Three million Trotskyists? Explaining extreme left voting in
France in the 2002 presidential electionejpr_1901 359..392
NATHAN SPERBER
Department of Politics & International Relations, University of Oxford, UK
Abstract. In the first round of the 2002 French presidential election, three million voters
(10.4 per cent of the national vote) supported Trotskyist candidates. This unprecedented
electoral result has received little academic attention. This study aimed to identify the
strongest socio-demographic and attitudinal predictors of support for the new extreme left
in 2002.A multivariate framework was applied in a series of models,using data from the 2002
French Electoral Panel.The study also aimed to understand the rise of the Trotskyists in the
context of broader social and political developments.The analysis was grounded in series of
hypotheses constituting a model of class voting in postindustrial France. Overall, the analysis
tended to confirm the predictions of the model, with younger voters at the lower end of the
service sector being the most likely to support the three Trotskyist parties. With regard to
attitudes, opposition to economic liberalism proved the strongest single predictor of Trotskyist
voting, followed by liberal attitudes on cultural issues, political distrust and political
disengagement. However, in terms of economic attitudes, Trotskyist voters still came out as
surprisingly close to mainstream left voters. In conclusion, it is argued that models of class
voting should reconsider the political role of social class in a postindustrial context, and pay
particular attention to the trajectories of different classes over time in terms of changing
employment conditions and life chances in order to understand how class is likely to shape
party preferences.
Introduction
In the first round of the 2002 French presidential election, three candidates
referring to themselves as ‘Trotskyists’ obtained 10.4 per cent of the national
vote. The three candidates, Arlette Laguiller, Olivier Besancenot and Daniel
Gluckstein,represented,respectively,Lutte Ouvrière (Working-class Struggle),
the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (Revolutionary Communist League,
LCR) and the Parti des Travailleurs (Workers’ Party).These names were by no
means mere labels devoid of revolutionary intent. All three candidates, for
instance, declared that they agreed that capitalism should be overthrown and
that the ‘permanent revolution’ – a concept dear to Trotskyists – should be put
into motion. In the first years of the twenty-first century, at a time when
Communist ideology,not to speak ofTrotskyism,seems to have lost its momentum
both in Western politics and on the world stage, the success of Trotskyist
European Journal of Political Research 49: 359–392, 2010 359
doi: 10.1111/j.1475-6765.2009.01901.x
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Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA
parties at a presidential election in France may appear deeply puzzling. Nonetheless,
the rise of the new French extreme left has been largely understudied.
The rise of the Trotskyist parties squarely contradicts the predictions of
prevailing theories of electoral change in advanced democracies.At first sight,
they offer a surprising combination of so-called‘old’ and‘new’ politics.In 2002,
they focused their campaigns on the socio-economic dimension of political
competition, violently denouncing economic inequality, flexible labour market
policies and rising corporate profits. Most of their electoral support came from
younger voters to be found in the manual working class and the lower end of
the service sector. In terms of organisation, these parties remain small and
deprived of a political machine comparable to that which the French Communist
Party (CP) still manages to maintain in many localities.Thus, in 2002, they
almost exclusively relied on the media for campaigning. Their rapid rise and
the seemingly transient nature of their success point to a picture where party
attachment plays little role.
This article will attempt to argue against certain misconceptions regarding
the Trotskyists. First, they should not be seen merely as the tail of the comet of
France’s postwar radical left.This old radical left is embodied in France by the
Communist Party – a once-glorious mass party now in disarray (the CP
obtained only 3.4 per cent of the vote in the 2002, a poor showing compared to
its 21.3 per cent in 1969).Whereas CP voters in France are older than average,
supporters of the new extreme left are found among younger age groups
(Knapp 2004).This study provides evidence that the two types of voters in fact
follow markedly different socio-demographic and attitudinal patterns.In terms
of party organisation, the new radical left also contrasts sharply with the old.
Yet the Trotskyist parties also fail to correspond to what is usually
described as ‘new politics’ in the literature (e.g., Dalton 1988; Inglehart 1977,
1990, 1997); they cannot be defined as ‘New Left’, or ‘left-libertarian’ in
Kitschelt’s (1988) sense. First, their main emphasis is on the material, and not
the postmaterial, dimension of political competition. Despite their adoption of
very liberal positions on issues such as immigration or women’s rights, especially
the LCR, this libertarian element is secondary in their platforms and
rather discrete in their campaigns. Second, most of their electoral support does
not come from the middle class, whereas this is usually held to be a typical
attribute of a New Left or left-libertarian party. The very notion that new
political parties on the left of the political spectrum in wealthy industrialised
nations will tend to be left-libertarian, and emphasise postmaterialist goals
over materialist ones, as argued by Inglehart (1990, 1997), appears to be
contradicted by these parties’ electoral success.
Finally, it might also be tempting to emphasise only the protest character of
Trotskyist voting and therefore to assimilate the new extreme left with the
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anti-system extreme right, represented in France by the Jean-Marie Le Pen’s
Front National. This third possible misconception about the new French
extreme left has proven somewhat popular among French commentators (e.g.,
Taguieff 2002; Lévy 2007), but this view hardly seems defensible given that in
terms of party platforms the extreme left and the extreme right were radically
opposed on virtually all economic and cultural issues in 2002.
The primary aim of this study is to provide an account of Trotskyist voting
in France in 2002, paying attention to both socio-demographic and attitudinal
factors. For this purpose, a quantitative analysis using multivariate logistic
regressions is carried out. However, the analysis was also grounded in a more
general theoretical framework allowing one to understand the changing influence
of class on the vote within advanced capitalist countries. Drawing on a
large literature describing how employment relations and class conditions in
France were affected in the past few decades in the process of transition from
an industrial to a postindustrial society, an historical interpretation of the
electoral rise of the Trotskyist parties is provided, and a series of hypotheses
constituting a model of class voting in France are put forward and tested.
It will emerge that class voting is highly relevant to understanding the rise of
the new radical left in France,although it might not be class voting as we used to
know it. Indeed, the Trotskyist parties do not represent the extreme left of an
industrial society,but of a postindustrial one,and their rise has to be understood
in relation to the process of transition from the former to the latter.As such,the
French extreme left constitutes a genuinely new political development.
The setting
The rise of the Trotskyist parties
For a long time following the official foundation of the (Trotskyist) Fourth
International in 1938, French Trotskyist organisations refused to engage in the
electoral process and typically denounced elections as a sham. The argument
usually put forward was that bourgeois democracy was but a formal façade to
capitalist exploitation, and that the overthrowing of the capitalist order would
only come through proletarian revolution and not elections. However, since
the presidential election of 1969, there has always been at least one candidate
representing a Trotskyist organisation in the first rounds of presidential contests.
While never actually aiming to assume office or even enter a governing
coalition, the French Trotskyists have mainly used elections as a way of making
their positions known to the public, as well as promoting their respective
organisations by attracting members and militants (Raynaud 2006; Reynié
2007).
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Trotskyist presidential candidates between 1969 and 2007 were consistently
affiliated to one of the three parties already mentionned: Lutte Ouvrière, the
Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire and the Parti des Travailleurs. Until the
1990s, the three parties put together never obtained more than 2.5 per cent of
the vote. In 1995, however, Trotskyist voting reached 5.3 per cent (1.6 million
voters), after which it peaked at 10.4 per cent (3 million voters) in 2002 before
declining to 5.8 per cent (2.1 million voters) in 2007.1
The two strongest
Trotskyist parties in electoral terms have been Lutte Ouvrière (LO) and the
Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR), whereas the Parti des Travailleurs
(PT) never scored over 0.5 per cent.
While LO and the PT still exist today, the LCR disappeared in 2009 to give
way to a new entity, the NPA (Nouveau Parti Capitaliste). Until this recent
development, the LCR was the official French section of the Fourth International.
It was also by far the most open of the three Trotskyist parties in terms
of doctrine as well as social composition. Often taking anti-nuclear or feminist
positions in addition to the more classic revolutionary stance, it pursued a
systematic strategy of accompanying a variety of social movements,both‘materialist’
and ‘postmaterialist’ (Raynaud 2006; Bensaïd 2002). By contrast, LO
still overwhelmingly concentrates its discourse on the manual working class
and this in turn is reflected in a more working-class heavy party membership.Its
organisation has often been denounced as opaque and secretive (e.g., CohnBendit
& Cohn-Bendit 2002). The case of the PT is more complicated.
