No Sex Scandals Please, We’re French: French Attitudes towards Politicians’ Public and Private Conduct

Abstract

The notion of distinct ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres underpins much normative and practical engagement with political misconduct. What is less clear is whether citizens draw distinctions between misdemeanours in the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres, and whether they judge these in systematically different ways. This paper explores attitudes to political misconduct in France. French citizens are often said to be particularly relaxed about politicians’ private affairs, but there has been little empirical evidence for this proposition. Drawing on original survey data, this paper demonstrates clearly that French citizens draw a sharp distinction between politicians’ public and private transgressions, and are more tolerant of the latter.

Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the British Academy (SG-101785). We would like to thank Martin Hansen and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. The Bettencourt affair erupted in 2010 over allegations that Liliane Bettencourt, the richest person in France, had made illegal cash donations to prominent conservative politicians, among them then President Nicolas Sarkozy.

2. Authors’ translation. The original French versions of these questions are available from the authors upon request.

3. The survey was administered online in January 2013. The sample was based on quotas for gender, age, education and region of residence. The breakdown of the sample according to selected characteristics is as follows: 54.3 per cent female, 45.7 per cent male; 30.1 per cent 16–34 year olds, 57.4 per cent 35–64 year olds, 12.5 per cent 65+ year olds; 6.6 per cent have no school-leaving certificate, 59.5 per cent have a school-leaving certificate (BAC), 33.9 per cent completed additional studies after BAC; 10.9 per cent unemployed, 89.1 per cent not unemployed; 30.1 per cent identify with the Parti Socialiste (PS), 22.8 per cent identify with the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire (UMP). Regional percentages of the sample ranged from 22.1 per cent for the Nord region and 18.3 per cent for Île de France, to 2.1 per cent and 3.2 per cent for the Bassins Parisiens Est and Ouest respectively.

4. This scenario is taken from Redlawsk and McCann (2005).

5. It would be an interesting avenue for future research to explore in more detail which considerations enter respondents’ heads when responding to different variations of such scenarios, though this was beyond the scope of this paper.

6. The two variants of the ‘affair’ scenario are here treated as a single scenario. Even though different respondents were asked different versions of the question and even though responses revealed a small difference in means, the assumption is that infidelity, rather than the gender of the senator, is the most important aspect of the question. To test this assumption, the sample was also split according to the variant of the scenario, and all subsequent analyses were re-run on both sub-samples and compared to each other as well as the original results. The factor, reliability and correlation analyses revealed no significant differences. However, the results from the regression analyses changed slightly. Above all, smaller sample sizes meant that some previously significant variables became insignificant.

7. To further check the validity of these scales, these scores were correlated with perceptions of French politicians’ conduct. Respondents were asked how much of a problem different forms of behaviour by elected politicians constituted in France today: not giving straight answers to questions; accepting bribes; misusing official expenses and allowances; making promises they know they cannot keep (on a scale from 0 to 10, where 0 meant not a problem at all and 10 indicated a very big problem). The correlations indicate that there is a much stronger relationship between perceptions of politicians’ wrongdoing and intolerance of politicians’ public misdemeanour than with intolerance of politicians’ private wrongdoing. These correlations are as follows – straight answers: 0.440 for intolerance of public, 0.102 for intolerance of private misdemeanours; bribes: 0.474 for intolerance of public, 0.097 for private misdemeanours; expenses and allowances: 0.556 for intolerance of public, 0.170 for intolerance of private misdemeanours; promises: 0.583 for intolerance of public, 0.222 for intolerance of private misdemeanours (all correlations significant at the 5 per cent level). None of the forms of behaviour covered here are ‘private’ wrongdoing scenarios (though ‘straight answers’ and ‘promises’ are not obviously examples of politicians abusing their office and influence either). Thus, it is not surprising that intolerance of sexual misdemeanours correlates weakly with perceptions of all of the forms of behaviour. Conversely, intolerance of public misconduct shows strong correlations with all forms of wrongdoing: the more a respondent disapproves of politicians’ public wrongdoing, the more of a problem he or she will deem politicians’ misdemeanours in France today. Thus, people who are more intolerant of politicians’ public misconduct are also more sensitive to politicians’ wrongdoing and more inclined to describe it as a problem, as one would expect if the ‘intolerance’ scales are reliable.

8. The resulting ‘personal morality’ scale ranges from 0 to 30 (30 being coded as the highest degree of personality morality), with an alpha of 0.66.