Democracy-Speak: Party Manifestos and Democratic Values in Britain, France and Germany

Abstract

This article analyses changes in party-manifesto references to democracy in post-war Britain, the French Fifth Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany in order to explore changes in political parties' statements about democracy. It finds that in recent decades parties in all three countries have generally become more supportive of and more vocal in their calls for citizen participation in political decision-making, with a related increase in expressed support for direct democracy and other opportunities for participation. It also finds that left-wing parties have tended to be more enthusiastic than right-wing parties. The article suggests that changes are most likely parties' responses to wider shifts in societal values, and it concludes with a discussion of the significance of democracy-speak for both parties and citizens.

Acknowledgements

This paper benefited from Aude Bicquelet's input into an earlier draft. Thanks are also due to Judith Bara, Bruno Hopp, Paul Pennings and Andrea Volkens for helping track down manifestos and data, and to Kai Arzheimer, Ian Budge, Anthony King, Hugh Ward and two anonymous reviewers for their comments.

Notes

1. The CMP's methodology entails the manual coding of each and every quasi-sentence – defined as ‘an argument which is the verbal expression of one political idea or issue’– of manifesto text into one of 56 variables (Budge et al. 2001: 96–8). The variables can then be reported as a percentage of the total number of quasi-sentences, which, in turn, can be interpreted as an indicator of salience for a given issue in that manifesto.

2. The data span legislative elections for which we were able to obtain CMP data. Elections between 1945 and 2002 were covered in CMP publications (Budge et al. 2001; Klingemann et al. 2006). Data for the 2005 British and German elections were obtained from Judith Bara and Andrea Volkens, to whom we are both very grateful.

3. To those familiar only with the British and German party systems, party politics in the Fifth Republic are confusing. There are numerous parties, of varying persuasions, and they frequently change their names. The Gaullist and centre-right parties are especially culpable. We rely on François Petry and Paul Pennings (2006), the leading experts on French party manifestos, to determine which parties were Gaullist and centre-right at any given election.

4. The party manifestos were made available in electronic form through a joint effort between the Zentralarchiv für Empirische Sozialforschung (ZA), Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin (WZB), the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU) and the Party Manifestos Project. We would have preferred to focus on only those quasi-sentences that were coded as ‘favourable references to democracy’ by the CMP. However, it was not possible to determine how quasi-sentences in each manifesto were coded, as the original coded documents were no longer available. For this reason, we analysed all references to democracy in all manifestos. Our analysis, therefore, covers a larger number of favourable references than the original CMP codes.

5. The Green party manifestos cover elections since 1993. Unfortunately, and despite the best efforts of the Central Archive in Berlin, we were unable to locate 10 French manifestos: Communists, 1968; Socialists, 1958, 1973 and 1978; centre right 1962, 1973, 1978, 1988 and 2007; and the Gaullists, 1978.

6. The Green party manifestos cover federal elections since 1983.

7. All translations are by the authors.

8. This is partly a problem of missing manifestos.