1France has always fascinated comparative scholars throughout the world. Its rather original political space, particularly its polarized party system, and sometimes unstable political life make for an especially rich case study. Because of these unique characteristics, numerous specialists in France are quick to cite a “French exception”, justifying their reluctance to adopt a comparative perspective. And yet several recent studies suggest that, on the contrary, French politics and institutions are a great deal less exceptional than we would like to think. [1] These observations are particularly supported by the study of party competition. In the mid 1990s, French party politics specialists largely adhered to the idea that the French political space was tripartite, organized around three clusters situated on the left, right, and extreme right of the political spectrum. This interpretation has since been challenged, and some have proposed that France has returned to a more classical, essentially bipolar, form of electoral competition.

2This article does not seek to fuel this controversy, but rather sets out to explore a dimension that, though essential in the theoretical literature on party competition, has to date remained largely neglected: the policy issues highlighted in the context of the party game, and the relation between political supply and the structure of political competition. This realignment is promising, not only from a comparative perspective, given the predominance of issue competition theories in the international literature. It also allows for an analysis of the more subtle changes, which the cleavage lens developed by Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan would not permit, as its focus is extremely general. In other words, the fact that party competition is structured by major historical cleavages, either by a left-right axis or two approximately orthogonal dimensions, provides insight into the operative “format” and political grammar, but sheds light on neither the “substance” of the electoral agenda nor the dynamics of its evolution. [2] Similarly, electoral competition remains commonly – albeit more or less explicitly – understood to be largely exogenously determined by the identity, affiliation, and preferences of voters. Viewing this competition as a systemic agenda that each party contributes to shaping but that none controls completely rehabilitates the weight of interactions among parties.

3Based on the analysis of original data collected by the Agendas France project on the attention given to different political issues within electoral platforms, this article seeks to contribute to a renewal of the theories and methodologies employed in explaining French political competition. We will present and briefly discuss the debates around the nature of French party competition, before explaining our methodological approach and presenting our findings.

Understanding the dynamics of French electoral competition: from cleavages to issue competition

4Most research on French party competition is characterized by the adoption of a very broad perspective – the format of the competition [3] – and by an ascending vision centered on political demand rather than supply. This work is primarily structured by a controversy around the transformations of the French political space, which ties into the broader discussion on the evolution of values in Western democracies since the late 1970s. Like other countries, France experienced “a violent materialist reaction” to post-materialism, which translated, in particular, into the rise of the Front National (FN, National Front). According to Gerard Grunberg and Étienne Schweisguth, these changes resulted in the transformation of the French political space from a bipartite to tripartite structure during the period between the 1988 and 1995 presidential elections. [4] From that moment on, the attitudes of French voters have been better explained by the juxtaposition of two transversal cleavages: on the one hand, a classical left-right cleavage relative to the desirable degree of interventionism, taxation, and redistribution; on the other, a “cultural” dimension thought to have emerged perpendicularly to the former, associated with issues such as immigration, Europe, or globalization. [5]

5This hypothesis provoked the publication of numerous works aiming to identify and describe this second dimension. In the French context, their analysis was contested by Robert Andersen and Jocelyn Evans, who challenged its empirical foundations and viewed the persistence of the left-right axis as the most structuring dimension of competition, the cultural dimension having no significant impact. [6] In an article published in the previous issue of this journal, Vincent Tiberj develops a new approach modeling the impact of both dimensions, and to a certain extent confirms their existence in the French political space. [7]

6Regardless of the definition of “cleavage” selected, the works referred to above adopt a very broad perspective, developed in order to reconstruct the long-term evolutions of the format and social anchors of competition. While the alignment, disalignment, and realignment phenomena are interesting, they alone do not account for the dynamics of electoral competition, to the extent that they neglect the question of shorter-term changes and the issues that are concretely set forth in different campaigns. Furthermore, the different contributions to the debate seem to share a number of premises that are not necessarily self-evident. In particular, they share a common conception of political life that is essentially “bottom-up”, privileging political demand. For this reason, the evolution of voters’ values and identities, for instance, constitutes a crucial parameter in the explanation of the National Front’s high scores. And yet, although the elections sanction the parties running for election, parties are likely, in the context of uncertainty and electoral volatility, to be primarily concerned with the strategies of their rivals. This article strives to test this intuition by adopting an approach centered on political supply.