Although its candidate in 2002 declared himself to be a Trotskyist, the party
does not officially refer to itself as such and welcomes non-Trotskyist militants.
It is,however,the heir to the Organisation Communiste Internationaliste (OCI),
a radical Trotskyist group that used to denounce the Fourth International for
being too supportive of the Soviet Union (Raynaud 2006; Campinchi 2001).
It might appear surprising that the threeTrotskyist parties never united into
a single political force, all the more so since their electoral platforms differed
quite little in practice, at least as far as LO and the LCR are concerned.A large
part of the explanation for this puzzle lies in the intense rivalries, dating back
to the years of immediate postwar France, that marked the groups from which
these organisations emerged (Pina 2001; Raynaud 2006). These rivalries were
in turn based on doctrinal differences in the context of the Cold War, mostly
pertaining to the identity of the Soviet Union and various other Communist
regimes around the world, and to the exclusive role of the manual working
class in the revolution.
The creation of the NPA, as the successor to the LCR, has significantly
altered the landscape of the radical left in France. Following a good showing at
the 2007 presidential elections (4.3 per cent), the LCR’s leader, Olivier Besancenot,
announced the creation of a new party. Officially established in Febru-
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ary 2009, the Nouveau Parti Capitaliste resulted from the merger of the LCR
with other like-minded political groups (Le Monde 2009). Interestingly, the
NPA is no longer an officially Trotskyist organisation, and the formal link to
the Fourth International has been abandoned. For their part, the LO and the
PT refused to dissolve into the NPA at the moment of its creation, and seem
bent on maintaining their independence from the new party.
The 2002 presidential election
The 2002 presidential election, which produced a shock in France as a result of
the qualification for the presidential run-off of the extreme right candidate,
Jean-Marie Le Pen, was marked by the lowest turnout for a presidential
election in the Fifth Republic (71.6 per cent), as well as by a general climate of
distrust in politics. The five previous years, from 1997 to 2002, had seen a
Socialist Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, govern with a socialist parliamentary
majority but a right-wing president, Jacques Chirac. In 2002, both politicians
were candidates for the presidency in a context of economic slowdown after
the 1997–2000 recovery. As the campaign went on, they were both seen as
increasingly disconnected from the French electorate (Courtois 2002). Jospin,
trying to reach the centre ground, declared his programme was ‘not socialist’,
thus infuriating many voters on the left.At the same time, the three Trotskyist
candidates, while declaring themselves favourable to social revolution, chose
to campaign on immediate socio-economic concerns, such as the introduction
of a tax on capital to finance pensions, making public transportation free and
more generally strong public services (Pina 2007).The platforms of the LO and
the LCR were fairly similar, the LCR adding feminist and anti-nuclear concerns.
The PT campaigned on the defence of public services and a strong
anti-Maastricht Treaty stance.
Eventually,Arlette Laguiller, the candidate for LO, obtained 5.7 per cent of
the vote, Olivier Besancenot from the LCR 4.3 per cent and André Gluckstein
from the PT 0.5 per cent. The CP reached a meagre 3.4 per cent, while the
incumbent president, Jacques Chirac, came to a surprisingly low 19.9 per cent,
as the extreme right leader Le Pen (16.9 per cent) ended in front of the
incumbent premier Jospin (16.2 per cent).
An understudied political oddity
The rise of the Trotskyist parties has led to few academic studies, especially
compared to the large attention received by Jean-Marie Le Pen’s extreme
right. In France, scholarship on the subject has remained almost exclusively
qualitative, with a substantial number of historical enquiries into the roots of
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the three Trotskyist parties (Raynaud 2006; Bensaïd 2002; Campinchi 2001).
Johsua (2007a, 2007b) has studied extensively the social origins, and political
outlook, of succeeding generations of LCR militants, using both qualitative
and quantitative methods. Research on extreme left voting based on the analysis
of survey material has remained scarce, however, and has mostly taken the
form of descriptive statistics (e.g., Sineau 2004; Grunberg & Schweisguth
2003). The only study to use statistical modelling on extreme left voting is
Tiberj (2007), but the author focuses on a limited number of attitudinal predictors
and excludes social class.
This lack of scholarly attention is understandable, but not warranted. The
success of the extreme right in Western Europe, especially, is considered by
many academics to be more genuinely new than electoral support for the
radical left, all the more so in a country like France where the CP has experienced
high levels of electoral support in the past. However, equating the new
extreme left with the legacy of the CP would be misleading. In effect, as will be
shown, CP voters and Trotskyist supporters follow distinct socio-demographic
and attitudinal patterns.
Academic enquiry into the French extreme left is all the more justified as it
appears, once again since 2007, to be on the rise. In particular, Besancenot’s
initiative to create the NPA has received intense media coverage as the young
Trotskyist leader’s personal popularity skyrocketed in the aftermath of Nicolas
Sarkozy’s election. As of September 2008, a poll by the French institute
Opinion Way credited him with 13 per cent of voting intentions on the hypothesis
of a presidential election to be held then and there (Le Monde 2008b).
Moreover, the NPA’s standing today appears to benefit from the LCR’s past
strategy of activism within a wide array of social movements.The vast majority
of NPA militants are also union members, and a substantial portion is affiliated
to the trade union SUD-Solidaires, a radical organisation that has recently
assumed a high-profile role in episodes of labour activism (Le Monde 2008a).
Theoretical framework and hypotheses: A story of class voting in a
postindustrial context
A new framework for analysing the political role of class in the context of
French postindustrial society will be discussed in this section.As noted earlier,
Trotskyist parties in France emphasise the economic dimension of political
competition, and therefore cannot be assimilated to Kitschelt’s (1988) ‘leftlibertarian’
parties. Neither do they fit the model of the ‘old left’, either
social-democratic or communist, as set out in the academic literature (Dalton
1988; Kitschelt 1994; Inglehart 1990). Indeed, social-democratic and commu-
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nist parties rose in Western Europe in the postwar period in the context of the
advent of industrial Fordism. In the past few decades, however, these same
European countries have undergone far-reaching social transformations.
Whereas evidence points to the fact that social class still influences voting in
advanced Western societies (e.g., Evans 1999), it can be hypothesised that as
social classes have themselves changed over time, so has their role in terms of
political integration and influence. Furthermore, the nature of partisan attachment
in advanced democracies has also been altered, as the experience of a
stable, deep-seated attachment to a given party has become less prevalent
within the electorate.It is against this backdrop that the electoral success of the
Trotskyists should be understood.
Partisanship in question
Partisan attachment has been argued to have lost its centrality in the voting
process across Western democracies. Originally an American concept, the
notion of ‘partisanship’ initially found only mild support within the European
academic community. In Campbell et al.’s (1960) classic study,‘partisanship’ is
defined as a durable, affective psychological identification with a party. As
such, partisan loyalty not only has influence on the vote, it also serves to
organise a voter’s relationship to the political environment more generally,
providing the partisan voter with informational short-cuts and prompting
someone to follow his or her party’s positions on various political issues.
French survey evidence from the 1960s reveals that many manual workers had
such a relationship with the CP (Michelat & Simon 2004).
Today, by contrast, survey evidence points to a general pattern of decline in
declared partisan attachment across the postindustrial world (Dalton 2000;
Berglund et al. 2005). This trend has also affected France (Schweisguth 2002),
where partisanship had often been assumed to play a comparatively modest
role to start with, given the persistent instability of the party system. Various
hypotheses have been put forward to account for the widespread decline in
partisan attachment. While some authors have emphasised the more general
‘modernisation process’, including the increase in educational levels and the
rise of the mass media as the new principal source of information in modern
democracies (Dalton 1988, 2000), others have insisted that specifically political
factors have played their part, especially through a process of disaffection
towards poorly performing parties in government (Schmitt & Holmberg 1995;
Berglund et al. 2005).
