967. The authors found two antagonistic social subcultures that structured
the vote. The first was a working-class culture based on class awareness, collective
solidarity, and identification with the Left, particularly the Communist party, (p. 334)
perceived as the party which defended the workers. The more integrated a person was to
the working-class milieu, as measured by the number of class attributes (being a
worker oneself, having a working-class father or spouse, etc.), the more likely she was to
feel part of the working class, and support the Left. The second subculture was Catholic-
conservative and individualistic, centerd on religion, defending the individual and
property against the state and communism, and identifying with the Right. Michelat and
Simons founding work was the starting point for similar research on political cultures in
the plural, from army non-commissioned officers (Schweisguth et al., 1970) to managers
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(Grunberg and Schweisguth, 1979) and small shopkeepers (Mayer, 1986), and beyond, to
all social and political groups composing French society (Brchon and Perrineau, 2000).
Political Socialization
Another milestone was the study of political socialization by Annick Percheron (for an
introduction see Mayer and Muxel, 1993). The concept was developed by Herbert Hyman
(1959), applying to politics a notion first coined by Durkheim to describe the way young
generations learn the norms and rules necessary to the reproduction of society.
Percheron, who completed her doctoral studies in the US, was influenced by David
Easton, Fred Greenstein, and Kent Jennings pioneering empirical surveys of children and
teenagers in the 1960s, as well as by the genetic psychology of Charles Piaget and Pierre
Bourdieus concept of habitus (see below). Her starting hypotheses were that the
socialized were not passive, and that socialization lasted for ones whole life and was part
of a more general process; the construction of ones identity. Her first survey was about
political socialization of some 500 pupils between 10 and 15 years old, in two schools
around Paris. She used projective techniques more adapted to children. The political
universe of young children she described was coherent, formed very early (Percheron,
1974), and was very different from the political universe of American children. The
benevolent image of political authorities and regime in the United States contrasted
sharply with the negative image of parties, unions, and leaders in France, where politics
was associated with division and conflict, and massively rejected. The only consensual
notions were the tricolor flag, the Republic, and the homeland.
Percherons second major contribution was to show how the French political scene was
structured by the left/right divide, while Americans thought in terms of party
identification with the Republicans or the Democrats. Comparing French and American
children, Philip Converse and George Dupeux (1962) saw discontinuities in the
transmission of party identification as the main reason of the Fourth Republics structural
instability. Working with paired samples of parents and their children, Percheron showed
that the discontinuity disappeared almost completely if one relied on left/right self-
placement (1981). Actually, just after religious values, political preferences displayed the
highest rate of transmission by parents to children. Various works have confirmed that
the left/right divide still remains essential: among the French, of all ages, even (p. 335)
though the content and significance of left and right have much evolved since the 1970s
(Jaffr and Muxel, 1997; Muxel, 2001; Michelat and Tiberj, 2007).
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A French Version of Post-materialism?
Very close to Ingleharts materialist/post-materialist indicator is the scale of cultural

