Party elite discursive repertoires of globalisation, Europeanisation and immigration in France: Party system dynamics and the political manufacturing of inexorability and exogenous constraints

http://www.essex.ac.uk/ecpr/events/jointsessions/paperarchive/nicosia/ws8/Ivaldi.pdfThe purpose of this paper is to explore and discuss French party elites' attitudes to European integration and to contrast them with partisan discursive constructions of economic globalisation, on the one hand, and immigration, on the other, in the specific context of the post-ECT referendum. We look at how these ‘active' sets of subjective images – as resources in struggle (Dean, 2003)– interact with the domestic political agenda and the electoral dynamics of first-order politics. In this, we follow and expand the recent call by Peter Mair with regard to the study of political parties and elites' attitudes towards Europe. According to Mair: “in addition to the imputed location of a party's core identity, and in addition to the evidence provided by the formal policies which it adopts or is obliged to adopt, we need to know more about how Europe actually plays in national political discourse, as well as about the way in which it is conceived” (Mair, 2006). A project still in its embryonic stage, the main focus here is on the heuristic approach that can be used in the exploratory study of partisan attitudes, with a clear view to assessing its pertinence prior to a more systematic textual corpus analysis , and to confront it with comparable attempts at mapping attitudinal preferences at party level in Western Europe and elsewhere (hence the participation in the ECPR workshop). An extension of Mair's argument on Europe to globalisation and immigration, and an attempt to combine party system approach with the social constructivist perspective underpinning critical discourse analysis (Fairclough & Thomas, 2004), this paper builds upon the concept of discursive repertoires –defined as articulated ideational formations produced and deployed interactively through the combination of discourses available to social actors operating in a given field (Bourdieu, 1977; Campbell, 2002; Korteweg, 2003)– to which partisan elites can have recourse under specific party system constraints and/or windows of opportunity for the purpose of mass mobilisation. From this party system perspective, the study of party-based attitudes to immigration, economic globalisation and Europe shall therefore look at the extant sets of discursive accounts upon which political actors may draw to maximise their appeal to voters in the first order arena, within the boundaries set by the necessity to achieve a politically acceptable level of ideological consistency and policy-homogeneity to avoid dissonance with their core value system and that of their traditional electoral constituency