7In addition, the debate is dominated by a spatial conception of French party competition, seen primarily as the confrontation of antagonistic points of view. The rich literature developed around the matter of electoral competition and strategies nevertheless suggests that parties demarcate themselves from one another not only by adopting distinct positions, but also by attempting to impose their signature issues on the electoral agenda. From this perspective, it is indispensable to explore the content of this agenda and the dynamics of “issue competition”, a concept first defined by David Robertson, [8] who views party competition as “selective emphasis rather than direct confrontation”. [9] This idea gave rise to numerous works that, by mobilizing various notions such as “issue emphasis”, [10] “salience”, [11] or “issue ownership”, [12] conclude that there exist different thematic profiles of parties, and that parties have an interest in attracting attention to the issues that they “own”. [13] A brief overview of the works published on the idea of issue ownership shows that this concept is both polysemous and multidimensional. It is increasingly mobilized in a “perceptionist” [14] sense, in order to explain voting patterns by voters who are assumed to make their choices by turning to the party considered the most competent in the areas which they judge to be the most important. [15] The existence of issue voting implies that party competition is largely constrained by the systematic association of a party with one or more specific political issues. Moreover, numerous studies on issue competition and issue ownership specifically aim to shed light not only on electoral behavior, but also on party strategies. [16] From this perspective, noting the different levels of attention given to issues and interpreting the observed differences is key to understanding the party game.

8Attention to issues in the media agendas during electoral campaigns in France has regularly been the object of research. [17] These studies have sometimes studied the interactions between media agendas and public agendas in terms of agenda, framing, or priming effects. [18] However, save for the work of Jean-Louis Missika and Dorine Bregman [19] dedicated to the contents of parties’ official televised campaigns, party agendas have not sparked much interest in the French academic community, despite the data available on the thematic content of media coverage of different candidates. [20] In particular, in the French case, the hypothesis of issue ownership has not been tested in a systematic and longitudinal manner using data centered on the parties themselves. However, it has been contested by several authors working on other cases, who empirically ascertain a strong thematic overlap between different parties’ platforms. [21] Beyond these observations, there exist sound theoretical reasons to doubt the existence of stable issue ownership. Indeed, if a party lays claim to an issue and is able to garner an electoral benefit from this “property”, rival parties will be strongly driven to contest the legitimacy of the “owner” in order to avoid granting the party a monopoly over the framing and orientation of the issue, and to deflect criticism for having ignored the subject. Tracy Sulkin [22] describes the process of appropriation of rivals’ political priorities (issue uptake) in her study of the political agenda of outgoing members of the US congress. Outgoing elected representatives, including in non-competitive constituencies, are active in the main areas emphasized by their opponents. The fact that the idea of issue ownership seems to suffer from an overly static vision of politics and struggles to obtain empirical support does not necessarily indicate that issue competition does not exist. Thus, a dynamic analysis of the content of French parties’ electoral agenda has promise, both to better understand how these parties compete with one another and to progress towards deeper knowledge of the articulation between positional competition and issue competition.

An original methodological approach

The Agendas Project data: new perspectives

11Empirically analyzing the dynamics of issue competition implies access to data on the attention given to different issues by French parties over time. The classic sources for this are expert survey data (in the tradition of the poll described by Peter Mair and Manuel Castells in 1984) and the data collected by the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP).

12While certain expert surveys are to be commended for including salience measurements (notably in the case of Chapel Hill data collected by Leonard Ray), [25] this type of poll suffers from important reliability issues when producing series a posteriori, to the extent that experts are not retrospectively capable of determining the weight of different issues in each party’s argument with sufficient precision. [26] Additionally, observations are limited by the pre-selection of a limited number of issues on which experts comment.

