West European politics has been reshaped by the Education politicization of a new divide: environmentalism versus productivism. While existing scholarship since the 1960s mostly assumes the emergence of a single, unified cultural divide, this article goes back to the model developed by Lipset and Rokkan (Citation1967) and distinguishes two new cleavages, Ecologism/Productivism and Identity/Cosmopolitanism, both resulting from different revolutions. Building on Bartolini and Mair's seminal framework, this analysis also introduces a fourth dimension to the definition of cleavage: in fully mobilized electoral societies, it encompasses sociological, ideological, and organizational dimensions, as well as a policy-making component. The study then delineates and illustrates the core features of the Ecologism/Productivism divide with data on public opinion, party positions, and green parties' development. This conceptualization offers a new lens for political scientists and policymakers, illuminating how the environmental conflict reshapes societies and party systems, interacts with other ideological and social conflicts, and influences the trajectory of West European polities in the age of the Anthropocene.

This article introduces data produced within the French Election Results Database (FERD) framework. French election results are generally analysed according to official 'political nuances' (or political shades) defined by the Ministry of the Interior. However, datasets based on official categories have major limitations because of the administrative logic underlying the Ministry's identification of candidates. In this article, which focuses on the Fifth Republic, I describe the data sources and specify the logic behind the coding of candidates that forms the basis of the FERD project. I also detail the structure of the files available and indicate how to obtain them via the Centre for Socio-Political Data (CDSP) databank

The 2024 European and legislative elections were an exceptional moment in French political history. The rise of the radical right, the increased fragmentation of the National Assembly following its dissolution, and the Education center-right minority coalition government fueled the theory of political instability. However, by developing the theory of realignments and using original data covering 40 years of electoral history, this article argues that the 2024 elections confirm the emergence of a new electoral order that has been in place since 2019. This new electoral order imposes unprecedented operating mechanisms, to which actors and analysts are struggling to adapt.

The 2024 French legislative elections were called by President Macron following the severe defeat of his coalition in the 2024 European elections. Held on 30 June and 7 July after a 3-week campaign, these snap elections were part of an unexpected electoral sequence. The first round confirmed the rise of the radical right Rassemblement National in the European contest: for the first time in the first round of legislative elections, a radical right coalition was the largest pre-election coalition by vote. However, the second round reaffirmed the radical right was still rejected by the majority of French people, finishing third in terms of seats, behind both the left-wing coalition and the presidential coalition. A centre-right minority government was ultimately formed with four parties (Les Républicains, Renaissance, Mouvement Démocrate and Horizons) and the parliamentary tolerance of the Rassemblement national. From the realignment perspective, the legislative elections were maintaining elections, confirming the tripartition of the votes, the tripolarisation of party competition and the end of majority governments - three key features of the new electoral order that emerged after the 2019 European elections.

This chapter proposes to distinguish between the concepts of tripartition and tripolarization, by associating them with different arenas: the electoral arena for the former, the parliamentary arena for the latter. On this basis, he shows that both concepts are relevant for describing French political life after the 2022 elections: there is tripartition in the electoral arena and tripolarization in the parliamentary arena, a configuration unprecedented in the Fifth Republic. These results enable us to better characterize the new electoral order that crystallized after the 2019 European elections (Gougou, 2022): tripartition and tripolarization could be its distinguishing features.