The unsolved contradictions of the modernists. Economic policy expectations and political crisis in France 1978-2012

Bruno Amable

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: This paper analyses the French political crisis since the late 1970s by investigating the links between the social structure and the economic policy expectations of the electorate. To this end, data on post-electoral survey are used to estimate structural models of political support to political parties for 1978 and 2012, and the estimation results are used to propose an analysis of the French crisis. The enduring French political crisis is found to be the expression of contradictions between the economic policies implemented by the successive governments and the existence of a dominant social bloc, i.e. a coalition of social groups that would politically support the dominant political strategy. Since 1978, both the right and the left have failed to find a solution to the contradictions between the policies they implemented and the expectations of their social bases, which are themselves inhabited by tensions and contradictions that evolve with the structure of French capitalism. The failure of all governing coalitions so far is a new expression of that of the "modernists" to take into account the expectations of the popular classes.

Keywords: crise politique; économie politique; base sociale; France; political crisis; political economy; social base (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-his and nep-hme
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00973926
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published in 2014

Downloads: (external link)
https://shs.hal.science/halshs-00973926/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: The unsolved contradictions of the modernists. Economic policy expectations and political crisis in France 1978-2012 (2014)
Working Paper: The unsolved contradictions of the modernists. Economic policy expectations and political crisis in France 1978-2012 (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00973926

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().