13The CMP has the advantage of being based upon a relatively unified empirical foundation, composed primarily of political platforms, but using its database does entail several difficulties. On the one hand, the categories used to characterize the content of each quasi-sentence of a political program are not sufficiently precise to reconstruct the modalities of issue competition in their complexity: categories such as “social justice”, “democracy”, or “welfare state” encompass numerous issues that should be distinguished. Furthermore, the CMP grid combines true public policy issues such as “the welfare state”, and conceptual categories, such as “Marxist analysis”, “multi-culturalism” or “degrowth”, which have more to do with the parties’ positioning than their thematic profiles. Finally and most importantly, the French CMP data is characterized by specific weaknesses. Given the difficulty of obtaining certain French programs as well as their characteristic length, the CMP has sometimes coded other types of texts, or even included data from previous elections, [27] and France is the only country in which the coding unit is not the quasi-sentence but the paragraph.

14Conversely, the data collected by the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) opens up promising possibilities to better understand the scope and modalities of issue competition. The CAP’s approach is certainly less ambitious than that of the projects cited previously, since it focuses exclusively on the level of attention granted to different issues and does not take into account the positions adopted by the parties. However, this lens is precisely what is needed for a more rigorous (the directional and non-directional approaches are not combined), fine, and precise operationalization of issue competition. The sources used are the platforms collected by the CMP, supplemented in cases where it was both necessary and possible. With the exception of the platform presented by the FN in 1988, which could not be found, this corpus covers all of the legislative programs presented by parties having obtained more than 3% of votes in the legislative elections since 1981: the Parti Communiste Français (PCF, French Communist Party), Parti Socialiste (PS, Socialist Party), Union pour la Démocratie Française (UDF, Union for French Democracy), Rassemblement pour la République (RPR, Rally for the Republic) (and the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, UMP [Union for a Popular Movement] from 2002), [28] as well as the two main rivals we alluded to earlier, the FN and the Verts.

15These programs were divided into quasi-sentences, or in other words, into units of meaning taking the form of a grammatical sentence or phrase. Each of the 33,400 quasi-sentences thus defined was then coded according to its content, following a code grid translated and adapted from the original American codebook, developed by Frank R. Baumgartner and Bryan Jones. [29] The French codebook, like its counterparts used in the United States and elsewhere, includes 24 general themes (cf. Table 1) that are, on average, divided into ten subcategories, for a total of 250 exhaustive and mutually exclusive categories. [30] One of the strengths of the CAP data is that it is well-suited to the extremely precise and differentiated analysis of issue competition. But above all, this data opens up new prospects for the analysis of party competition. The inclusion of the original text of the programs in the database helps to make the analysis comprehensive by studying the framing of issues and the subsequent positions of parties, and thereby reveal the consensual, proprietary, or positional nature of each issue. [31] Finally, the use of the same schema to code party platforms and diverse institutional agendas – governmental, parliamentary, presidential, etc. – enables us to explore the links between party priorities and the themes put on the agenda by elected representatives.

Table 1

Codes for the Agendas France project

1 Macroeconomic policy 2 Rights and liberties 3 Health 4 Agriculture 5 Labor and employment 6 Education 7 Environment 8 Energy 9 Immigration 10 Transport 12 Justice and crime 13 Social policy 14 Urban policy and housing 15 Economic regulations 16 Defense 17 Science 18 Foreign trade 19 International 20 State operations 21 State property 23 Culture 24 Local and regional policy 27 Risks and natural and climate disasters 29 Sport

Codes for the Agendas France project

Issue ownership or convergence of thematic profiles?

19The hypothesis of issue ownership implies that certain parties are generally associated with certain themes. From this perspective, it is probable that they seek to impose their signature issues as electoral campaign themes, judged important by both their members and voters. This type of situation should translate into distinct thematic profiles, with each party focusing on different bodies of issues and achieving relative stability, to the extent that ownership must be sustainable over time in order to structure the behavior of voters. The issue ownership hypothesis can be tested by comparing the priority accorded, on average, to each theme in the PS and RPR-UDF alliance platforms between 1981 and 2007, using the share of attention (Figure 1) and classification (Figure 2) indicators.