liberalism devised by Grard Grunberg and Etienne Schweisguth (1981). For the authors
the main factors explaining the rise of the Left in 1978 and its victory in 1981 were
increasing secularization, a demand for state interventionism in the economy
(nationalizations), but above all the development of cultural liberalism (social
libertarianism)a set of hedonistic, anti-authoritarian, pro-choice values, developed in
the wake of the May 1968 events. The highest scores on the scale were found among
young, educated, middle-class voters. At the time the authors did not mention Ingleharts
work, but they would later, when they theorized cultural liberalism as the distinctive
feature of the new salaried middle classes, far closer to the economically interventionist
but culturally liberal socialist Left than to the Communist party. Their findings
anticipated the debate about the new politics in post-industrial societies, but because of
the isolationism of French political science, they were not acknowledged. Later, the
authors split their cultural liberalism index into three distinctive dimensions: sexuality
and mores, relations to authority, and the universalism/anti-universalism divide.
Cultural Distinction
Another central contribution to the study of culture and politics comes from the work of
Pierre Bourdieu, especially his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
(1979, translated in 1984). The study focused on the social conditions that produce taste
and showed how cultural distinctions and lifestyles (ways of eating, drinking, and
entertaining, listening to music, and going to the movies) served in a subtle way to
reinforce the mechanisms of social and political domination. Class positions were defined
by the volume of their economic, social, and cultural capital and by their structure (the
respective weight of cultural versus economic capital). The main cleavage placed the
dominant classes, more likely to vote for the Right, in opposition to the dominated ones
more likely to vote for the Left; a secondary cleavage placed the dominant-
dominant (business owners, managers) in opposition to the dominated-
dominant (intellectuals, teachers, artists, with little economic capital but large cultural
capital) tempted by a temporary alliance with the working classes. The central concept
was habitus, an acquired system of generative schemes objectively adjusted to the
particular conditions in which it is constituted (Bourdieu, 1977: 95), ensuring the
reproduction of the social, cultural, and political order. The last chapter was about
political culture, analyzed as an instrument of class domination. Daniel Gaxie followed
up Bourdieus work with Le cens cach, that is the hidden disfranchisement, in 1978,
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showing how the less-educated voters exclude (p. 336) themselves from the polls because
they lack both the objective and subjective competence to understand the complex world
of politics.
Bourdieus monumental work sparked a lot of criticism for its social determinism and
incapacity to explain change. People have plural identities, and they change throughout
their lifetimes (Lahire, 1998). Yet Bourdieus theories have had a lasting influence in
France and abroad. A recent symposium (Coulangeon and Duval, 2013) exploring the
international reception of La Distinction shows the enduring relevance of his insights on
topics as diverse as food practices, political attitudes, housing conditions, forms of
residential and geographic mobility, attitudes in the areas of mores and the family,
educational styles, cultural practices, etc. Bourdieu is now considered one of the ten
major sociologists of the twentieth century (Coulangeon and Duval, 2013: 1415).
A New Cultural Look at Social Movements
Another pivotal figure was post-Marxist sociologist Alain Touraine, among the first to coin
the expression new social movements (describing, for example, the causes of women,
minorities, and ecologists) and to connect their rise to the emergence of post-industrial
society (Touraine, 1969). To study these movements, Touraine and his colleagues
elaborated a new method, sociological intervention, based on the active implication of
the researchers with their object. And their focus shifted from economic class interests to
identity, values, and culture as drivers of mobilization.
A second generation of studies went even further in this direction, stimulated by the rise
in the 1990s of a new generation of movements that connected materialist and post-
materialist claims: workers coordinations rejecting the existing unions and
associations, radical anti-AIDS networks such as Act Up, global justice protesters led by
ATTAC, and movements defending the social rights of the have-nots (les sans), that is,
those without papers, without a job, without a roof, etc. (Sommier, 2003; Crettiez and
Sommier, 2006). The reader edited by Olivier Fillieule, Eric Agrikoliansky, and Isabelle
Sommier (2010) is a good introduction to this burgeoning field of research. The message
was that the contentious politics paradigm imported from the United States had
stretched its main concepts too far (mobilizing structures, political opportunity structure,
frame analysis, repertoire) and was losing its explanatory power. Instead, they pleaded
for a cultural, historicized, and recontextualized approach to the study of social
movements, taking a long-term processual perspective, comparing non-Western forms
of protest and extending the boundaries of social movements to include acts of resistance
or self help. Their perspective was explicitly interactionist and actor-centered, looking for
the meaning individuals give to their actions, to their emotions and affects, to the way
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they accepted or modified their frames of interpretation (Cefai and Trom, 2001) at the
micro level. They turned away from quantitative methods, with the exception of the
pioneering studies of demonstrations by Danielle Tartakowsky and Olivier Fillieule
(Fillieule, 1997; Tartakowsky, 1997; 1998; 2004; Fillieule and Tartakowsky, 2008) and the
invention of individual surveys in rallies (INSURA), a tool developed (p. 337) in France
as early as 1994 (Favre, Fillieule, and Mayer, 1997; Fillieule and Blanchard, 2010) and
applied on a large scale in Europe since (Agrikoliansky and Sommier, 2005; Sommier,
Fillieule, and Agrikoliansky, 2008; van Stekelenburg et al., 2012, on the new CCC
(Caught in the Act of Protest: Contextualizing Contestation) project. They anticipated the
cultural turn taken since by American studies of social movements (Johnston and
Klandermans, 1995). The result was a rich collection of case studies on the subcultures
giving birth to unlikely mobilizations, by prostitutes, illegal immigrants, precarious art
performers (intermittents du spectacle), seen as laboratories of
democracy (Mouchard, 2010).
The French Socio-history of Politics
Last, but not least, a growing body of literature began to investigate the historical making
of political culture and citizenship. It has proposed, for instance, a neo-institutionalist
approach to the emergence of French electoral democracy, focusing on voting rituals and
rules, and the symbolic dimension of the act of voting (Dloye and Ihl, 2007). Starting
with the pioneering work of the historian Maurice Agulhon and his study of the Republic
in the village (Agulhon, 1979), a major French school of socio-history has taken shape
(for an introduction, see Buton and Mariot, 2006). Claiming to be different from historical
sociology as well as from sociological history, it has its own review, Genses, sciences
sociales et histoire, and a book series Socio-histoires, co-edited by Michel Offerl and
Grard Noiriel.
Todays Research Challenges

