Who Remembers Best? Institutional Memory and Political Mobilization in France and the United States

Right-wing populist (RWP) parties have moved from the fringes to the mainstream in many advanced democracies, yet their electoral success varies across national contexts. What explains the variation of electoral success of right-wing populist parties in Western democracies? The extensive scholarship on the rise of the far right and right-wing populism point to various explanations: demand-side factors (i.e., economic uncertainty, a backlash against progressive values) and supply-side factors (i.e., the determining role of electoral systems, governing institutions and elite behavior). Although I do not fully reject the validity of these theories, I propose a novel, ideational theory for RWP success which situates institutional memory—or the way in which politicians instrumentalize the national past—as an explanation for RWP political mobilization. My paper argues that positive narratives about the national past can be used more or less efficiently by politicians, depending on the cultural institutional context which I broadly define as institutions related to public history and national culture (e.g., museums, history textbooks, flags). These narratives in turn contribute to the mobilization of voters as they appeal to emotions of pride, specifically national pride. My multi-methods research design relies on the comparative cases of France and the United States (US), two “most likely” cases which are ideal for theory-building. Although these cases share many similarities, they differ on two key empirical aspects: (1) in the aftermath of the 2020 anti-racist protests in both countries, controversial statues were removed in the United States but not in France, and (2) Donald Trump’s RWP party in the US recently won its second presidential victory while the Rassemblement National—so far—claims none. I conduct fieldwork in South Carolina, a state characterized by particularly vivid memories over its Confederate past, where I visit “sites of memory” and interview cultural actors as well as politicians from both the Republican and the Democratic parties. In addition to ethnographic research and semi-structured interviews, I collect and analyze the content of history textbooks as well as political campaigns’ speeches and manifestos over the past two decades. I follow the same strategy in France, where I conduct fieldwork in Paris and interview figures from the center-right party Renaissance and the far-right party Rassemblement national. Finally, I conduct a survey experiment among South Carolinian voters to test the “emotions of national pride” mechanism. Overall, I use process-tracing to identify and test the causal mechanisms linking the politics of memory with political mobilization. My preliminary results indicate that institutional memory does play a role in political mobilization, although its successful appeal by politicians is conditioned by the degree of centralization of cultural institutions. This paper explores how narratives about the national past shape political preferences by bridging the scholarship on right-wing populism and symbolic politics, notably the politics of memory. In doing so, it considers the underexplored role of emotions and ideas in political processes by relying on a rich research design, with mixed-methods, original empirical data and a clear theoretical contribution.