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This paper investigates changes in the French parliament’s role in the control of military missions, introduced by the 2008 constitutional reform, and examines their effects on practices of parliamentary control and legislative‒executive interactions. The paper analyses how the constitutional changes have developed; the attitudes of parliamentarians towards control; the knowledges they relate to legislative-executive relations; and the post-reform practice of parliamentary control of French military missions. Although legislative‒executive relations with regard to military missions have been recalibrated and formalised, they have not fundamentally challenged the executive’s lead. Reasons include a strong belief in the need for effectiveness, acceptance of the institutional order, and a foreign policy culture of executive leadership. French parliamentarians value their new powers, but mostly do not seek their further extension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2017 French presidential elections featured an eventful campaign, produced astonishing results, and presented important signs of party system change. This paper analyses the main lines of divide of the demand and the supply side of electoral competition. It analyses the structure of citizens' preferences, as well as the candidates' strategic issue opportunities, relying on issue yield theory. To that end, it combines data from an original individual-level survey with information about the candidates' Twitter messages. It is found that the traditional model of two-dimensional political space, characterised by an economic (left–right) and socio-cultural (integration–demarcation) dimension is largely challenged. On the supply-side, the analysis offers additional evidence for the central role played by the integration–demarcation divide, while showing that the traditional left–right conflict has not fully disappeared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of distinct ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres underpins much normative and practical engagement with political misconduct. What is less clear is whether citizens draw distinctions between misdemeanours in the ‘public’ and ‘private’ spheres, and whether they judge these in systematically different ways. This paper explores attitudes to political misconduct in France. French citizens are often said to be particularly relaxed about politicians’ private affairs, but there has been little empirical evidence for this proposition. Drawing on original survey data, this paper demonstrates clearly that French citizens draw a sharp distinction between politicians’ public and private transgressions, and are more tolerant of the latter. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Why do some countries rely more heavily on equities markets, while others depend more on commercial banking? Analyses of the origins of contemporary capitalist institutions usually look back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. However, this paper demonstrates that financial institutions -- regarded as central to the way capitalist systems are organised -- changed radically in the mid-twentieth century in many countries. This paper argues that government partisanship in formative moments of institutional (re)creation can better account for their modern manifestation than prominent alternative explanations. A new measure of partisanship that is sensitive to these institutional transformations is presented. Case studies on Germany and France offer evidence consistent with this argument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the high level of protest activity in France is, at least partly, the result of distrust between the government and the trade unions, and that such distrust is inevitable in a society where unions are sometimes strong enough to mobilise against the government but not confident in their own future strength. This trust problem can be overcome if governments are willing to make institutional changes that commit them to future policies, but such political engineering is costly and unstable, which explains why governments sometimes prefer open confrontation. The empirical part of the paper analyses four French social and labour market reform initiatives in the 1990s and 2000s, demonstrating that the ideas developed in this article help to explain important features of contemporary French policy-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defining industrial policies has traditionally been a preserve of EU member states, upon which the Commission has only impacted indirectly, through numerous measures affecting industry, leaving little room for an industrial policy in its own right. However, growing concern about the EU's future position in the international division of labour has led several member states to request from Brussels a more pro-active approach and closer attention to European industrial interests. This paper investigates the recent trend towards 're-inventing' industrial policy in the EU, France and Germany. It examines the model of intergovernmental industrial cooperation established between these two member states, its usefulness and limitations. It argues that, despite recent regression in France towards old-style interventionist policies, and although German governments sometimes favour a protectionist stance, both countries can also generate new, more constructive, euro-compatible intergovernmental initiatives, but that promoting national champions damages the credibility of such initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Insider–outsider theory argues that in dual labour markets there are two groups with opposing preferences regarding protection against dismissal: (i) insiders with permanent work contracts who defend employment protection, because it increases their rents, and (ii) outsiders (temporary workers and the unemployed) who see protection as barriers to mobility and demand deregulation. Although this argument is influential in the political economy literature, there is little empirical research on outsiders’ preferences regarding employment protection. This article tests the argument using French data on support for a proposed reform of employment protection. The results show that permanent and temporary workers do not differ significantly in their support for employment protection, while some evidence indicates that the unemployed do show greater support for deregulation. The article concludes that insider–outsider theory overemphasises the relevance of employment protection for temporary workers and that care should be taken not to place these workers in a composite outsider group with the unemployed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article introduces various reports published within the issue on the French Fifth Republic and the political development of France.