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Unit 12: Politics of Representation and Participation

If all the presidential campaigns have fascinated French voters and foreign observers, it is not only Notes
due to the novelty of a nationwide competition in a country accustomed to small constituencies and
local contests. Style and content of campaign oratory have generally been of high quality. Because
the formal campaigns are short and concentrated, radio, television, and newspapers are able to
grant candidates, commentators, and forecasters considerable time and space. The televised duels
between the presidential candidates in the last four elections, patterned after debates between
presidential candidates in the United States, but longer and of far higher quality, were viewed by at
least half of the population.
Informal campaigns, however, are long and arduous. The fixed term of the French presidency means
that, unless the president dies or resigns, there are no snap elections for the chief executive as there
are from time to time in Britain and Germany. As a result, even in the absence of primaries, the
informal campaign begins to get quite intense years before the election. In many ways, the
presidential campaign of 2002 began well before the new millenium.
Just as in the United States, electoral coalitions that elect a president are different from those that
secure a legislative majority for a government. This means that any candidate for the presidency
who owes his nomination to his position as party leader must appeal to an audience broader than
a single party. Once elected, the candidate seeks to establish political distance from his party origins.
Although at the time of his first election he was more closely identified as a party leader than his
predecessors in the presidency, Mitterrand successfully established the necessary distance between
party and office, which explains a great deal about his political success in 1988. Francois Mitterrand
was the first president in the history of the Fifth Republic to have been elected twice in popular
elections. Jacques Chirac has now accomplished this same achievement.
Although the 2002 presidential election deeply divided all of the major parties, the process of coalition
building around presidential elections has probably been the key element in political party
consolidation and in the development of party coalitions since 1968. The prize of the presidency is
so significant, as we shall see, that it has preoccupied the parties of both the right and the left since
the 1960s and influences their organization, their tactics, and their relations with one another.
Political Participation in China

In the communist party-state, political participation, interest articulation, and interest aggregation
are processes that are different from those normally, found in liberal democratic systems. The source
of difference is, of course, different conceptions of the relationship between leaders and citizens:
the notion of guardianship is fundamentally incompatible with liberal democratic notions of
representation. The Communist Party organization claims to represent the interests of all society,
but it rejects, as unnecessary and unacceptable, organized interest groups independent of the
Communist Party and political parties other than the communists. While there has been change in
political processes in recent decades, the “officially acceptable” forms of political participation,
interest articulation, and interest aggregation in the Chinese political system nonetheless continue
to reflect the relationship of guardianship between party and society. Although moderated somewhat
by the mass line, which emphasizes consultation, this relationship essentially structures political
participation as a hierarchical top-down process, restricts interest articulation to individual contacting
of officials, and leaves little place for interest aggregation outside the Communist Party. This section
discusses political participation; the next section explores interest articulation and aggregation.
Officially Acceptable Political Participation

An important aspect of political reform undertaken after Mao’s death in 1976 has been the redefinition
of what constitutes “officially acceptable” political participation in the Chinese system. This is part
of the process of political liberalization within a framework of Communist Party dominance.
Guidelines for the new political participation are evident in three categories of rule changes that
have routinized participation and reduced its burden for ordinary Chinese. The changes reflect an

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