This debate is not to be settled here. For the present purpose, it can be
noted that the rapid rise of the Trotskyist parties in France since the 1990s
seems to suggest that party attachment, defined as a stable and durable dispothree
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sition on the part of the voter, has played little role in the electoral success of
the new extreme left.The story of their rise fits quite well with the notion that
the mass media have come to short-circuit the informational function of the
large postwar parties, most notably the CP. The media were crucial to the
Trotskyist candidates’ success as they enabled candidates affiliated to small,
little-known parties to acquire national fame. In sum, one might hypothesise
that, regarding the specific issue of partisan attachment, the new extreme left
finds its place in a ‘new politics’ world where partisanship has in effect declined
in relevance.
The debate on class voting
In Lipset and Rokkan’s (1967) early study on the influence of social cleavages
on party preferences in Western Europe, the social division between the
working class and the middle class is reflected in the political division between
left-wing social-democratic or communist parties on the one hand, and rightwing
Christian-democratic or conservative parties on the other. In recent
decades, this model has come under marked criticism as numerous authors
have argued for a strong decline in the influence of social class on voting
behaviour (Rose & McAllister 1986; Dalton 1988; Inglehart 1990; Franklin
et al. 1992; Clark & Lipset 1991, 1993).
Yet several authors have been keen to denounce the methodological flaws
of the early decline-of-class literature (Heath et al. 1985, 1987; Manza et al.
1995; Evans 1999). First, the favourite analytical tool of those who argued for
a decline in class voting, the Alford index, does not allow one to distinguish the
impact of a genuine alteration in class-based voting behaviour at the individual
level from the effect of compositional changes in the macro-level class struc-
ture.2
Second, and more importantly for the present purpose, this literature has
usually operationalised class by means of the traditional manual/non-manual
dichotomy, itself a symptom of an ‘old politics’ outlook. By offering a simplistic,
presumably ahistorical, interpretation of class, many authors ignored significant
and evolving social variations within the non-manual category, which
has dramatically increased in size and diversified since the time of Lipset and
Rokkan.
Drawing on the Erikson-Goldthorpe class schema instead of the manual/
non-manual dichotomy, the contributors to Evans (1999) attempted to show
that class retained much of its previous influence on the vote in advanced
democracies, and that what was usually interpreted as a decline in class voting
had merely been a trendless fluctuation. Among the contributors to Evans’s
collection, however, De Graaf and Nieuwbeerta (1999) struck a different note,
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arguing for an overall decline, if not disappearance, of class voting over the
postwar period in advanced democracies, even when using the EriksonGoldthorpe
schema.
This study fully embraces the argument that the simple dichotomy between
manual and non-manual activities is unlikely to capture the various possible
influences of class position on the vote in postindustrial societies. It adopts the
neo-Weberian approach of class devised by Erikson and Goldthorpe (1992)
(see infra), and rejects the manual/non-manual dichotomy.3
If class voting may well have declined, it cannot be seriously said to have
disappeared (De Graaf & Nieuwbeerta 1999).4
In particular, it remains susceptible
to party strategies of class mobilisation (Evans et al. 1999; De Graaf
et al. 2001).This last point is likely to be especially relevant with regard to the
three Trotskyist parties in France, whose rhetoric is all but classist.
A new type of proletarian worker in a service economy
A new framework for understanding class voting in France has to take into
account the dramatic changes that have affected the country’s economic and
social structures since the 1970s.As industrial employment started to decline in
the mid-1970s, the Fordist production model was progressively called into
question and, as in most other advanced capitalist countries, new industrial
patterns emerged (Piore & Sabel 1984; Castells 1996; Boltanski & Chiapello
1999; Gershuny 2005).As French firms increasingly pursued strategies of ‘flexible
specialisation’ (Piore & Sabel 1984), the practice of subcontracting diffused
throughout French industry to reach a share of 21 per cent of industrial
output in the 1990s (Hannoun & Guerrier 1996). In addition, French firms
became, on average, smaller in size, reversing a secular trend (Marchand &
Thélot 1997). Subcontracting production to smaller specialised units allows
business to avoid agreements with trade unions, and work conditions are
usually worse in such units (Gershuny 2005). Non-standard job contracts, in
the form of part-time or temporary work, have also become common practice
since the 1970s, affecting in particular the lower end of the service sector and
the manual working class (Boltanski & Chiapello 1999). For each of these two
categories, corresponding respectively to class III and classes VI and VII in the
Goldthorpe seven-class schema (see infra), unemployment averaged 20 per
cent in the 1990s (Boltanski & Chiapello 1999; Chenu 2005). In addition, there
seems to have been in France a generational trend concerning all social classes,
whereby those who entered the labour market in the 1980s or after experienced
higher unemployment and lower income than the previous generation,
despite superior educational credentials (Chauvel 1998).
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As the manual working class was both declining in number and drawn away
from a Fordist production model, the lower end of the service sector (Goldthorpe’s
class III) expanded. Mostly composed of women, this class is characterised
by a high diversity in work situations, from routine administrative work
in the public sector to supermarket employee or cleaning woman (Chenu
1990). However, as shown by Chenu (2005), the working conditions and standards
of living of this class as a whole have steadily deteriorated in France
since the 1960s. Whereas routine non-manual employees had an average
income 20 per cent higher than the average manual working-class income in
1954, it was only 2 per cent higher in 2002, and the increase in job insecurity
and unemployment has affected both classes alike. In a comparative study,
Esping-Andersen (1993: 229) has called the low-skilled service class a ‘service
proletariat’.
The political integration of manual workers and lower-grade employees
From the end of the Second World War to the 1970s, the French manual
working class experienced a high degree of political integration. This integration
was closely associated with the presence of a very strong CP, which
obtained on average one-quarter of the national vote from 1944 to 1972, and
with the Communist-led Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), the largest
trade union. A plethora of local associations were dependent on the CP for
functioning and funds, and, in addition, the party had active militant cells in
many French industrial firms (Courtois & Lazar 2000; Lavabre & Platone
2003). Surveys conducted in the 1960s show that a majority of French manual
workers expressed a strong feeling of belonging to the working class, believed
in the reality of the class struggle and voted for the left, especially for the CP
(Michelat & Simon 2004).
Yet, by the 1990s little was left of this working-class political culture. Industrial
restructuring simply erased from the map the workplaces where the CP
used to be present (Lavabre & Platone 2003), and strike action, measured in
terms of the number of days of work lost to strikes, was down to less than
one-tenth of what it had been in the 1950s and retained a strong presence only
in transportation and the public sector (Groux 1998, 2007).5
Finally, the CGT’s
membership plummeted to 10 per cent of the workforce and only 5 per cent of
the private sector, while aging substantially (Rey 2004; Labée 1996). In the
early 2000s, trade unions in France, and especially the CGT, were often criticised
for having only marginally modified their theoretical outlook since the
1960s, and for paying little attention to the issues of temporary work contracts
and unemployment, both of which have affected the younger generation much
more than the older one (Groux 1998; Beaud & Pialoux 1999). In 2002, only 6
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per cent of the manual working class cast a CP vote, many of them belonging
to the older generation of workers who had entered the labour market during
the postwar Long Boom rather than during the crisis years that followed
(Lavabre & Platone 2003; Knapp 2004).The manual workers from the younger
generation have been described as politically distrustful, hostile to the political
system and opposed to economic liberalism (Michelat & Simon 2004). Under
such conditions, it can be advanced that younger manual workers are likely to
be attracted by the new extreme left.
The story for routine non-manual employees is quite a different one since
this class never reached the level of political integration experienced by the
manual working class in the 1960s. Trade unions have always had lower membership
in this class than in the manual working class, and their presence has
declined since the 1970s. Rather, routine employees have often been described
as a comparatively apolitical class, more prone to contemplating the hope of
upward social mobility for their children than to joining the working class in
any radical political struggle (Crozier 1965; Bourdieu 1977). However, this
view has come under increasing criticism over time (Schweisguth 1983; Chenu
2005), and in effect voting patterns of routine employees in France are closer
to those of the manual working class than ever before (Chenu 2005). Given a
clearly disadvantaged position in French society in terms of income and
employment security, many routine employees are likely to be attracted to the
left.At the same time, a centrist campaign on the part of the Socialist Party, as
well as the characteristic workerist tradition of the CP, would tend to bring
left-wing members of the ‘service proletariat’ towards the Trotskyist parties. In
addition, for the same reasons as for the manual working class, it might be
expected that the Trotskyist parties’ appeal would be stronger for the younger
generation of lower-grade employees.