Figure 1

Average share of attention given to different issue areas in the platforms of the two principle French parties (by percentage of quasi-sentences)

Average share of attention given to different issue areas in the platforms of the two principle French parties (by percentage of quasi-sentences)

Figure 2

Average classification of issues in the platforms of the two principle French parties

Average classification of issues in the platforms of the two principle French parties

20The difference between the two averages is usually slight, and significant for only two issues. As we might expect, socialist platforms pay more attention to issues related to work (p=.02 for both measurements) and civil rights (p=.00 for the percentage comparison and p=.03 for the classification comparison). On the other hand, contrary to what the theory of issue ownership might suggest, the RPR-UDF alliance does not assign significantly higher priority to issues pertaining to justice, crime, and immigration but, surprisingly, sets itself apart with its greater attention to education and social policy. This counter-intuitive finding reveals the absence of contrasting and stable thematic profiles. While it goes against the hypothesis of issue ownership, it is not incompatible with the ad hoc definition of distinct electoral priorities by the two parties, as illustrated by the campaign led by the UMP in 2002, largely centered on the theme of insecurity. Furthermore, it should be noted that our data do not imply that the two groups hold electoral discourses of similar substance, since they do not tell us anything about the stances adopted. The appropriation of rivals’ issues is liable to give rise to a confrontation of antagonistic analyses and proposals inspired by opposing value judgments. It is therefore very possible that the priority assigned by the RPR-UDF alliance to matters of education and social policy indicates an attempt to appropriate the PS’s signature issues.

21We explored this idea in greater depth by observing the degree of similarity among the priorities stated by the two groups during each election. This was done on the basis of an indicator measuring the share of issues common to both parties, by adding the absolute attention differences, issue by issue, between the two parties for a given election (Table 2). [35] These results line up with the previous findings and indicate a relative convergence of the PS and RPR-UDF alliance priorities, which share approximately half of their issues and operate a similar ordering (on average, a difference of three classification points).

Table 2

Thematic convergence between PS and RPR-UDF alliance

Year Level of attention Ranking of issues 1981 56.4 3.2 1986 48.5 3.5 1988 85.5 3.1 1993 57.6 2.9 1997 41.9 2.9 2002 43.9 2.3 2007 44.4 3.2

Thematic convergence between PS and RPR-UDF alliance

22A second manner of testing this hypothesis consists of looking at the degree of stability of parties’ electoral priorities. Christopher Green-Pedersen and Peter Mortensen [36] developed an indicator of intra-party coherence allowing the exploration of this aspect, by adding the absolute attention difference issue by issue given by each party from one election to another. We completed this indicator of the proportion of attention dedicated to each issue using a second indicator of ranking (Table 3).

Table 3

Intra-party coherence on issue attention

PS RPR-UDF % index ranking % index ranking 1981-1986 76.6 3.9 69.5 3.7 1986-1988 63.7 3.8 61.8 5.5 1988-1993 61.9 4.4 58.2 5.4 1993-1997 74.2 2.8 74.9 3.3 1997-2002 75.4 3.2 83.9 2.4 2002-2007 85.7 2.3 80.9 2.5

Intra-party coherence on issue attention

23These two measures reflect a certain level of stability in the priorities of the PS and RPR-UDF, both of whom, over time, have maintained stable attention to at least half of the themes. The highest level of stability was attained recently by the PS, which transferred barely 15% of the attention stated in its 2002 platform to other themes in 2007. Nevertheless, our analysis confirms that the priority issues are not fixed and that, as Stefaan Walgrave and Michiel Nuytemans suggest, [37] parties adjust their priorities to different extents depending on the election. For instance, between 1988 and 1993, the parliamentary right shifted more than a third of its attention towards new issues. The ranking of issues by the two groups varies on average by almost four places between 1981 and 1986, by 5.5 places between 1986 and 1988, but only by 2.5 places between 2002 and 2007. Therefore, the two indicators highlight the existence of considerable fluctuations in parties’ priorities over time. The level of intra-party coherence (over time) in the prioritization of issues is similar to the level of inter-party convergence (in a given election). The hypothesis of issue ownership is therefore not confirmed by the observation of a stable thematic profile for the two party groups.

