Investigating forty years of French politics through the prism of value change

Belot, Céline; Bréchon, Pierre; Gonthier, Frédéric

In this introduction, we advocate for an approach based on values when trying to make sense of shifts and changes that occurred in French politics during the last four decades. Values play a pivotal role in structuring political views and policy preferences. They influence citizens’ attitudes and behaviors as well as reflect long-lasting political cultures and cleavages. After presenting the data collected within the European values studies, on which the six articles included in this issue build, we explain how these contributions highlight some major French political dynamics by scrutinizing key driving forces such as the individualization process, generational replacement or ideological consistency in economic and cultural beliefs, and by re-assessing how attitudes toward democracy, religiosity and nationalism shape political attitudes. Challenging dominant narratives of value crisis, this issue sets up an agenda for future research on French politics through the lens of value change.