A model of Trotskyist voting in France
The preceding theoretical and historical considerations suggest that Trotskyist
voting is likely to take place in a context where: partisan ties have declined in
relevance; social class may still influence voter preference for leftist economic
policies; and distrust towards established political parties on the part of
younger voters from less advantaged social classes calls for an alternative to
the parties of the postwar left.
In turn,it is argued that distrust on the part of the working class and the lower
end of the service sector vis-à-vis the established left-wing parties in France –
namely the Socialist Party and the Communist Party – can be understood
primarily in relation to the dramatic changes that have affected these two social
classes over the past few decades in terms of labour market conditions,employthree
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ment and living standards in the process of transition from an industrial to a
postindustrial society. This model advances that labour market entrants from
the 1980s onwards occupying manual working-class or lower-grade service
occupations will be the most likely to vote for the new extreme left.By contrast,
older left-leaning voters having experienced the postwar Long Boom during
most of their working lives will be less sensitive to its appeal.
The role of attitudes
This study is also concerned with identifying attitudinal predictors of Trotskyist
voting in France.Whereas social class is among the traditional determinants
for analysing voting behaviour, it has tended to play a smaller part in France in
accounting for electoral outcomes than in most other advanced capitalist
countries (Dalton 1988). Furthermore, the instability of the party system and
the high level of electoral volatility recorded throughout the twentieth century
(Bartolini & Mair 1990) have made the prevalence of ‘issue voting’ a longlasting
characteristic of the French political system (Weakliem & Heath 1999;
Fleury & Lewis-Beck 1993). As far as the 2002 presidential contest is concerned,
several sets of attitudes can be associated with a likely tendency to cast
a Trotskyist vote.
Political distrust and disengagement
As already noted above, support for the new extreme left is most likely to
affect voters with low levels of partisan attachment and who feel dissatisfied
with the two established parties of the French left. This prediction was made
specifically for the members of the manual working class and for lower-grade
employees, but there are grounds to believe that distrust in politics, on the one
hand, and political disengagement, on the other, might predict extreme left
voting across all social classes.
France has been affected by a severe drop in public confidence in
parliament and politicians since the 1970s (Dalton 1999; Mayer 2002), in a
way rather similar to most other advanced democracies (Norris 1999).
This mounting public distrust led to the rise of a strong extreme right party
in the 1980s, the Front National, whose success has been strongly related to its
anti-establishment appeal (Mayer & Perrineau 1992; Perrineau 2003). The
three Trotskyist parties’ strong attacks on the political system are also likely
to attract voters who feel they are no longer represented by mainstream
politicians.
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‘Political disengagement’, defined as a lack of interest and participation in
politics, is also a potential predictor of Trotskyist voting, provided that the
disengaged citizens do not simply abstain from the vote. For instance, the
extremist discourse of Trotskyist parties, like that of the Front National, might
attract unsophisticated and ill-informed voters.Alternatively,one might expect
an association of Trotskyist voting with political disengagement as a result of a
class effect or a generational effect since, on the one hand, manual workers and
lower-grade employees in France have been singled out for their tendency to
abstain and to declare little or no interest in politics (Michelat & Simon 2004;
Chenu 2005) and, on the other hand, the younger generation also has a clear
tendency to be politically disengaged (Schweisguth 2002).
Economic interventionism and cultural liberalism
Although it has been asserted that advanced capitalist societies are moving
away from material concerns towards giving a larger place to issues of quality
of life and the environment (Inglehart 1990), political competition in France is
still very much informed by the debate between economic interventionism on
one side, and market liberalism on the other. As already pointed out, the
refusal of economic liberalism and the denunciation of the iniquities of capitalism
are the main components of the Trotskyist parties’ rhetoric. Accordingly,
there are strong reasons to believe that voter attitudes on economic
issues are among the main predictors of Trotskyist voting.
It is also likely that electoral support for the new extreme left is associated
with liberal attitudes on issues such as immigration, minority rights, the death
penalty and so on. Although it has been suggested by several commentators
that Trotskyist voters tend towards antisemitism (Taguieff 2002), xenophobia
(Perrineau & Ysmal 2003) and ‘social-nationalism’ (Reynié 2005), Tiberj
(2007) refutes such claims in his analysis of the attitudes of extreme left voters.
In addition, given the electoral platforms of the Trotskyist parties, extreme left
voters are unlikely to be culturally conservative, at least as far as the LCR and
LO are concerned.The LCR, in particular, gave a substantial place to feminist
and environmental concerns in its campaign, and LO, though usually very
discrete on cultural matters, declared itself against all barriers to immigration.
Data and methods
The 2002 French Electoral Panel
At the time it was conducted, the Panel Electoral Français (PEF) 2002 was the
largest election survey ever done in France. Not actually a ‘panel’ in the usual
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sense, it was composed of three waves administered at a few weeks’ interval
each, in the context of a two-month election period with four successive
consultations (the first and second rounds of the presidential election,followed
by the first and second rounds of the legislative elections). The PEF 2002 was
designed and conducted by two research teams – the CEVIPOF (Centre for
Studies in French Political Life) in Paris and the CIDSP (Centre for Computerised
Socio-Political Databases) in Grenoble – and one private political
expert agency – the CECOP (Centre for Studies of Public Opinion).6
Only the second wave of the PEF 2002 is used in this study. The second
wave, conducted in May 2002 after the presidential election and before the
legislative election, was designed to be used as a post-election survey for the
presidential election. The interviews of the second wave were conducted by
telephone with a sample of 4,017 individuals, out of which 3,179 said that they
had voted for a candidate in the first round.
The dependent variable
The analysis uses multivariate logistic regressions in three different kinds of
models: with socio-demographic predictors, with attitudinal predictors and
with both types of predictors in a mixed model. The dependent variable is
Trotskyist voting, defined as casting a ballot for any one of the three Trotskyist
parties (LO, the LCR and the PT). Only the respondents who reported having
actually voted for a candidate in the first round of the election are included in
the analysis. Furthermore, since the interest of this study is the electoral
success of the new extreme left as a whole, aggregating votes for the three
parties into one single variable seems warranted. Regression models were also
run separately for LO and LCR voting (see Appendix Table A1). It emerges
from these models that the predictors of LO and LCR voting differ little from
those of Trotskyist voting as a whole.
The independent variables
Three age groups are distinguished: respondents born before 1940, respondents
born between 1940 and 1960, inclusive, and respondents born after 1960.
The first age group is composed mainly of retired individuals, who experienced
the postwar Long Boom during most of their working lives. The third age
group, by contrast, is mainly composed of respondents who entered the labour
market during the economic slowdown of the 1980s and 1990s.
Social class is operationalised by means of the Goldthorpe class schema
(Erikson & Goldthorpe 1992). Based on an analysis of employment relations,
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the Goldthorpe seven-class schema distinguishes whether an individual’s
employment situation is regulated by the ‘service relationship’, which includes
a long-term exchange with the employer and guarantees of job security and
career opportunities, or the ‘labour contract’, which involves by contrast ‘a
short-term specific exchange of money for effort’ (Erikson & Goldthorpe
1992: 41–42), and thus reduced opportunities and job security.
For this study, Goldthorpe’s seven-class schema was collapsed into a fiveclass
schema, also known as the ‘Goldthorpe-Heath class schema’, as advised
by Evans (1992). Five social classes will therefore be considered: the salariat,
corresponding to classes I and II in Goldthorpe’s seven-class schema, which is
the group benefiting from the advantageous ‘service relationship’; the routine
non-manual employees, class III, a highly feminised class composed of lowergrade
workers in the service sector; the self-employed and independent, class
IV; foremen and technicians, class V; the working class, corresponding to
classes VI and VII in the seven-class schema, and composed of skilled and
unskilled manual workers.
For the unemployed and the retired, class position was determined by the
last occupation held. Since a working woman’s economic interests might be
heavily influenced by her husband’s class position, especially if the husband
has a much higher-status occupation than his wife, a dummy variable for
female routine non-manual employees with husbands members of the salariat
was included in the models.
