Grandstand. Wednesday, April 20 will take place the traditional debate between the two rounds. For the second time in a row, he will see Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron face off. There is no doubt that on this occasion the two candidates will be keen to demonstrate to the French that they have mastered their subject, in particular by massive use of statistical indicators.
Purchasing power, pension system deficit, public debt will be examined through the prism of figures. But their use is never innocent. The common perception of the number is that it gives strength to the speech, conferring rigor and seriousness on whoever uses it.
A peak in 2012
What is it really? Is there a rhetoric of numbers specific to these political debates? Has it evolved in nearly five decades?
In an attempt to answer these questions, we analyzed the seven inter-round debates from 1974 to 2017, the transcripts of which are available online. We manually extracted all the figures used by the candidates: both the dates and the statistics.
We have noted the themes associated with each. Finally, a figure serving an intention, we have classified them into four categories: “observation”, “proposal”, “attack” and “counter-attack”. It should be noted that this treatment involves an inherent part of subjectivity, the analysis proposed here must therefore be taken with hindsight.
First lesson: the figure has gradually taken more and more space in the arguments of the candidates.
During the first organized debate, in 1974, François Mitterrand and Valéry Giscard d’Estaing between them mentioned about forty figures (not counting the dates), while the duel between Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande in 2012 reached a peak with 210 figures put forward, five times more!
The use of dates is decreasing
This inflation is partly attributable to the lengthening of the duration of the debates, which went from one and a half hours to nearly two and a half hours. But this upward trend clearly persists, even once the duration of the debates is taken into account: we thus go from less than 0.8 figures per minute in 1974 to 1.2 figures twenty years later to reach a maximum of 1.5 in 2012.
The use of dates during debates decreases sharply over time. In the first debate in 1974, half of the numbers given were dates, rather than actual statistics. But these dates only represent a tenth of the figures stated in 2012 and 2017. This reflects a decline in the use of historical references in favor of a more accounting vision of politics.
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