24Finally, the evolution of attention to different areas can be analyzed by using kurtosis (k) and L-kurtosis (L-k) measures, which are common in the literature on agenda-setting to measure the distribution of variations in issue attention. [38] A high value for these indicators (k > 3 and L-k >. 123) indicates a leptokurtic distribution of these variations; in other words, a distribution in which very small and very large variations are over-represented relative to what is observed in a normal distribution. “The General Punctuation Hypothesis” formulated by Bryan Jones and Frank Baumgartner posits that the changes in the ordering of political priorities are distributed leptokurtically, both for cognitive and institutional reasons. The issue ownership hypothesis also predicts an over-representation of small variations, but offers an alternative explanation: parties are attached to the issues that belong to them, to the extent that their politicization would enable them to obtain votes. Yet the kurtosis and L-kurtosis values characterizing the distribution of variations in attention within the PS and RPR-UDF (measured in terms of classification) indicate a nearly normal distribution (k=3.4 and L-k=.183), [39] which confirms the graphical estimation of the distribution and several complementary statistical tests. [40] This last finding also runs counter to our expectation of a leptokurtic distribution that would go hand in hand with issue ownership.

25In sum, our analyses of the changes in the thematic priorities of the PS and the RPR-UDF do not enable us to corroborate the existence of “issue ownership”. None of the issues studied seem to belong to one party rather than another, and the two primary political groups share a majority of themes. Studied in terms of hierarchy, the changes in attention were slighter and more regular than what is generally expected: parties do not cling to a few signature issues and only exceptionally modify their priorities. Fierce electoral competition, in the context of which “constant adaptation is simply a matter of survival for parties”, seems to counterbalance the effects of cognitive limits, institutional friction, and the potential perception of electoral gains related to the politicization of certain issues. The parties appear constrained to dynamically adapt to their environment and to respond to challenges posed by their rivals’ strategies.

26Thus, party ideology does not appear to reduce the attention spectrum of the parties studied. While this situation can be viewed in conjunction with the thesis of the decline of ideologies in contemporary party competition, we can also suppose that adhesion to a particular ideology is first and foremost determinant in defining the party’s orientation and positioning. Because an ideology is a weltanschauung, it is never short of answers and offers a lens allowing parties to produce proposals for each new problem placed on the political agenda.

Niche-party priorities and their influence on the party agenda

27The absence of distinct thematic profiles could be due to the specificities of the two largest French parties, which can be characterized as “catch-all” parties. This type of organization builds its success on the coverage of a broad spectrum of areas and claims to represent the largest possible electoral clientele. If the primary parties share numerous concerns, it may be because they are competing for the same electoral sectors. Niche parties, on the other hand, base their legitimacy and their electoral appeal on the politicization of a limited number of issues.

“Instead of prioritizing economic demands, these parties politicize sets of issues that were previously outside the dimensions of party competition […]. The issues are not only novel, but they often do not coincide with the existing, ‘left-right’ lines of political divisions […]. Niche parties differentiate themselves by limiting their issue appeals. They eschew comprehensive policy programs common to their mainstream party peers, instead adopting positions on and prioritizing only a restricted set of issues” [41]

Table 4

Entropic values for political programs in each election [43]

PC PS Verts RPR RPR-UDF UDF UMP FN Average 1981 0.55 0.85 0.72 0.73 0.71 1986 0.79 0.81 0.78 0.84 0.81 1988 0.48 0.69 0.79 0.68 1993 0.81 0.78 0.74 0.75 0.82 0.77 1997 0.70 0.83 0.77 0.76 0.84 0.78 2002 0.72 0.81 0.80 0.61 0.81 0.88 0.77 2007 0.87 0.86 0.89 0.83 0.85 0.87 0.86