The other socio-demographic predictors are gender, higher education,
home ownership, marital status and employment in the public sector (all
binary variables). A variable for income was also included, divided into nine
increments and treated as continuous,7
as well as a binary variable for being
employed under a non-standard work contract (typically entailing part-time or
temporary work). Finally, religious practice, often argued to be one of the main
socio-demographic predictors of voting behaviour in France (Michelat &
Simon 1977, Cautrès 2004), was operationalised as a binary variable equal to 1
for respondents who reported attending mass at least once a month.
Regarding attitudes, a strategy of constructing a number of theoretically
grounded scales with high internal reliability was pursued (see Heath et al.
1994). This was seen as the best way to capture the various attitudinal dimensions
identified as potentially relevant to Trotskyist voting, as opposed to a
simple indicator of left-right self-placement. Although identification with the
left or the right of the political spectrum is a particularly strong determinant of
voting behaviour in France (Michelat & Tiberj 2007), left-right self-placement
typically draws on both attitudes towards economic policy and attitudes on
socio-cultural issues simultaneously (Van der Eijk et al. 2005). As such, the
very ambiguity of this measurement makes it unsuitable to the purpose of this
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study, which is to disentangle the effects of attitudes held on different policy
dimensions.
It proved possible to build suitable scales for all the sets of attitudes
identified as potentially favouring Trotskyist voting, with the notable exception
of attitudes towards the economy, which failed to combine in a scale with an
acceptable Cronbach’s alpha. The failure of economic preferences to form a
coherent cluster of attitudes in France has already been noted by Grunberg
and Schweisguth (2003).Accordingly, three questions were used to form three
separate variables: one on economic inequality (‘Do you consider it important
to reduce the inequality between the rich and the poor?’); one on state
dirigisme (‘In the face of economic difficulties, do you think the state should
give more freedom to firms or exercise more control over them?’); and one on
the labour market (‘Do you agree that layoffs on the part of private companies
should be banned?’).
For cultural liberalism, distrust in politics and political disengagement,
three scales were constructed. The ‘cultural liberalism’ score (Cronbach’s
alpha 0.79) is based on responses to eight separate questions pertaining to
immigration, the death penalty, perceptions of tradition and so on. The ‘political
distrust’ scale (Cronbach’s alpha 0.74) draws on five questions asking
respondents whether they think politicians are honest and whether they trust
political parties and various democratic institutions. The third scale, ‘political
disengagement’, was constructed from four questions with an alpha of 0.75,
and brings together a question about interest in politics and questions about
the frequency of political discussions with family and friends. Finally, an index
of political knowledge was built by adding up the number of correct answers to
five right-or-wrong questions about the French political system. All the questions
used are presented in the Appendix.
Analysis and results
Partisanship and the Trotskyist parties
The PEF data reveal that only 23 per cent of Trotskyist voters declared in 2002
that they identified with any of the Trotskyist parties. Although strikingly low,
this figure is not surprising. As noted earlier, the Trotskyist parties’ electoral
rise began in the 1990s. Therefore they were unlikely to generate substantial
partisan attachment within the electorate by 2002. Being small and relatively
unknown to the public from the outset, these parties chose during the 2002
campaign to rely almost exclusively on the media appearances of their presidential
candidates to foster support. Furthermore, the previous discussion also
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suggested that they were likely to attract relatively disenfranchised voters
distrustful of the political system. Such voters would in general tend to experience
low levels of partisan attachment.
Socio-demographic patterns
As an introduction, Table 1 provides the distribution of extreme left voters for
the socio-demographic variables retained for the analysis. Separate proportions
are also given for LCR and LO voting, although not for the PT given the
small number of PT supporters in the sample.The two social classes that were
the most likely to support Trotskyist parties in 2002 were the lower end of the
service sector and the manual working class (14 and 13 per cent, respectively).
The very strong emphasis on the plight of the manual working class that
marked LO’s campaign did not prevent lower-grade employees from giving a
comparatively large number of votes to this party. The smallest proportion of
extreme left supporters is to be found among the self-employed and independent
(3 per cent), which is by no means surprising since this group is known to
be a strong conservative force in France (Cautrès 2004). Individuals subject to
non-standard work contracts, usually entailing less job security and a lower
income, tend to support Trotskyist parties quite strongly (15 per cent).
The distribution of Trotskyist voters as a function of age reveals that
support for the new extreme left among the older generation is dismal (3 per
cent),whereas it is the highest for individuals born after 1960 (14 per cent).Not
surprisingly, home owners and individuals who attend church are less likely to
give their support to parties of the new extreme left. The same can be said of
married individuals, although an age effect is likely to be at play. Similarly, the
negative association between higher education and Trotskyist voting is likely
to be mediated by social class and income. At first sight, comparatively high
support for the new extreme left among public sector employees (12 per cent)
would seem to run counter to the previous discussion, which suggested that
Trotskyist support was rather to be found among people with disadvantaged
employment conditions. This association, however, is not surprising given the
traditional leftist tendencies of the public sector in France. Moreover, a
growing share of public sector employees does not benefit from the traditional
civil service employment guarantees, and is instead employed on the basis of
non-standard job contracts.
As for the apparent support of women for the extreme left, it might be
related to the propensity of French women to be distrustful of the political
class (Sineau 2004), but could also be due to the prevalence in France of worse
working conditions and lower earnings for women than for men, particularly
within the routine non-manual class (Chenu 2005). Finally, the comparatively
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high proportion of female LO voters relative to female LCR voters might be
related to the fact that LO’s candidate in 2002,Arlette Laguiller, was a woman,
although little hard evidence can be put forward to support this idea.
Table 2 provides logit estimates for socio-demographic predictors of
extreme left voting in 2002. In keeping with the hypotheses, Model 1 reveals
that the associations of Trotskyist voting with both the lower-grade nonmanual
class and the manual working class resist well multivariate analysis
Table 1. Distribution of Trotskyist voters by socio-demographic attributes (percentages;
N = 3,179)
Trotskyist
support LO support
LCR
support
Gender
Female 12 7 5
Male 9 4 4
Age
Born before 1940 3 2 1
Born between 1940 and 1960 11 7 4
Born after 1960 14 7 6
Social class
Salariat (I+II) 8 4 4
Routine non-manual (III) 14 8 6
Self-employed and independents (IV) 3 1 1
Foremen and technicians (V) 9 5 3
Manual working class (V+VI) 13 7 5
Employment sector
Public 12 6 5
Private 9 5 4
Marital status
Married 10 6 4
Not married 12 5 6
Home ownership
Home owner 9 5 4
Not home owner 12 6 6
Higher education
With higher education 9 5 4
Without higher education 11 6 4
Non-standard work contract 15 9 6
Church attendee 5 3 2
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since both classes are significant at a 0.01 level. The dummy variable added to
control for female routine employees with husbands in the salariat is also
significant, suggesting the introduction of this variable was justified.8
Not surprisingly,
income has a significant effect and is negatively associated with
Trotskyist support. Being a woman appears as a significant positive predictor
of extreme left support, and so does the fact of being from the younger
generation, although there is less discrepancy than had been hypothesised
between the size of the effect for the younger generation, born after 1960, and
the size of the effect for the intermediate generation, born between 1940 and
Table 2. Socio-demographic predictors of Trotskyist voting (multivariate logistic regressions;
N = 2,651)
Model 1 Model 2
coefficient coefficient
Female 0.36*** 0.36***
Age
Born before 1940 (reference)
Born between 1940 and 1960 1.56*** 1.56***
Born after 1960 1.80*** 1.65***
Social class
Salariat (I+II) (reference)
Routine non-manual (III) 0.47*** 0.30
Self-employed and independents (IV) -0.41 -0.41
Foremen and technicians (V) 0.15 0.15
Manual working class (V+VI) 0.46** 0.48
Wife (III) husband (I+II) dummy variable -0.93** -0.95**
Income -0.11** -0.11**
Public sector 0.42*** 0.42***
Non-standard work contract 0.25 0.26
Home owner -0.04 -0.05
Higher education -0.07 -0.07
Married 0.03 0.03
Church attendee -0.29 -0.29
Class III ¥ born after 1960 0.44
Class VI+VII ¥ born after 1960 -0.07
Constant -3.42*** -3.37***
Pseudo R2
0.074 0.076
Notes: ** p < 0.05; *** p < 0.01.