France is now well integrated in almost all large-scale comparative projects (EVS, ISSP,
ESS, EES). Basically, long-term value trends are similar throughout Europe, even if their
timing and pace can differ from one country to another. Almond and Verbas study
explored what held citizens together and what linked them to the state. Today, micro-
level and ethnographic observations show an increasing fragmentation of political
cultures and the rise of identity politics. Research has shifted to what makes citizens
different and unequal, in multicultural and diverse societies. It focuses on their changing
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attitudes toward politics, in a globalized world where the nation state is no more the only
locus of politics. The recent research developing in France takes a fresh look at these
challenges.
Bring the Citizens Back In
Representative democracy is clearly under pressure: turnout rates are declining, while
contentious modes of action have spread. Consequently, a growing number of French
(p. 338) scholars, led by figures such as Loc Blondiaux and Yves Sintomer (2002) have
been investigating if and how participative democracy tools can bring citizens back to the
heart of the political scene. This has led to varied research on: how different groups voice
their message; which participative devices assure a relative equality among voters and
which do not; and how to stimulate electoral mobilization in disadvantaged suburbs
(Braconnier and Dormagen, 2007). This lively field of research has led to the creation of a
new journal simply called Participation. This is quite a change in a country where
previous work rejected the very concept of political participation as ideologically biased
(Memmi, 1985).
Post-national Citizens
Another line of research explores how citizens, in a globalized world, connect with the
different levels (national, transnational, local), and which matter most to them. Yasemin
Soysal (1994) coined the concept of post-national citizenship. Saskia Sassen (2002) has
pointed more generally to the de-nationalization of politics. One of the main issues is
assessing the impact of the European integration process and the possible emergence of
a European citizenship and identity. Perhaps the most abrasive introduction to the debate
is the special issue of Politique europenne coordinated by Sophie Duchesne, which
explores the idea of a European identity somewhere between political science and
science fiction (2010) and brings together scholars from different disciplines, using
different methods. Paradoxically, all authors point to the very low saliency of the
European issue, in sharp contrast with the common idea, conveyed by Eurobarometer
data, of a rising Euro-pessimism and criticism of the EUs democratic deficit (see also
Duchesne, Frazer, and Haegel, 2013). A second finding is that European identity, when it
exists, is not in contradiction with national identity, but that they reinforce each other.
The last and perhaps more far-reaching conclusion comes from Adrian Favells in-depth
study of free-moving cosmopolitans, the Eurostars and Eurocities customers (Favell,
2011). They are not the prototype of an emerging involved European citizenry. But they
do practice a non-partisan mode of participation, as consumers, public service users,
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neighbours, and cultural entrepreneurs, integrating Europe from below. This finding
resonates with the early work of Sophie Duchesne (1997) sketching out two models of
citizenship in France: the inheritance model characterized by a strong identification to
the nation; and the scrupules modelindividualistic, typical already of citizens of the
world, taking their distance from a citizenship solely defined by ones nation of birth. It
is also in line with more recent work such as Henrik Bangs conceptualization of
everyday makers and expert citizens. These scholars do not address the state; they
prefer to engage in the building and running of governance networks and reflexive
political communities. They invent a variety of small everyday tactics and narratives,
which make a difference (Bang, 2005).
Symmetric with the Europeanization/globalization debate and sometimes complementary