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview and characterisation of the rejection of the European Constitutional Treaty by a majority of voters in France's referendum held on 29 May 2005. Whilst pointing to the salience of political discontent with the incumbent right-wing government and some elements of the longstanding crisis in French national party politics, the analysis places the emphasis on the central role played by social issues in the referendum, the transposition at the European level of the mechanism of the evaluation by voters of traditional parties' performances and responsiveness to the country's social malaise and the unilateral termination by a majority of left-wing voters of the ‘social welfare and economic growth’ confidence pact that they had made with their national political elites on the occasion of the Maastricht referendum in 1992. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1999 and 2000 the French parliament passed a constitutional revision and a set of legislation with the aim of achieving parity of representation between men and women in France's elected assemblies. France was the first country in Europe to institute such radical reform to address the issue of women's under-representation in politics. The success of the parity reforms in achieving equal representation for women has been limited, however. This paper will discuss how and why the issue of parity progressed onto the French political agenda, and will identify the main factors which have limited the impact of these reforms. It will be argued that both the electoral system and the attitudes of political parties remain important obstacles to achieving true parity in elected institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During international crises, trust in government is expected to increase irrespective of the wisdom of the policies it pursues. This has been called a 'rally-round-the-flag' effect. This article examines whether the COVID-19 crisis has resulted in such a rally effect. Using multi-wave panel surveys conducted in Austria and France starting from March 2020, in the article it is examined how government trust was affected by the perceived threats to the nation's health and economy created by the pandemic as well as by the perceived appropriateness of the government's crisis response. A strong rally effect is shown in Austria, where trust was closely tied to perceived health risks, but faded away quickly over time. Perceptions of government measures mattered, too, while perceived economic threat only played a minor role. In France, in contrast, a strong partisan divide is found and no rally effect. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2021.1925017. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The referenda conducted in France and Denmark in 1992 to ratify the Maastricht Treaty are often seen as giving evidence of 'true' attitudes towards Europe. In this paper we dispute this assumption, presenting evidence that shows referenda in Parliamentary systems with disciplined party governments to be subject to what we call a 'lockstep' phenomenon in which referendum outcomes become tied to the popularity of the government in power even if the ostensible subject of the referendum has little to do with the reasons for government popularity (or lack of popularity). In the case of the Maastricht referenda in France and Denmark, the apparent unpopularity of the European project in fact appears to have been nothing of the kind, but instead to have reflected the unpopularity of ruling parties in both countries. A referendum conducted at about the same time in Ireland, where the government was more popular achieved a handsome majority, as did the referendum conducted a year later in Denmark after a more popular government had taken office. The mechanisms involved are elucidated by means of survey data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Terrorist attacks negatively affect support for immigration policy, and this has been linked to the extensive media coverage of terrorism. Yet, this coverage may also have a moderating effect. This article uses the timing of the fielding of the European Social Survey, which took place during the Charlie Hebdo and Hyper Cacher attacks, as a natural experiment. Because the media coverage of the attacks varied between France and other European countries, it is possible to study how differences in the media framing and priming of the attacks affected attitudes. The expected negative effect on immigration policy preferences is found outside France, but not within France. This study's findings lend support to a moderating effect of the media coverage of terrorist attacks, both as a framing effect that influenced the perceived relevance of the attacks to immigration attitudes and a priming effect that primed the public with tolerant French Republican values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates what impact the terrorist attacks in Paris (2015) and Nice (2016) had on political attitudes in France. Drawing on nine cross-sectional surveys, it tests the premises of three major theories of opinion change that predict contrasting shifts in opinion among ordinary citizens according to their ideological position in the aftermath of terrorist attacks: the Reactive Liberals Hypothesis (RLH), the Terror Management Theory (TMT), and the Bayesian Updating Theory (BUT). In line with both RLH and BUT, the findings show that left-wing sympathisers shifted toward the right following the attacks. However, the