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1960. This might be explained by the fact that both generations have experienced
the economic crisis of the past few decades and its repercussions on
working conditions and living standards, albeit the younger more acutely.
Whereas being employed in the public sector appears as a positive predictor
of extreme left voting, marital status, home ownership and higher education
come out as insignificant, as do church attendance and the fact of being
subject to a non-standard work contract. To give an illustration by predicted
probabilities, an unmarried female lower-grade employee from the younger
generation, employed in the private sector with a relatively low income, had a
24.9 per cent chance of voting Trotskyist in 2002.
Moreover, the socio-demographic predictors for Trotskyist voting differ
widely from those related to Communist Party,Socialist Party and Green Party
voting (see Appendix Table A2 for models for these three parties). For the CP,
being part of the younger generation has a negative effect on support, and no
significant effect is associated with the lower-grade non-manual class.The same
applies to the Socialist Party. As for support for the French Greens, it is
positively predicted by higher education and a middle-class occupation.
In Model 2, interaction effects have been added to test further the hypotheses
of the model of class voting presented previously. It has been suggested
that the strongest Trotskyist supporters were likely to be found among the
younger generation of lower-grade employees and manual workers. At first
sight, the estimates for the interaction effects appear disappointing since only
the interaction effect for the lower-grade non-manual class is significant at a
0.1 level. However, the absence of a strong interaction effects is not surprising,
given that Model 1 already shows a strong age effect operating across all social
class. At any rate, the model of class voting presented seems supported by the
fact the most likely Trotskyist voters are the younger members of the less
advantaged classes.
Attitudinal patterns
In Model 3,Trotskyist voting is regressed on the attitudinal predictors identified
previously (Table 3). All the variables are significant at a 0.01 level in the
predicted direction. Refusal of laissez-faire, liberal views on cultural issues,
distrust in politics,political disengagement and low levels of political knowledge
all are strongly related to support for the new extreme left. Since some of the
variables are constructed scales while others are simply derived from survey
questions with a dichotomous answer choice, it is not easy to assess the relative
importance of the predictors.Using odds ratios,it is found that the odds ratio of
voting Trotskyist for an individual declaring opposition to economic liberalism
on all three indicators compared to an individual taking the opposite stand on
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the three indicators is 4.6.For the‘cultural liberalism’ scale,the odds ratio of the
most culturally liberal compared to the least culturally liberal is 4.2, which
indicates the large importance of liberal values for Trotskyist voting. However,
since very few individuals occupy the two extremes for the scale for cultural
liberalism,whereas there are large numbers at both ends for economic attitudes,
it can advanced that attitudes on the economy have more explanatory power.It
should be noted, nonetheless, that the odds ratios for economic attitudes
calculated in the same way for Socialist Party and Communist Party support are,
respectively, 3.0 and 13.4, suggesting that in fact the ‘Trotskyists’ are much less
radical on the economy than one may be led to think.
Mixed model
Model 4 is obtained by bringing together into one multivariate framework the
significant socio-demographic variables with the attitudinal predictors of
Trotskyist voting (Table 4). The public sector variable ceases to be significant
at a 0.05 level, confirming that the significant relationship between employment
in the public sector and extreme left support found earlier was partly
mediated by the specific leftist political leanings of the public sector in France.
Income ceases to be significant, as well as gender, which is by no means
surprising since, as has already been pointed out, the positive relationship
between being a woman and support for the new extreme left was likely to be
mediated by attitudes such as cultural liberalism and distrust in politics, which
Table 3. Attitudinal predictors of Trotskyist voting (multivariate
logistic regression; N = 2,815)
Model 3
coefficient
Economic inequality 0.29***
Control over firms 0.70***
Ban on layoffs 0.22***
Cultural liberalism 0.08***
Political distrust 0.09***
Political disengagement 0.11***
Political knowledge -0.16***
Constant -6.18***
Pseudo R2
0.101
Note: *** p < 0.01.
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are found more often among women than among men (Sineau 2004). The
positive effect of being a member of the manual working class on Trotskyist
support is divided by two and ceases to be significant, which might be attributed
the prevalence of left-wing attitudes on the economy among manual
workers (Michelat & Simon 2004), which are in turn conducive to Trotskyist
support. By contrast, the positive effect of being a lower-grade employee not
only resists the analysis, but is in fact strengthened by the introduction of the
attitudinal variables. This important result suggests that, although less driven
towards Trotskyist voting by their political attitudes than other social classes,
Trotskyist supporters from the lower service sector will still tend to vote for the
new extreme left for other reasons, associated in one way or another with their
Table 4. Mixed model of Trotskyist voting (multivariate logistic regression; N = 2,397)
Model 4
coefficient
Female -0.01
Age
Born before 1940 (reference)
Born between 1940 and 1960 1.34***
Born after 1960 1.44***
Social class
Salariat (I+II) (reference)
Routine non-manual (III) 0.51***
Self-employed and independents (IV) -0.01
Foremen and technicians (V) 0.22
Manual working-class (V+VI) 0.24
Wife (III) husband (I+II) dummy variable -0.73
Income -0.04
Public sector 0.27*
Economic inequality 0.29***
Control over firms 0.56***
Ban on layoffs 0.24***
Cultural liberalism 0.08***
Political distrust 0.08***
Political disengagement 0.07***
Political knowledge -0.19***
Constant -6.48***
Pseudo R2
0.139
Notes: * p < 0.1; *** p < 0.01.
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experience as a class. Previously, it was advanced that the decisive experience
for lower-grade employees in this case would be the worsening labour market
and employment conditions that have affected their class as a whole since the
1970s. Although nothing conclusive on this precise point can be drawn from
the analysis, this view would tend to be confirmed by the results.
Regarding age, the fact of being born after 1940 retains a strong predictive
power when controlling for attitudes, although its effect is a little reduced.
Although the coefficient remains higher for the younger generation than for
the intermediate generation, both are very close. As already suggested, the
small difference found between these two generations in terms of extreme left
support might also provide evidence that it is not so much the fact of having
entered the labour market in the 1980s or later that is decisive, but the fact of
having experienced during most of one’s working life the years of economic
crisis. As for the attitudinal predictors of Trotskyist voting, they all resist the
introduction of socio-demographic variables, and all remain significant at a
0.01 level.
Discussion and conclusion
That three million voters in an advanced capitalist nation like France would
support Trotskyist parties in an election held thirteen years after the fall of the
Berlin wall can be seen as deeply puzzling.This study aimed first and foremost
to identify who the ‘Trotskyists’ were, and what were the strongest predictors
of support for the Trotskyist parties in 2002. It also aimed to provide a test for
a series of hypotheses put forward in the form of a model of class voting suited
to a postindustrial society like France.
On the socio-demographic side, the strongest single predictor of Trotskyist
voting in 2002 is age – more specifically the fact of belonging either to an
intermediate generation, born between 1940 and 1960, or to a younger generation,
born after 1960, as opposed to belonging to an older generation born
before 1940. The effect is the strongest for the post-1960 generation, thus
tending to support the generational hypotheses presented, although the difference
between the younger and the intermediate generations was not as
wide as predicted. It remains impossible to assert with certainty whether the
reluctance of individuals older than 60 to vote for the new extreme left is
attributable to a generational effect or an age effect, although one might
suspect both are at play.
As far as class is concerned, the individuals who were the most likely to
support Trotskyist parties in 2002 were to be found in the lower end of the
service sector – a highly feminised social category that has been called a
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‘service proletariat’ (Esping-Andersen 1993). This finding is an important one
since it reveals that, in a postindustrial society, members of less advantaged
social classes may still have a privileged relationship with political forces on
the left running on a radical economic platform. Put differently, the strong
links that existed forty years ago between the French working class and the CP
may have found here a kind of avatar, but with different actors and in a social
and economic context dramatically altered.
On the side of political preferences, the attitudes that retained the strongest
effect after a multivariate analysis were, unsurprisingly, attitudes towards the
economy. In addition, three other strong attitudinal predictors of Trotskyist
voting were identified – namely cultural liberalism, distrust in politics and
political disengagement. In respect of the last two, extreme left voters share a
common attitudinal trait with the supporters of the French extreme right,
whereas in respect of cultural liberalism these two groups of voters are poles
apart.As far as economic preferences are concerned, the extreme left supporters
came out as less radical on this dimension than the older CP voters, and
closer to the supporters of the mainstream Socialist Party than might have
been expected. This would suggest, in turn, that many of these voters are very
far from being actual ‘Trotskyists’.
