APSA, Boston 2008 Frank Baumgartner Pennsylvania State University Sylvain Brouard SPIRIT, Sciences Po Bordeaux Emiliano Grossman Sciences Po Paris Partisanship and political attention in France: Agenda dynamics and electoral incentives How does issue attention change over time and what determines such change? Are there left- wing or right-wing issues? Do partisan preferences affect issue attention or do the media or public opinion determine change in political attention? Or are institutional dynamics of political life more important? Do the proximity of elections, majority status or the years in office explain issue attention? This paper examines the dynamics of issue attention in France. In doing so, it will draw on the increasing amount of monographic or comparative work on the politics of attention and agenda-setting. It is based, moreover, on original data collected over the past three years on three separate and comprehensive agendas: presidential speeches (each quasi-sentence of the annual New Years Address by the President), bills (all government bills introduced in Parliament), and government statements and bill proposals (e.g., the agenda of the formal weekly cabinet meetings held each Wednesday throughout the Fifth Republic). For all of these indicators, we possess data for the period from 1986 to 2006. Each item in these three databases has been coded according to the common topic codebook of the comparative policy agendas project so we can easily assess the degree of attention across all policy topics, and we can do so in a manner that will later enable international comparisons as well. Our objectives are several. First and foremost, we want to renew the study of French institutions by developing original and innovative indicators of the life of political 1 institutions, as well as partisan and media indicators. While this paper is only a first step towards this wider objective, it already builds on a significant amount of data. Second, from a more comparative point of view, we intend to build on the literature in comparative politics and comparative public policy, as well as on the currently ongoing agenda projects elsewhere, to explore the dynamics of attention and to understand the specific determinants – institutional or other – of issue attention change. In this paper, we will concentrate on the importance of the partisan character of particular issues. To which extent are issues partisan: i.e. left-right or right-wing? To which extent, on the contrary, are they determined by other factors? In the rest of this paper, we will first discuss in further detail our research outline and hypotheses. We then look at static differences, before exploring more dynamic hypotheses on the importance of partisan factors. I. Issue attention and partisanship In democratic theory, whether traditional or economic, people vote in accordance with policy preferences, and political parties propose and try to implement specific policies for instrumental or intrinsic reasons. So, the identity of the governing parties should matter in policy making. According to the partisan hypothesis,1 the partisan composition of governments affects policies. Several empirical studies support this perspective.2 In contrast, however, other studies demonstrate that political parties do not matter in government and more precisely in lawmaking.3 For example, Cutright (1965), Haniff (1976), Wilenski, (1975), and Dye (1976) point out that « Welfare state » expenses depend on economic growth and demographic variations rather than on partisan preferences. More recently, renewing the industrial society convergence theory (Pryor, 1968 ; Parkin, 1971), scholars explain that globalisation (Garett & Lange, 1991 ; Keohane & Milner 1996 ; Mair, 1995), the increasing levels of complex interdependence (Keohane & Nye, 1989) and international capital mobility (Simmons, 1998 ; Andrews, 1994 ; Moses, 1994) decrease 1 For example, CASTLES F. & McKINLAY R., « Does politics matter ? an analysis of the public welfare commitment in advanced democratic states », European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 7, 1979b, pp. 169-186, BLAIS A., BLAKE D. et DION S., « Do Parties Make a Difference ? Parties and the Size of Government in Liberal Democracies », American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 37, n° 1, February 1993, pp. 40-62. 2See for example ROSE R. & DAVIES P. L., Inheritance in Public Policy : Change without Choice in Britain, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1994, and WILENSKI H., The Welfare State and Equality, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1975. 3 SCHMIDT M. G., « When Parties Matter : A Review of the Possibilities and Limits of Partisan Influence on Public Policy », European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 30, 1996, p. 155-183. 2 sharply the probability of partisan influence. The historical work of R. Rose and P. L. Davies (1994) on Britain policies also concludes that parties do not matter in policy making. Thus, we face two essentially divergent views on the relationship between parties and policies. One way to overpass this contradiction is to focus on « when parties matter »4 and to set a research agenda for analyzing the interaction between partisan variables and institutional or socio-economic variables. In this paper, we will focus on the effect of partisanship and electoral competition on three different agendas to understand if and how patterns of issue attention are shaped by partisanship. Parties and issue attention The “partisan difference hypothesis” remains common. It is based on equally forceful arguments. First, given that parties have different policy priorities, partisanship will induce variation in attention allocation. This hypothesis has the great advantage that it is easily testable. Moreover, we assume that certain issues are historically linked to particular political camps. A specific set of issues should be associated with leftwing and rightwing incumbents. These issues are of course not the same in all countries and over time. Without going into too much detail as to how we come to this hypothesis, we expect the following for the French case: - Rightwing parties should dedicate more attention to issues like law and order, immigration, defense, agriculture; - Leftwing parties should focus more on Rights, solidarity, housing, environment, education, labor. Let us now turn to the “partisan similarity hypothesis”. In the above mentioned literature, there are several types of arguments to explain the perceived or real convergence of partisan preferences. A first argument is very straightforward: given that portfolio holders want to attach their name to a policy initiative, each government, president, or legislature will try to legislate on each topic. Put differently, parties are made of individuals and party leaders, once 4 SCHMIDT M. G., « Political performance and types of democracy : Findings from comparative studies », European Journal of Political Research, Vol. 41, 2002, p. 147-163; SCHMIDT M. G., « The impact of political parties, constitutional structures and veto players on public policy », in KEMAN H. (ed), Comparative democratic politics, London, Sage, 2002 ; BOIX C., « Privatizing the Public Business Sector in the Eighties : Economic Performance, Partisan Responses and Divided Governements », British Journal of Political Science, Vol. 27, 1997, pp. 473-496, and OATLEY T., « How Constraining Is Capital Mobility ? The Partisan Hypothesis in an Open Economy », American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 43, n° 4, 1999, pp. 1003-1027. 3 in power, will attach more importance to their own success than to the values and the ideology of their party. Second, even assuming, on the contrary, that parties are indeed characterized by strong (ideological) preferences, this does not necessarily affect issue attention: newly elected governments will want to erase changes from outgoing governments. This will thus induce a similar attention allocation after alternation. Provided that alternation has been the rule for every general legislative election in France between 1981 and 2002, i.e. all the elections in our sample, this hypothesis is paramount for our paper. Finally, a third line of argument posits “partisan neutrality”. According to this point of view, governments are driven by the general dynamics of public problems that arise from the media agenda, public opinion, international events, the economy… Political attention is thus first of all shaped external events. Those alternative hypotheses are of course fundamental. Given our data, we will not be able to test all hypotheses equally. In particular, for the time being, we lack systematic data on external variables. Hence, the third hypothesis will only be tested residually, i.e. only in as far as the two preceding hypotheses are not confirmed. And even this will not be straightforward, as it will be close to impossible to distinguish it clearly from the “similarity” hypothesis. Moreover, it will not be possible – within the limits of this paper – to explore in more details the eventual sources of partisan similarity, as this would require a separate and specific research design. In sum, then, we will only look at whether differences between parties are strong and significant. Despite their importance, these hypotheses can hardly be said to cover all of the potential significance of parties. It is true that all of these hypotheses may be confirmed at different points in time. We therefore need some additional elements about how these different hypotheses may apply