French Parties and the Legislative Elections of 1993

Abstract

The dramatic reversal of party fortunes in the French elections of 1993 prompted us to re-evaluate the scheme we had devised for analyzing French parties. The scheme, based on the assumption that electoral rules have a significant impact on party organization, set out four stable prototypical parties. We felt that parties would organize around the electoral strategies prescribed by the single-member-district, two-ballot rules used for all but one of the Fifth Republic's legislative elections. We analyzed the 1993 election results to see if the parties we had identified as our prototypical parties still conformed to type. Despite the Socialists' dramatic defeat and the overwhelming victory of the Gaullist-centrist coalition, the Gaullists remained the primary party, the Union for French Democracy the dual electoral party, the Socialists the secondary party and the Communists the marginal party.