results suggest that, in line with BUT, the attacks only had a significant impact on attitudes toward security, while they had no effect on attitudes toward immigration, or toward moral and socio-economic issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most prominent theory accounting for variation of morality politics across Western Europe is the so-called Two Worlds framework. According to this approach, the presence or absence of a secular‒religious cleavage in national party systems strongly affects the degree of conflict intensity and the framing of morality policy issues. This article shows that the explanatory power of the Two Worlds model could be enhanced significantly by introducing a second analytical dimension that captures the institutional venue (party politics vs. parliamentary politics), in which moral conflicts take place. This is useful because there are instances in which a religious cleavage is lacking, but moral conflicts are nonetheless highly intense and party-based (thetraditionalistworld), and there are cases in which the religious cleavage formally exists, but moral conflicts are nonetheless resolved in the parliamentary arena (theunsecularworld). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As the world's first country to adopt a ‘parity’ quota, France could be considered an example of the growing phenomenon of quotas as a ‘fast track’ solution to the problem of women's under-representation. French universalism had impeded a more ‘incremental track’ to gender equality whilst placing a constitutional ban on quotas. The design of ‘parity’ as a means of overcoming these hurdles was both normative and pragmatic. Parity could be considered an example of a symbolic policy, where grand claims were made early on but the corresponding legislation only became effective over time. While the practical constraints on parity have delayed its impact, the recognition of the need to ‘legislate equality’ has had a more profound impact, leading to the creep of parity into other areas such as ethnic minority representation and parity in the workplace. This broader societal change is indicative of a ‘dual track’ to gender equality. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Political strategy matters – especially in the case of unpopular reforms. This is the main argument of this article. It shows that the analysis of political strategies gives complementary insights into the causal mechanisms of reform politics. It helps us to understand how political actors successfully implement unpopular reforms. The article provides empirical evidence for this claim by means of an analysis of adjustment efforts in Sweden, Belgium, Canada and France during the 1990s. It is shown that governments acted strategically in two areas: they used strategic manoeuvres in the political sphere in order to circumvent veto players. And they employed strategic organisation and communication in the public sphere in order to dampen the risk of being punished by voters for the implemented policies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article uses post-referendum Flash-Eurobarometer surveys to analyse empirically voter attitudes towards the EU Constitution in four member states. The theoretical model used incorporates first and second order variables for voting to ascertain whether the outcome of the vote was a reflection of either first or second order voting behaviour. It is hypothesised that the cleavage politics over integration in the European arena had a major impact on the four votes, as captured by three first order variables: 'Europhile' and 'Constitution-phile' attitudes and 'Egocentric Europeanness', respectively. The quantitative analyses - controlling for a number of dimensions - strongly supports the hypothesis when compared with a model using solely second order party identification variables. These findings establish that how voters understood the EU polity, in particular whether membership is beneficial to one's own country, was a crucial factor in all the referendums. Implications for future research include the need to discover the cues or proxies influencing first order voting within domestic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patrimonial economic voting has been neglected in favour of classical economic voting studies. This assertion holds less, however, with French election investigations, where the neglect is relative rather than absolute. Whereas classical economic voting holds the economy to be a valence issue, patrimonial economic voting regards the economy as a positional issue. Voters who own more property, in particular high-risk assets, are held to be more right-wing in their political preferences. This patrimonial effect shows itself to be statistically and substantively strong in one of the few election data-sets with sufficient measures available -- surveys on the National Assembly contests of 1978, 1988, 2002. The electoral effect exceeds that from the traditional 'heavy variables' of class and income. Moreover, further work might show its impact comparable to that of classic sociotropic retrospective evaluations of the national economy. Certainly a case can be made for further study of patrimonial economic voting, as compared to classical economic voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses changes in party-manifesto references to democracy in post-war Britain, the French Fifth Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany in order to explore changes in political parties' statements about democracy. It finds that in recent decades parties in all three countries have generally become more supportive of and more vocal in their calls for citizen participation in political decision-making, with a related increase in expressed support for direct democracy and other opportunities for participation. It also finds that left-wing parties have tended to be more enthusiastic than right-wing parties. The article suggests that changes are most likely parties' responses to wider shifts in societal values, and it concludes with a discussion of the significance of democracy-speak for both parties and citizens. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses French European policy-making in the context of divided government, arguing that in the area of European policy-making cohabitation increases the number of veto players, as compared with unified government. The increase of veto players, in turn, reduces France's acceptance-sets at the European table and thereby introduces a status quo bias. In order to test this theory, use is made of a comparative case study design. Process-tracing and counterfactual analyses reveal that veto player theory can, indeed, be applied to the interactions of a split-executive government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Constitutional courts are often considered to be 'veto players' or 'third chambers of parliament'. However, no attention has been paid to the composition of European constitutional courts and how they make decisions. Do European judges exhibit political preferences as their US counterparts do? If so, it is important to know who selects the judges as the selection determines the outcome. This article analyses the composition of the German Bundesverfassungsgericht and the French Conseil constitutionnel. It tests the correlation between the party affiliation of the pivotal judge and oppositional success empirically for all abstract reviews filed between 1974 and 2002. In both countries the likelihood of an oppositional victory or defeat varies with the ideological position of the pivotal judge. This leads to the conclusion that European judges decide on the basis of their political preferences like their US counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The salience of foreign affairs to general publics is an important but often neglected parameter for the role of public opinion in foreign and security policy. This article explores the determinants of foreign affairs' public salience and probes into the respective patterns in Germany, Britain and France. Building on the theory of news values, the article proposes to distinguish between issue-specific and country-specific influences on the public salience of foreign and security policy. The data suggest that broad international crises on the scale of 9/11 or the Iraq war go along with distinct cross-national peaks in the salience of foreign affairs to general publics. At the same time, the effects of constant issue logics are refracted by country-specific factors: most notably, the latter account for the much higher overall salience of foreign affairs to the British public than to the German and French publics since late 2002. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of semi-presidentialism was first operationalised by Maurice Duverger. There are now 17 countries with semi-presidential constitutions in Europe. Within this set of countries France is usually considered to be the archetypal example of semi-presidentialism. This article maps the main institutional and political features of European semi-presidentialism on the basis of Duverger's original three-fold schema. The most striking feature is the diversity of practice within this set of countries. This means that semi-presidentialism should not be operationalised as a discrete explanatory variable. However, there are ways of systematically capturing the variation within semi-presidentialism to allow cross-national comparisons. This diversity also means that France should not be considered as the archetypal semi-presidential country. At best, France is an archetypal example of a particular type of semi-presidentialism. Overall, Duverger's main contribution to the study of semi-presidentialism was the original identification of the concept and his implicit insight that there are different types of semi-presidentialism. In the future, the study of semi-presidentialism would benefit from the development of theory-driven comparative work that avoids a reliance on France as the supposed semi-presidential archetype. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most original feature of the French Fifth Republic is the use of a two-round system for both presidential and legislative elections. This article considers the effects of this electoral system and its development in the first 50 years of the Republic. It distinguishes between two types of effects: mechanical and psychological. It reviews the theoretical arguments for each and the available evidence. The authors first specify a series of vote-seat curves that characterise the mechanical effect, paying particular attention to the mediating effects of coalitions. They then examine the psychological effect through a series of tests on coalition formation. The article concludes by noting that much remains to be learned about the electoral system and its effects in the French Fifth Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New structural potentials related to the processes of globalisation and European integration have produced far-reaching changes in the structure of opposition in the French party system. Whereas the newly designed institutions of the Fifth Republic progressively brought about a 'bipolar multipartism' in the first two decades of their existence, the rising prominence of new cultural conflicts and of the issue of European integration have led to an increasing disunity of the parties within the left and right, to the emergence of the Front National as a powerful new actor, as well as to a general process of party system fragmentation. On the basis of four electoral campaigns between 1978 and 2002, this article analyses the transformation of the ideological dimensions underlying party competition and the positions of parties within this space, and assesses the implications for the electoral success of parties and for the general make-up of the party system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews trends in state spending across the Fifth Republic. Considering the partisan divisions in French political life and the importance accorded to elections and partisan control of government, one might expect substantial differences in spending patterns by governments of the Left and the Right. Instead, we find only a small number of statistically significant differences and when we do find them, governments of the Right are the higher spenders. The reasons for this are the different historical