to it is the debate placing rootedness in opposition to transnationalismglobal to local.
Patrick Le Gals and his colleagues (Andreotti, Fuentes, and Le Gals, 2012) have
explored the mix of mobility and belongingness characteristic of the upper middle
(p. 339) classes in four large European citiesParis, Madrid, Milan, and Lyon. They show
a complex blend of cosmopolitanism and rootedness, of proximity and distance in relation

to local social groups and politics. At one extreme one finds the nomads/barbarians,
genuine uprooted citizens displaying partial exit strategies. At the other are the local
stalwarts, anchored and self-segregated in their local communities.
New Social Stratification; New Political Cultures
French and European scholars are focusing on how societies are transforming around
new social and geographical cleavages, and the political consequences of these changes.
A blooming block of research looks at the unskilled working classes exposed since the
mid-1970s to unemployment, job insecurity, and semi poverty. They are close to what
Elisabeth Cohen has called semi-citizens (Cohen, 2009). They also remind us of the
rising category of outsiders,with insecure jobs or no jobs at all, and little social
protectionas opposed to stable and protected insiders (Emmenegger et al., 2012).
Because these groups are overrepresented in dilapidated suburbs, there also seems to be,
at least in France, a relocalization of politics, in relation to the territorialization of social
policies. In the past citizenship was rooted in the workplace; now it is in the place of
residencethe working class is no more, just inhabitants (see Merklen, 2012; Bgue,
2011; Castel and Martin, 2012). As a consequence, the ties of these outsiders with
party politics have eroded. Braconnier and Dormagen (2007) show this in their
ethnographic study of a housing project in the former communist suburbs of Paris, where
over 60 percent of the inhabitants do not vote; where many have lost the very habit of
going to the polls, with no family or friends around them to mobilize them on election
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day. Just above, at the border between the lower middle class and the upper working
class, a new group attracts attention; the petits moyens (Cartier et al., 2008). Hard
work allowed them to become home owners, and to achieve a modest upward mobility.
But the neighborhood has deteriorated, immigrant families have settled in, and
precariousness has developed. The petits moyens are afraid of falling down the social
ladder. They resent the rich abovethose who havebut also the poorthe assisted,
welfare recipients belowfeeling that they pay for them (on this tri-partition of the
social conscience linked to the decline of working-class solidarity, see Schwartz, 2009).
And this resentment is feeding support for the exclusionist ideas of the National Front
(Peugny, 2009).
More generally there is a renewed interest in contextual approaches to politics

(Braconnier, 2010) and electoral studies at the local level, as shown by the developments
of large-scale projects such as Cartlec (Cartographie des grandes villes franaises
lchelle des bureaux de vote: <http://www.cartelec.net/>) or PAECE (Pour une approche
cologique des comportements lectoraux), coordinated by Jean-Yves Dormagen. These
approaches shed new light on what citizenship means to people, from those on the higher
to those on the lower rungs of the social ladder; from Pariss deprived suburbs, to the
gentrified West of the city, where the upper bourgeoisie is not as civic and politicized
as one might expect (Agrikoliansky, 2013).
(p. 340) Race, Ethnicity, and immigration
A fast-developing research field, and one that for a long time was almost absent in
France, explores the relationship of ethnic and religious minorities with politics. The
Marxist tradition considered class more important than any other characteristics,
including race and ethnicity (Jaunait and Chauvin, 2012). The French universalist
republican model is color blind. Still now, the very notion of ethnic statistics is highly
controversial, making it difficult to conduct surveys on minorities for comparison with, for
instance, the Ethnic Minority British Election Survey (EMBES). With the exception of the
pioneering work of Catherine Wihtol de Wenden on the politicization of immigrants
(1988), it was only in the mid-1990s that the first studies of immigrants electoral
participation appeared. Since then, a growing number of studies have examined the field
of migrant-origin French identities (Venel, 2004; Ribert, 2006). In 2005 the first large-
scale survey of French immigrant citizens politics was conducted by Sylvain Brouard and
Vincent Tiberj (2011). And in 2008 a monumental public survey on trajectoires et
origines (TeO), was conducted by INSEE (the census office) and INED (National
Institute for Demographic Studies), showing how diverse the relations betweenpolitics
Page 13 of 27

