Promising a Greener Paris: Anne Hidalgo’s Framing of Environmental Issues in Her Mayoral Campaigns

ABSTRACT

Mayors are increasingly tackling environmental issues. To enact demonstrable change, however, mayors first need to be elected – leading one to question: How can a candidate create cohesive messaging on environmental issues and win? By content analyzing Anne Hidalgo’s successful 2014 and 2020 mayoral elections in Paris, this study seeks to illuminate potential environmental communication strategies for future candidates. Results revealed Hidalgo favored traditional environmental frames over alternate frames, treatment recommendations over blame attributions, and ecological solidarity frames. Further, Hidalgo employed gender adaptive strategies moving between elections, which enabled her to navigate gendered expectations in becoming Paris’s first female mayor.

KEYWORDS:

• Environmental frames
• Anne Hidalgo
• French politics
• municipal elections
• mayoral campaign communication

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

To access the data set, which is available as a .xlxs file, and the SPSS files for analytic reproduction, including the .sav data file and .sps syntax file, please visit https://osf.io/fdtma/?view_only=eb42d01d00f744f7927a5e7c48cb7b19.

Notes

1 Within each arrondissement, Parisians vote for a party and slate of councilors. The councilors who receive the most votes in their respective areas comprise the Conseil de Paris, which then elects the mayor. Any candidate running for mayor must present candidate lists in each arrondissement (Élections municipales à Paris, n.d.).

2 Han et al. (2021) is a notable exception that focuses on municipal elections.

3 France financially penalizes parties who fail to meet a female representation quota on their tickets, however the penalty is small enough that some parties continue to not comply (Brechenmacher, 2018). See Murray (2010) for additional discussion of French parity laws and the gendering of French politics.

4 Other studies examined female mayors’ communications while in office, but not their campaign communications, e.g. Li et al. (2022). Scholarship focused on mayoral campaigns and gender examined non-communicative aspects, e.g. fundraising, competitiveness. The few studies examining mayoral campaign communication and gender rely on interviews with the politicians, such as Tsuji (2017), and do not include systematic content analyses of their campaign communications.

5 Hidalgo’s competitors in the second round of voting in both elections were women.

6 The Fondation Jean-Jaurès does not have an archive of Hidalgo’s social media posts. Because the Twitter API limits captures to 3200 historical tweets, I was unable to access her campaign tweets in 2014 or 2020. Therefore I analyzed her Facebook posts to provide a partial understanding of her social media efforts.

7 Texts were also periodically run through Google Translate and compared to the human translations as a spot check to ensure greater validity. Scholarship on climate change has verified that Google Translate is a robust tool (Reber, 2019).