Entropic values for political programs in each election [43]

28Our data do not confirm the existence of an opposition between “monothematic” niche parties and “catch-all” parties, with more diverse preoccupations. The Verts’ and FN’s scores fall into the average, or even slightly above. We should note nevertheless that the PCF scores seem more revealing of a “monothematic” way: the platforms presented by this party in the 1981 and 1988 elections concentrated on a small number of issues, and the questions pertaining to economic policy and labor represented over 30% of the program, whereas other issues such as liberties, health, or energy policy were practically absent. Despite this, the PCF remains an “old” party that played a central role in the politics of the after-war years and cannot quite be designated as a niche party.

29In order to more accurately determine the weight of niche parties in issue competition, another strategy consists of concentrating on their ability to place their signature issues on the party agenda. According to Meguid, the combined strategies of mainstream parties – particularly those ideologically situated the farthest from the niche party – are decisive for the success or failure of such a party. A party situated to the center-right could, for example, deliberately politicize an issue dear to the radical left in order to weaken its center-left rival. The issue uptake hypothesis suggests a different scenario: if we view party strategies as intrinsically connected and developed within the limits of a highly competitive context, it seems unlikely that a mainstream party, that is to say one of those liable to form a government, can afford to ignore the discourse of a more radical rival if it is appealing to similar segments of voters. From this perspective, it is probable that the affirmation of niche parties is reflected first and foremost in the closest mainstream party.

30These different hypotheses have been explored by observing the changes in the PS and the RPR-UDF alliance’s attention to themes of justice and police, immigration – areas claimed by the FN – and the environment – a theme classically associated with the Verts – while taking into account the electoral performance of these two niche parties (Figure 3).

Figure 3

Niche party votes and party attention [44]

Niche party votes and party attention [44]

31The three examples presented above indicate that, in accordance with our hypothesis, the rise of niche parties is accompanied by an appropriation of their signature issues by mainstream parties, and particularly by the one that is the closest ideologically. The breakthrough of the Ecologists in the 1989 European and municipal elections – as well as in the 1992 regional elections, whose results are not represented here – led to a spectacular increase in the PS’s attention to the issue of environmental protection during the 1993 legislative elections: with an increase of around 5%, the environment moved up 5 places in the classification of socialist priorities between 1988 and 1993. Similarly, following the good scores recorded by the FN from the 1984 European elections, immigration appeared in the RPR-UDF alliance’s program – where it had been completely absent in 1981 – and immediately reached 5%. “Justice and police”, which includes issues such as “social order” and “homeland security”, follows a different dynamic. In contrast with topics like environmental protection or immigration, it is an older theme, historically claimed by the parliamentary right. The FN seems to have succeeded in contesting its ownership, which was translated by a peak in attention by the RPR in 1986, then by the increased weight of the security issue in the RPR’s programs in the 1990s, with a historic peak in 2002.

32Note that the appropriation of a new issue by one of the two mainstream parties can lead to adaptation by the other mainstream party. While the PS was the first to integrate environmental protection into its priorities, the RPR and UDF’s programs displayed increasing interest in this topic from the second half of the 1990s. Similarly, the politicization of security questions by the FN has stronger repercussions on the themes highlighted by the RPR, but the PS also seems to take up this issue, albeit later and to a lesser extent. Although this observation can be generalized, the variations in attention to different issues from one election to another should be positively correlated among competing parties, and particularly so among mainstream parties. Our data confirm that the changes in the classification of the 24 themes operated by the PS and the RPR-UDF alliance between 1981 and 2007 are very strongly correlated (.83**).

33Therefore, the attention given to issues follows a rationale neither of opposition nor differentiation. Whatever the reasons leading to changes in attention to issues – exogenous or endogenous – in political platforms, there seems to be a systemic rationale that drives parties to modify their attention towards the same issues. As expected with the issue uptake rationale, when a given party devotes more attention to an issue, its rival tends to imitate it and place this issue on a higher level in its own prioritization of issues.

