Voting Is Not Enough: The Electoral Impact of Generational Renewal in France

• In Event: 2022 Parliamentary and Presidential Elections in France

Abstract

International studies have generally concluded that there has been a decline in electoral participation in most Western democracies (Delwit, 2013, Kostelka, Blais, 2021). In France, there is growing concern that the country is evolving into an “abstention democracy” (Braconnier, Dormagen, 2006). Abstention at the individual level may signify a lack of social integration (Lancelot, 1962) or individuals’ lack of political competence (Lane, 1972) while at the collective level, abstention may lead to a strengthening of social inequalities when it comes to people’s having a political voice (Lehamn Schlozman et al., 2012). Yet there remains a paradox. Citizens have never had more formal qualifications, and in France and elsewhere, acquiring information through the media is becoming easier and easier. This ought to have led to a kind of “supercitizen” (Dalton, 1984), but abstention has nevertheless gained ground. Several studies point to generational renewal as a possible explanation (Dalton, 2007, Blais, Rubenson, 2013, Tiberj, 2017, 2019).
The objective in this paper is to verify and in particular to demonstrate that, behind generational renewal, there has been a decentering of voting in terms of citizens’ attitudes toward politics. This decentering has translated into a rise in intermittent abstention (or voting). Older cohorts may be characterized by a culture of deference, while the younger ones might be more characterized by a remote form of citizenship (Tiberj, 2017). The first of these outlooks may consist in trusting and submitting oneself (Gaxie, 1978) to parties and the political class, as well as in voting based on a sense of duty (Duchesne, 1997; Dalton, 2007). High levels of participation in elections would therefore not necessarily signify a strong interest in public affairs but rather an allegiance to the political system and to representative democracy. By contrast, the second outlook is characterized by a certain criticism of politics as it is conducted (Tiberj, 2017) and in particular of the classical actors who embody it. The act of voting has therefore apparently lost its centrality.
I consider there to be two phenomena at work behind this decentering. In one case, there is an intermittent abstention associated with social inequalities that has caused those with few formal qualifications and members of working-class categories to head to the ballot box less and less. The more recently members of these categories were born, the more likely they are to abstain in some elections. This development can also be explained by a decline in microincentives to vote among these social sectors. The other case is a matter of citizens for whom voting has become less important than other forms of politicization and participation. For these individuals, voting is no longer enough. There are overlaps here with the political theory of acts of citizenship (Isin and Nielsen, 2008) according to which individuals mobilize forms of actions and engagement that differ from the traditional forms of conventional political participation, which are deemed too restrictive.
To demonstrate this evolution, in this paper I propose to conduct analyses that are based on a dataset comprising the “participation” surveys of the Institut national de la statistique et des études économiques (INSEE) (covering the period 2002–2017, to highlight the evolution of abstention through the prism of generations and on the 2022 post-presidential survey.

Author

• Vincent Tiberj, Sciences Po Bordeaux