and citizenship are, depending on country of origin and generation (Tiberj and Simon,
2012).
A connected field of research focuses on the relation between religion and politics. The
place of Islam is particularly well studied in a country like France, which has one of the
largest estimated Muslim communities in Europe; a community which is more and more
visible in the public space and which is often described as at odds with supposed
European mainstream values. Brouard and Tiberj challenge the idea of a crisis of
integration of the new French immigrants, as well as of their children and
grandchildren born in France, and show, despite existing differences, that they share a
wide scope of behaviors and values with other French citizens. On this matter France is
now a regular case study in comparative research (see for example Fetzer and Soper,
2005), and a laboratory both for understanding how Islam can (re)shape European
political culture and also how mainstream society reacts, accepting or rejecting it. There
is the heated debate about rising islamophobia, fueled not only by the xenophobic
platform of the French extreme Right, but by state policies such as the laws banning first
the headscarf in state schools, then the face veil in public (Mayer et al., 2014; Hajjat and
Mohammed, 2013).
Gender
Another rapidly expanding field of research in France, in line with the pioneering work of
Janine Mossuz-Lavau and Mariette Sineau (Mossuz-Lavau and Sineau, 1983) is gender
studies (Bereni et al., 2008), particularly the persisting gender gap in political attitudes
and political participation. The laws on la parit have marked a major improvement (see
Lpinard, 2007), allowing more women to be candidates and to be elected, though they
are still underrepresented. But, interestingly for political engagement and knowledge
indicators, women, even the educated and middle class, still score systematically and
(p. 341) dramatically lower than men (Chiche and Haegel, 2002; Schemeil et al., 2008). It
seems to be a global phenomenon, according to a recent ten-nation study of media
systems and national political knowledge, done for the UKs Economic and Social
Research Council (<http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2013/07/02/study-wide-
political-knowledge-gap-exists-between-men-and-women>). But it could also be an effect
of the way questions are framed (Mondak and Anderson, 2004). When facing quiz-type
questions, being asked to answer yes or no, or select the true answer, men take the risk
and guess, while women are far more willing to admit their ignorance. The same goes for
the gender gap in levels of political participation. As shown recently by Coff and
Bolzendahl (2010) in their comparative article on 18 Western democracies, the issue is
not so much that women participate less, but that they participate differently. Controlling
Page 14 of 27