34In sum, this analysis of the characteristics of the thematic profile of niche parties and their impact on “catch-all” parties’ agendas confirms the existence of strong interactions, even if the spectrum of niche parties’ priorities is less focused on a few themes than we might have expected. The ordering of electoral themes therefore does not seem to follow a rationale of opposition or differentiation. Regardless of the reasons behind a change in attention within a party, a systemic rationale appears to drive other parties to turn their attention towards the same issues. Niche parties could thus be one of the primary forces within the evolution of the electoral agenda: mainstream parties are attentive to these new competitors and strive to integrate their priorities, in particular when they are relatively close in ideology. In other words, the transformations of the party system are likely to translate into important modifications of the electoral agenda.

Party system transformations and the electoral agenda

35While the emergence of new party organizations and the dynamics of interaction among parties are essential to understand the composition of the electoral agenda, we should observe the different fluctuations in the ordering of issues according to the degree of change of the party system. Over the period studied, these fluctuations are normally distributed, but this does not mean that they continue to be over time. On the contrary, the issue-uptake hypothesis leads us to posit that the ordering of issues experiences more marked variations when the party system is transformed, which we test by comparing the period from 1981-1993, characterized by important changes, to the period from 1993-2007, during which the French party system experienced greater stability.

36The average variation in attention measured in terms of ranking is indeed considerably higher between 1981 and 1993 (4.4 ranks on average) than between 1993 and 2007 (2.8 ranks on average). Similarly, the proportion of attention dedicated to each issue changed 2.9 points on average before 1993, and only 1.7 points afterwards. [45] On average once again, the change in this proportion of attention is 159% before 1993 and 74% after. In accordance with our expectations and regardless of the indicator selected, the average stability of the electoral agenda seems to be significantly higher since 1993.

37Nevertheless, understanding the rationale of issue competition in France necessitates going beyond these average values, and grasping the timing of the changes. In order to do so, we looked at the punctuations in the distribution of variations in attention by the PS and RPR-UDF alliance. [46] Since 95% of the values in a normal distribution are included in an interval of approximately two standard deviations from the average, the values outside of this interval are treated here as punctuations (Table 5). Following this definition, we have established, in particular, the list of variations in attention greater than 9 ranks. The issues listed experienced either a strong increase or a strong decline in attention. [47]

Table 5

Punctuation in the change in classification of issues between 1981 and 2007 [48]

Party Period Theme Rank change %Change %-% Change Socialist 1981-1986 Health -10 -3.9 Conservative 1981-1986 Energy -9 -1.8 Conservative 1981-1986 Immigration 10 4.8 Conservative 1981-1986 Justice and crime 7 4.3 622 Conservative 1981-1986 Social policy -11 -11.4 Socialist 1986-1988 Macroeconomic policy 1 9.4 Conservative 1986-1988 Rights and liberties 11 1.3 Socialist 1986-1988 Agriculture 10 2.9 Conservative 1986-1988 Immigration -10 -4.8 Socialist 1986-1988 Justice and crime -9 -4.4 Socialist 1986-1988 Economic regulation 10 15.8 636 Socialist 1986-1988 Defense -12 -6.9 Conservative 1986-1988 Defense -13 -6.7 Socialist 1986-1988 International trade 11 3 Conservative 1986-1988 International trade 11 6.4 Conservative 1986-1988 International 9 8.5 Conservative 1988-1993 Macroeconomic policy 2 8.4 Socialist 1988-1993 Macroeconomic policy -1 -12.3 Conservative 1988-1993 Rights and liberties -10 -6 Socialist 1988-1993 Health 6 4.4 544 Conservative 1988-1993 Health 10 6 1283 Socialist 1988-1993 Agriculture -13 -4.2 Socialist 1988-1993 Environment 9 4.8 1188 Socialist 1988-1993 Immigration 7 1.3 636 Socialist 1998-1993 Justice and crime 13 7.4 2476 Conservative 1988-1993 Urban policy and housing 10 6.1 653 Socialist 1988-1993 Economic regulation -11 -17.2 Conservative 1988-1993 International trade -15 -9 Conservative 1988-1993 International -12 -10.8 Socialist 1993-1997 Agriculture 10 4.6 624 Socialist 1993-1997 Labor and employment -2 -13.3 Socialist 1997-2002 Urban policy and housing 11 7 Socialist 2002-2007 Energy 2 1.3 710 Conservative 2002-2007 Justice and crime -9 -9.9