A closer look at the PEF data, however, leads one to qualify this view to
some extent. What emerges is not so much the moderation of Trotskyist
supporters in 2002, as a surprising radicalism on the part of Socialist Party
supporters. For instance, according to the PEF, as much as 51 per cent of
Socialist Party voters either ‘totally agreed’ or ‘rather agreed’ that ‘layoffs on
the part of private companies should be banned’ in 2002 (for the Trotskyist
voters, the proportion was 61 per cent).
This puzzle notwithstanding, the ideological proximity between extreme
left voters and Socialist Party voters on the economic dimension of political
competition has prompted Tiberj (2007: 147) to argue that the Trotskyist
parties are ‘redundant’ vis-à-vis the rest of the French left. According to this
author, the essential explanation for the Trotskyists’ rise lies in a bid on the
part of Trotskyist voters to influence the Socialist Party to take a leftist policy
turn. This should be accepted as part of the story, and indeed one of the
hypotheses proposed here has been that younger voters of less advantaged
social classes were susceptible to be drawn towards the Trotskyist parties in
2002 precisely because they perceived the Socialist Party as too moderate in
terms of economic policy. However,Tiberj’s attempt to explain away the rise of
the Trotskyist parties in strictly political-electoral terms is not only theoretically
one-sided, but misses out on the originality of these parties as bearers of
a new brand of ideological radicalism within a postindustrial society. By contrast
with Tiberj’s approach, this study has tried to provide an account of the
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Trotskyists’ rise by putting it in the perspective of certain dramatic societal
transformations that have affected France in the past few decades, particularly
regarding employment relations.
The Trotskyists’ electoral success seems to contradict the widely held
notion that the collapse of Soviet Communism eliminated the potential appeal
of the radical socialist left in advanced democracies, and thus ‘shortened the
axis of competition over alternative modes for allocating resources’ (Kitschelt
1994: 31). In addition, this electoral success is also in apparent contradiction
with the idea, defended by Inglehart (1990, 1997), that new political parties
appearing on the left of the political spectrum in wealthy capitalist countries
will tend to put the emphasis on ‘postmaterial’ concerns such as the environment
or quality of life issues, as well as to attract middle-class voters.
Although not ‘new politics’ in Inglehart’s sense, the parties that have been
considered here are definitely new politics.Their crucial reliance on the media,
their rather slim organisational structures, and in particular their appeal to
younger and relatively disaffected voters, qualifies them as such. In order to
account for the new extreme left’s success, this study has put forward a generational
argument of a widely different character from Inglehart’s (1977,
1990) generational model of political change. Instead of being driven towards
postmaterialism, it was hypothesised that voters from post-1960 cohorts might
instead be driven towards radical ‘materialist’ politics.As younger lower-grade
employees or manual workers in particular were likely to experience unemployment,
job insecurity and a relative drop in living standards upon their
entry in the labour market from the 1980s onwards, it was proposed that such
a formative experience of economic insecurity, together with a process of
political disaffection towards the established parties, would be conducive to
Trotskyist voting.
Moreover, this study also seems to contradict Kitschelt’s ‘realignment
hypothesis’ (Kitschelt 1994; Kitschelt & McGann 1995). According to the
realignment hypothesis, blue-collar workers and low-skilled employees in the
private sector, becoming aware that their employment conditions and opportunities
are now highly dependent on the ability of their own employers to
cope with foreign competition in a globalised economy, have undergone a
process of political realignment whereby they have ceased to support economic
interventionism and socialism to favour neoliberal economic policies.
For Kitschelt, then, with the exception of the public sector, the privileged
association between the less advantaged classes and the political left is something
of the past. Although it is true that manual workers and lower-grade
employees are also comparatively strong supporters of the French extreme
right (Mayer & Perrineau 1992; Perrineau 2003), the fact that the strongest
supporters of the new extreme left are to be found among these two classes
three million trotskyists? 383
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suggests that the realignment hypothesis has been overstated. Moreover, these
results converge with those of another study contesting Kitschelt’s realignment
hypothesis in the cases of France and Denmark (Ivarsflaten 2006).
The findings of this study on the electoral rise of the new French extreme
left call for further research, both idiographic and comparative. In France, after
a relative electoral setback in 2007, the extreme left appears to be once again
on the rise. It has assumed, however, a different shape since the transformation
of the LCR into the NPA in February 2009. The most dynamic political force
on the left of the Socialist Party today, the NPA is not an officially Trotskyist
organisation. Furthermore, it remains to be seen whether the French extreme
left has analogues in Europe. Although it might be tempting to dismiss it as a
Gallic oddity explainable by a long, highly idiosyncratic tradition of political
activism, there might be less and less ground to do so. In particular, in the last
German federal election in 2005, Oskar Lafontaine’s Left Party created a
surprise by obtaining more than 8 per cent of the vote. This result was an
advance compared with Germany’s far left result at the 2002 federal election.
In sum, class voting might still matter, even if it is of a kind quite removed
from class voting as it used to prevail in Western Europe in the 1950s or 1960s.
Although the support of the working class for the political left in the past was
never complete (Weakliem & Heath 1999), manual workers represented at the
time the primary source of votes for most social-democratic or communist
parties in Europe. The findings of this study point to a very different picture.
Not only does party attachment play little role in Trotskyist voting in France,
but the social class the most likely to support the Trotskyist parties in 2002 was
not the manual working class, but the lower end of the service sector. In turn,
it was argued that the reasons for this support could be understood in relation
to the changes that have affected this social class in terms of labour market
conditions, employment and living standards in the past decades, whereby it
was progressively transformed into a ‘service proletariat’. Overall, the findings
of this study confirm the need to build new models of class voting suited to a
postindustrial context. When constructing such models, particular attention
should be given to the trajectories of different social classes over time in terms
of changing life chances.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Anne Cornilleau, Jonathan Gershuny, Maria
Grasso, George Hoare, Shreya Sarawgi, Marlon Seror, Dan Sperber, Vincent
Tiberj and Radu Umbres, as well as three anonymous reviewers, for their
useful comments and advice.
384 nathan sperber
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Appendix
Cultural liberalism (8 questions, Cronbach’s alpha 0.79):
‘Is the respect of tradition important to you?’ (Not very important; Somewhat
important; Very important; Extremely important)
‘With which of these two opinions on schools do you agree the most?’ (They
should provide a sense of discipline and effort;They should allow pupils to
develop a critical mind)
‘Do you agree that there are too many immigrants in France?’(Strongly agree;
Rather agree; Do not agree; Do not agree at all)
‘Is the presence of immigrants in France a source of cultural enrichment?’
