Le Découpage électoral sous la ve République: intérêts parlementaires, logiques partisanes by Thomas Ehrhard (review)

Thomas Ehrhard's study of electoral boundaries under the Fifth Republic possesses all the virtues of what was originally a multiple-prize-winning thesis (the Assemblée nationale's Prix de thèse 2014; the Fondation Mattei Dogan's Prix de thèse 2015 in political science; the Prix Corbay 2015 from the Académie des sciences morales et politiques (Institut de France)). The coverage is exhaustive (stretching to almost a thousand pages), meticulously detailed, and rigorously constructed. It is, moreover, extremely topical, given President Macron's declared intention to reduce the number of representatives in the Assemblée nationale, and the widespread suspicion among the citizens of liberal democracies that the system is manipulated to the benefit of governing elites. Ehrhard tests the assumption that changes to electoral boundaries are driven to a significant extent by the desire of those in power to gain a partisan advantage over their rivals. Applying the lessons of leading theoretical and empirical findings from the United States, Ehrhard challenges any tendency to slip into simplistic or familiar conclusions. Electoral boundaries are the result of a complex interplay of mathematical, legal, and political constraints, and it is particularly the conflict between statistical objectivity and political subjectivity which fuels the suspicion that boundary changes can too easily operate as a form of gerrymandering with the cover provided by constitutional legitimacy. Taken at face value, electoral boundaries may be seen simply as the notional representation of a fractional space, since the representatives whose elections they facilitate are bound by an overarching obligation to serve the national interest. But those spaces are crucial to the operation of political competition especially, as Ehrhard points out, in a parliamentary 'first past the post' system such as France's 'scrutin uninominal à deux tours'. What reinforces the central importance of electoral boundaries but also underlines their problematic nature is that, while in practice their significance outweighs theoretical institutional concerns, the truth is that there can be no such entities as perfectly equitable boundaries. It is the impossibility of a perfect fit between quantitative and qualitative criteria which muddies the distinction between electoral engineering and 'charcutage électoral', or the kind of salami-slicing of constituencies that favours the status quo, especially in the eyes of historically marginalized political actors in the Fifth Republic, such as the French Communist Party. In the first part of his study, Ehrhard takes a forensic look at the formal, constitutional framework that sets the legal parameters within which boundary setting takes place. This is followed by a close investigation of the actors involved, the many variables that influence their decisions, and the mythical as well as more tangible socio-political spaces in which those decisions are deployed. In the second part of the analysis, Ehrhard engages with the empirical evidence of how boundary changes operate, and assesses the extent to which redrawn boundaries may alter the disposition of political forces, such as with the elections following the changes of 2010. Ehrhard's frequent references to the analytical perspectives developed by American specialists is explained in his Conclusion by the reproach he aims at French specialists for their shortcomings in this field. His impressive work goes a long way towards correcting those shortcomings.