Punctuation in the change in classification of issues between 1981 and 2007 [48]

38Very large-scale variations in attention – punctuations – were identified in 26 cases over the entire period. Half of the topics were affected by these variations, which are nearly uniformly distributed. The RPR-UDF alliance only modified its priorities slightly more frequently (14 times) compared to the Socialist party (12 times). On the other hand, the vast majority of variations did occur between 1982 and 1993 – between 80% and 88%, depending on the indicator used to measure the level of attention. The changes identified as punctuations are not always identical depending on the indicator [49] used but the relation between party system and electoral agenda is robust in all three cases. We are not affirming the existence of a status quo since 1993, but the priorities stated by parties in their platforms experienced slighter fluctuations over this period.

39Thus, the study of the relation between the transformations of the party system and the changes in the electoral agenda has provided further confirmation of the issue-uptake hypothesis. Indeed, the discussion has demonstrated that the partisan context is more important in determining the characteristics of issue competition than the supposed identity of the party, based on hypothetical issue ownership.

40*

41* *

42Approaching French electoral competition through the lens of issue ownership enhances the understanding of the dynamics of competition among French parties. The data from electoral platforms coded by the Agendas France project, on which these first analyses are based, offer a solid foundation to progress in this direction. From a methodological point of view, measuring the attention to different issues in terms of ranking helps to overcome the biases from which the most common indicators suffer, and seems robust and appropriate to address issue competition.

43From a more substantive point of view, our findings show the advantages of the issue competition perspective by confirming that French political parties do not confront one another only by adopting opposing stances, but also by modulating their attention to the different issues. However, while certain scholars observe a systematic association of certain themes to a party – among voters or in the media – and note the existence of issue voting, our analyses do not verify the hypothesis of issue ownership with regard to the existence of stable and distinct thematic profiles of French political parties. In accordance with the prior observation of the great similarity of right and left-wing governments’ concerns in France, the PS and RPR-UDF alliance seem to operate similar hierarchical ordering from one election to another.

44Political parties have adjusted their priorities on a regular basis since 1981. The evolution in political supply can be observed in conjunction with “real world” events and voters’ evolving preferences. However, in agreement with the thesis of issue uptake, our analyses suggest rather that these variations are largely determined by processes endogenous to the party system, such as the strategies developed by partisan actors in order to avoid leaving the monopoly over certain themes to their rivals. Effectively, these variations follow the dynamics shared by different parties – endorsing the idea of the existence of a relatively constraining “systemic” party agenda – and their amplitude varies with the degree of stability of the party system. In particular, we have observed the direct impact of the affirmation of the FN and the Verts on electoral agenda-setting for questions related to immigration, security, and environmental protection. Thus, the relative stabilization of the French party system and the consecutive decline of the endogenous sources of change in the 1990s may explain why electoral priorities have become more stable, despite the increasing volatility of media coverage.

45The debates around cleavages and alignments cannot give a full and accurate picture of agenda-setting that is primarily endogenous to the party system. On the other hand, they remain necessary and complementary to understand the manner in which parties appropriate salient electoral issues. Are the majority of issues shared by all parties simply the object of a competition to appear the most active in that area, or do they give rise to the confrontation of antagonistic positions, potentially structured by major historic cleavages?

46Finally, a deeper understanding of how electoral issues are positioned within a hierarchy from one electoral campaign to another presupposes a better understanding of the impact of the “real” world, and particularly of social mobilizations and media attention. Their role constitutes a promising but complex new direction for research. [50]