(Strongly agree; Rather agree; Do not agree; Do not agree at all)
‘Are you afraid that France might lose its national identity and
culture because of European integration?’ (Yes, I feel afraid; No, I don’t
feel afraid)
‘Are you afraid that European integration might lead to a new influx of
immigrants?’ (Yes, I feel afraid; No, I don’t feel afraid)
‘Do you agree that the death penalty should be reintroduced?’ (Strongly
agree; Rather agree; Do not agree; Do not agree at all)
‘Do you agree that in order to fight delinquency, when a minor commits a
crime his family should receive less social benefits?’ (Strongly agree;
Rather agree; Do not agree; Do not agree at all)
Political distrust (7 questions, Cronbach’s alpha 0.74):
‘How do you consider democracy works in France?’ (Very well; Quite well;
Not very well; Not well at all)
‘Do you think that politicians are more often honest or corrupted?’ (Honest;
Corrupted)
‘Do you think that politicians are in general preoccupied with what people like
you think?’ (Yes, a lot; Quite a lot; A little; Not at all)
‘Do you feel political parties can be trusted?’ (I rather do; I rather don’t)
‘Do you feel Parliament can be trusted?’ (I rather do; I rather don’t)
‘Do you feel the judiciary can be trusted?’ (I rather do; I rather don’t)
‘Do you feel the state can be trusted’ (I rather do; I rather don’t)
Political disengagement (4 questions, Cronbach’s alpha 0.75):
‘Do you take interest in politics?’ (Yes,a lot;Yes,quite a lot;Yes,a little;No,not
at all)
‘How often do you talk about politics with your family?’ (Often; From time to
time; Rarely; Never)
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‘How often do you talk about politics with your friends?’ (Often; From time to
time; Rarely; Never)
‘Do you feel close to a political party today?’ (Yes, very close; Yes, somewhat
close; Yes, a little; No, not at all)
Table A1. Socio-demographic and attitudinal predictors of LO and LCR voting in 2002
(multivariate logistic regressions)
LO support
(coefficient)
LCR support
(coefficient)
Female 0.36** -0.19 0.30 0.03
Age
Born before 1940 (reference)
Born between 1940 and 1960 1.39*** 1.23*** 1.51*** 1.25***
Born after 1960 1.48*** 1.02*** 2.04*** 1.75***
Social class
Salariat (I+II) (reference)
Routine non-manual (III) 0.49** 0.42* 0.38 0.57**
Self-employed and
independents (IV)
-0.72 -0.48 -0.03 0.54
Foremen and technicians (V) 0.37 0.33 -0.32 0.11
Manual working-class (V+VI) 0.50* 0.15 0.32 0.33
Wife (III) husband (I+II)
dummy variable
-0.70 -0.49 -0.92
Income -0.13** -0.02 -0.04 -0.04
Public sector 0.32* 0.22 0.40** 0.26
Non-standard work contract 0.38 0.05
Home owner 0.03 -0.02
Higher education -0.08 -014
Married 0.28 -0.28
Church attendee -0.15 -0.36
Economic inequality 0.36*** 0.33*** 0.13 0.15
Control over firms 0.42*** 0.32* 0.89*** 0.76***
Ban on layoffs 0.17** 0.14 0.18** 0.27***
Cultural liberalism 0.04** 0.05*** 0.12*** 0.10***
Political distrust 0.07*** 0.07*** 0.11*** 0.08***
Political disengagement 0.14*** 0.11*** 0.07* 0.01
Political knowledge -0.17** -0.22*** -0.12 -0.12
Constant -3.88*** -6.24*** -6.71*** -4.49*** -7.26*** -7.42***
Pseudo R2
0.057 0.077 0.104 0.067 0.090 0.127
N 2,651 2,815 2,397 2,651 2,815 2,397
Notes: * p <0.1; ** p < 0.05; *** p < 0.01.
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TableA2.Socio-demographicandattitudinalpredictorsofSocialistParty,CommunistPartyandGreenPartyvotingin2002(multivariate
logisticregressions)
SocialistPartysupport
(coefficient)
CommunistPartysupport
(coefficient)
GreenPartysupport
(coefficient)
Female0.15-0.49***-0.43**0.14-0.050.07
Age
Bornbefore1940(reference)
Bornbetween1940and1960-0.48***1.60***1.16***-0.61***-0.09-0.06
Bornafter1960-0.81***2.14***1.64***-0.88***-0.63**-0.48
Socialclass
Salariat(I+II)(reference)
Routinenon-manual(III)0.05-0.35-0.250.22-0.12-0.01
Self-employedandindependents(IV)-0.35-1.07*-0.92-0.04-1.14-0.82
Foremenandtechnicians(V)0.38*-0.13-0.100.55**-0.10-0.11
Manualworking-class(V+VI)0.23-0.67**-0.390.34*0.450.74*
Wife(III)husband(I+II)dummyvariable-0.52-1.41-1.31-0.58-0.90-0.36
Income0.03-0.08-0.13*-0.020.01-0.11
Publicsector0.51***0.06-0.070.37***0.35-0.08
Non-standardworkcontract0.070.55*0.40-0.010.670.58
Homeowner-0.130.35*0.57***-0.150.030.14
Highereducation0.140.63***0.220.08-0.91***-1.40***
Married-0.17-0.43**0.19-0.050.040.19
Churchattendee-0.81***-1.56***-1.36**-0.70***-1.87***-1.51**
Economicinequality0.24***0.16*0.160.20***0.34**0.39**
Controloverfirms0.63***0.08-0.110.64***1.47***1.60***
Banonlayoffs0.080.020.000.040.36***0.22*
Culturalliberalism0.06***0.22***0.20***0.08***0.06**0.11***
Politicaldistrust-0.06***0.07***0.05**-0.05***-0.01-0.01
Politicaldisengagement-0.06***0.030.02-0.06**-0.18***-0.21***
Politicalknowledge-0.08*-0.010.01-0.09*-0.03-0.07
Constant-1.16***-2.47***-3.62***-6.02***-5.67***-2.12***-2.97***-6.03***-5.99***
PseudoR2
0.0310.0680.1140.1401.1930.0980.0580.1510.235
N2,6512,8152,6512,8152,3712,3712,6512,8152,371
Notes:*p<0.1;**p<0.05;***p<0.01.
three million trotskyists? 387
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Notes
1. The Trotskyist parties also started, in the 1970s, to present candidates and lists at other
elections – most notably at parliamentary, municipal and European elections (Pina 2007).
Although they never fared well in parliamentary races, disadvantaged by the strict plurality
system at the district level, the LO lists and the LCR lists each obtained more than
4 per cent of the vote in the municipalities in which they were present at the 2001
municipal election.At the 1999 and 2004 elections for the European Parliament, LO and
the LCR presented joint lists, thus overlooking for the time of two campaigns their
longstanding animosity.The joint list made 5.2 per cent in 1999, and France was therefore
the only country to send deputies of the extreme left to the European parliament after
that election (Knapp 2004). However, the list did not reach the 5 per cent threshold to
send deputies in 2004.
2. The Alford index is simply the percentage of left voting within the manual working class
minus the percentage of left voting in the rest of the population. If non-manual labour as
a proportion of the workforce declines, the Alford index will decrease even if the strength
of the relationship between class position and voting behaviour at the individual level
remains constant.
3. Kitschelt (1994) claims to reject class analysis as a whole, but his critique of the concept
of class is almost exclusively concerned with debunking the property rights approach.This
is rather misleading since not all class analysis hinges on such an approach (this study is
yet another example). To consider, on the other hand, that Erikson and Goldthorpe
(1992) are not studying ‘class’ but something else would be to squabble over semantics
and little more.
4. A recent study concludes that even when using the Alford index class voting can hardly
be said to have disappeared in Western Europe (Oskarson 2005).
5. According to data from the French Ministry of Work and Employment (cited in Groux
2007), from 1947 to 1958 the average amount per year of days of work lost to striking
activity in France was six million. Throughout the 1990s, the average amount of days lost
was 500,000 per year, although this figure is obtained by not taking into account the year
1995 (in December 1995, France experienced a month of social unrest and strikes affected
many sectors of activity).
6. The PEF 2002 was conducted using quota sampling, a practise solidly established
in France (to the knowledge of the author, no large-scale post-election survey has
ever been conducted in this country using probability sampling). A multi-stage
survey protocol was followed, whereby a number of geographical units were selected by
means of probability sampling, after which specific quotas were filled in by interviewers
in respondent selection. The quota controls used were age, gender and occupation of
the head of household. Statistical modelling is much less reliable when the data has
been collected through quota sampling as opposed to probability sampling (Gschwend
2005). Two strategies were carried out to bolster the robustness of the results. First, as
advised in Gschwend (2005), the marginal distributions obtained in the PEF for some
socio-demographic variables that were not used as controls were checked against
census data from 1999 and data derived from large-scale surveys conducted around
2002 by the INSEE (National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies). Second,
each model presented was run a second time applying the socio-demographic weights
supplied with the PEF data. In none of the models did the use of weights affect the
results.
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7. The PEF asks respondents about their monthly household income, including social transfers.The
nine increments are the following: less than 3,000 francs, between 3,001 and 5,000
francs, between 5,001 and 7,500 francs, between 7,501 and 10,000 francs, between 10,001
and 15,000 francs, between 15,001 and 20,000 francs, between 20,001 and 30,000 francs,
between 30,001 and 50,000 francs, and over 50,001 francs.
8. In none of the models does the routine non-manual class lose its significance as a positive
predictor of Trotskyist voting when this dummy variable is removed.
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