for all socioeconomic and ideological variables, women are more likely than men to go to
the polls and be engaged in private activism (boycott/buycott for instance), while men
are more likely to have engaged in direct-contact, collective types of actions
(demonstrations and more active party membership).
Cultural Voting
In the wake of the debates surrounding the rise of the non-economic second dimension
of politics, the concept of cultural voting has gained importance. In the USA, the issue
brought into opposition Thomas Franck (Whats the matter with Kansas?, 2004) and
Larry Bartels (Whats the Matter with Whats the Matter with Kansas?, 2006), the latter
finding no evidence for such a trend. In Europe, Jeroen van der Waal and his colleagues
(2008) held a different position: Class is not deadit has been buried alive, under the
weight of cross-cultural voting, pushing the less educated to the Far Right on issues of
immigration and authority, and the better educated toward the Left, on socially
libertarian issues. What is the case in France? Is there or is there not a growing
importance of cultural non-economic issues in the public debate and the voting booth?
Do they influence the votes more than economic issues, even following the Great
Recession of 2008? And as a result has education, instead of class, become the key
variable of political orientations? France may be an interesting case because of the early
success of the National Front in the 1980s. Grunberg and Schweisguth (1997), followed
by Chiche et al. (2000), were early to conceptualize the tri-partition of the French
political space on the basis of cultural values. The main divide no longer sets the Right in
opposition to the Left, but the extreme Right to both the Left and the Right (Grunberg
and Schweisguth, 1997; and see also their debate with Jocelyn Evans and Robert
Andersen, in several issues of French Politics, from 2003 to 2005).
Peter Achterberg (2006) investigated the reality of issue change and the rise of new
political cultures in the post-war period in 20 Western countries, including France. On
the basis of political party manifestos, his first conclusion was that class issues have
neither decreased nor increased in importance and that newcultural and environmental
issues have risen in importance. Second, using data provided by the (p. 342) World
Values Surveys (19902000), he demonstrated that the observed changes in political
cultures have led to lower levels of class voting. A third conclusion was that the
importance of old and new issues in the public debate conditions individual voting
motives: the rise of these new issues undermines traditional classparty alignments. But
the very concept of cultural voting needs clarification, for some of the above so-called
non-economic issues, such as immigration or welfare chauvinism, can equally be seen
as economic. In France this has given an impulse to methodologically innovative
Page 15 of 27

research, based on systematic comparative data analysis and long-term time series. For
example, Tiberj (2012), analyzing French presidential elections since 1988, demonstrated
the rising impact of cultural values on support for the Socialist Party and the UMP and
showed that this explains the changes in the sociological profile of their electoral base. In
addition, Gougou and Labouret (2013) have shown that the value profiles of UMP and FN
voters are becoming more and more similar, the Right as a whole moving to the cultural
right.
The Culture of Poverty Revisited
A last challenge, in the aftermath of the 2008 Great Recession, is the extension of poverty
and precariousness, undermining citizenship and political participation of large segments
of the population (Braconnier and Mayer, 2015). The concept of a culture of poverty,
coined by Oscar Lewis, is controversial, and is often interpreted as a way to blame the
poor, more specifically African Americans, for their situation, and to justify cutting
welfare expenditure. It is making a comeback in the United States, with research
stressing the diversity of poverty subcultures, the way they can help eachother to resist,
and the importance of symbolic boundaries (Harding, Lamont, and Small, 2010). It is the
same in France (see the special issue of La Vie des ides coordinated by Nicolas Duvoux,
2010), where the study of Hugues Lagrange on second-generation migrants of African
descent (2010) in particular has sparked fierce criticism for its alleged
culturalism (Mucchielli, 2010). Lagranges conclusion is that the difficulties of the sub-
Saharan African youth (juvenile delinquency, high failure rate at school) stem partly from
their family context, where traditional norms from their countries of origin predominate.
These findings show the need to work more on the articulation of poverty and ethnicity,
so as to understand better the transformations taking place in the disadvantaged urban
suburbs of France.
Conclusion
France may not be, and probably never was, exceptional. Just like other countries, it
has its idiosyncrasies, such as its Hunting, Fishing, Nature, and Tradition Party, its
republican model, and its vibrant culture of protest. It also has specific research
traditions, (p. 343) which at times have insulated it from mainstream international
debates. This is less and less the case. Methods, theories, andconcepts are going global.
Multilateral comparison is the key term here. French research on political (sub)cultures
is thriving, in spite of its reticence to use the term culture. It contributes to our global
Page 16 of 27

understanding of increasingly topical issues such as support for democracy and extension
of citizenship, and also of problems like declining electoral participation and political
inequality, and how to overcome these. The situation could improve in two directions. The
first, pointed out by Frdric Sawicki and Johanna Simant with regard to studying
trends in political involvement, is not to lose sight of the global picture, and to link the
more tightly detailed monographs at the grassroots level to macrosocial factors and
structures (Sawicki and Simant, 2009). The second issue for French research to address
is its reluctance to employing quantitative methods; it needs to engage more with
comparative survey research on political culture. By building on its own scientific
traditions (socio-history, Bourdieus legacy of critical sociology, etc.) and its innovations
in qualitative methodology, French political science can shed new light on the scholarly
debates of today.
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Page 26 of 27

Nonna Mayer
Nonna Mayer is Emerita CNRS Research Director at the Centre dtudes
Europennes of Sciences Po, and chair of the French Political Science Association.
Her main research topics are political attitudes and behavior, with a focus on right-
wing extremism, racism and anti-Semitism, and the electoral impact of gender and
precariousness. Her last book was Les faux-semblants du Front National. Sociologie
dun parti politique (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2015) (co-edited with S. Crpon
and A. Dz).
Vincent Tiberj
Vincent Tiberj is currently Associate Professor at Sciences Po, Bordeaux, for the
201518 period. Previously, he was Associate Research Professor FNSP at Sciences
Po between 2002 and 2015, first at CEVIPOF and then the CEE. He specializes in
comparative electoral behavior (France, United States, and Europe), the political
psychology of ordinary citizens, the sociology of inequalities, the politics of
immigration and integration, and survey research and methodology.
Page 27 of 27

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How to Study Political Culture Without Naming It

Oxford Handbooks Online

Abstract and Keywords

Subscriber: Northwestern University; date: 21 February 2017

Milestones in the Comparative Study of

The Civic Culture and its Posterity

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The Post-materialist Turn

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The Shortcomings of Post-materialism

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Cultural Studies and Beyond

(p. 333) In Search of French Political Culture(s)

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devoted to political participation per se was Bernard Dennis doctoral dissertation in

Two Antagonistic Subcultures

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A French Version of Post-materialism?

Very close to Ingleharts materialist/post-materialist indicator is the scale of cultural

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A New Cultural Look at Social Movements

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The French Socio-history of Politics

Todays Research Challenges

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Bring the Citizens Back In

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Symmetric with the Europeanization/globalization debate and sometimes complementary

a complex blend of cosmopolitanism and rootedness, of proximity and distance in relation

New Social Stratification; New Political Cultures

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More generally there is a renewed interest in contextual approaches to politics

(p. 340) Race, Ethnicity, and immigration

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The Culture of Poverty Revisited

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Agrikoliansky, E. (2013). Politisation et engagements des classes suprieures dans la

Agulhon, M. (1979). La rpublique au village. Paris: Seuil.

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Andersen, R. and Evans, J. (2003b). Reply: Framing Change in Political Bloc

(p. 344) Bgue, M. (2011). Le rapport au politique des personnes en situation

Billordo, L. and Dumitru, A. (2006). French Political Science: Institutional Structures in

Blondiaux, L. and Sintomer, Y. (2002). Limpratif dlibratif, Politix 57: 1735.

Bourdieu, P. (1972). Les doxosophes, Minuit 1: 2645.

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Harvard:

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Braconnier, C. and Dormagen, J. Y. (2012). Logiques de Mobilisation et Ingalits

Brouard, S. and Tiberj, V. (2011). As French as Everyone Else? A Survey of French

Buton, F. and Mariot, N. (2006) Socio-histoire, in Dictionnaire des ides, 2, volume de

Castel, R. and Martin, C. (2012). Changements et penses du changement. Echanges avec

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Cohen, E. (2009). Semi-Citizenship in Democratic Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge

Dalton, R. (2008b). The Good Citizen. (Washington, DC: CQ Press).

Denni, B. (1986). Participation politique et dmocratie: dfinition et facteurs de la

Dompnier, N. (2014). Valeurs politiques et rpertoires daction des Europens, in

Duchesne, S. (1997). Citoyennet la franaise. Paris: Presses de Sciences Po.

Duchesne, S. (2010). Lidentit europenne, entre science politique et science fiction,

Duvoux, N. (2010). Repenser la culture de la pauvret. La Vie des ides. <http://

Eckstein, H. (1988). A Culturalist Theory of Political Change, American Political Science