periods during which the Left and Right have been in power. As the Right dominated French politics for the first half of the Fifth Republic, it oversaw a period of the most dramatic growth in the state, across virtually all sectors. Growth in state spending declined steadily over the decades but particularly after the oil crisis and other events in the 1970s. Since 1981, when governments (if not presidential control) have alternated on a relatively regular basis, austerity and limited growth in spending have been the rule, no matter which governments have been in power. The article demonstrates these facts with a comprehensive overview of public spending across 11 categories. The results are presented graphically, with statistical t-tests, and finally with regressions controlling for growth in the economy. In all cases, no linkage between left-wing control of government and higher spending is found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article adopts a long-term view of the Fifth Republic. It argues that there are historically two partly contradictory readings of the institutions created by the constitution of 1958: a presidential and a partisan reading. The first grants the president the role of a consensual arbiter at the heart of the executive. The partisan reading or logic puts the parties at the centre stage of a more parliamentary political system with the president as some kind of super prime minister. Both logics have co-existed in permanent tension. The authors show that the changing balance between the two logics has determined several successive phases in the evolution of French politics. They argue that the second logic has progressively supplanted the first. The constitutional revisions of 2000 and 2008 may, moreover, have institutionalised the partisan logic and presidentialisation of the Fifth Republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the evolution of intra-executive relations under the Fifth Republic. In particular, it looks at the presidential decision to change or reshuffle governments. It shows that the president has used the institutional privileges to reshuffle and replace governments very much in his own best interests. Moreover, we try to understand whether the evolution of the party system has affected this practice. The article shows that current tendencies are not strong or unambiguous enough to find strong effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increased cohesion of groups and political blocks within the French parliament is one key reason for the stabilisation of the political regime under the Fifth Republic. This article starts with precise measures of the extent to which patterns of cohesion have changed throughout the twentieth century in France. It then moves to explain why cohesion has improved with the new regime of the Fifth Republic despite the change to a single member district electoral system and the direct election of the president. Both are generally expected to threaten cohesion. The two-round electoral system and semi-presidentialism prove, however, to be important explanations of the emergence of strict discipline in the French parliament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article traces the foreign relations of 81 European regions by looking first at the constitutional competences which these regions enjoy within their nation-states. We discover that the regions in federal states have expanded their competences in two directions: conducting autonomous foreign activities and influencing national foreign policy. How far the Belgian regions, as well as the German and the Austrian Länder go in both directions depends very much on the scope of their competences in domestic politics. In non-federal states (France, GB, Italy), regionalisation brought rather more leeway to conduct a certain level of autonomous foreign activity than regional influence in national foreign policy. When we - in a second step - trace the strategies or directions of international activities which the regions pursue it becomes obvious that setting up an office in Brussels in order to adapt to political integration is very common among West European regions. In contrast, much more variety can be observed when examining the regions' strategies to adapt to fundamental economic and cultural transformations. Some European regions invest heavily in economic promotion offices and in transnational partnerships while others lack the motivation or ability to invest in these forms of foreign relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its reform in 1998, the national association of French employers and industry, MEDEF, appears to be an example of strong interest organisation. Unlike trade unions, the peak business organisation has been stable and unified, especially in terms of membership density. Through a study of the collective action of businesses in France, this article sheds doubt on such an impression and argues that the national business association has been put severely under stress in recent years. Like all encompassing associations, MEDEF comprises a great variety of interests and constantly has to manage its internal heterogeneity. An analysis of the historical and institutional context of its recent reform demonstrates that MEDEF's forceful media campaign should not be understood as a display of actual strength and coherence; rather it is the last resort of collective action that the association can claim legitimately as its responsibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary France has witnessed the rise of an anti-globalisation movement that has mobilised with considerable intensity and force on a national and international stage. This article examines the role of Attac, the leading French organisation against neo-liberal globalisation, focusing on its impact within mainstream political life. Attac has been characterised by unparalleled success within formal politics, gaining access to key institutions of government and developing alliances with parties on both the Left and Right. It will be argued here that the political success of Attac is linked to the place of intellectual elites within it, who hold positions of power and influence within political, university and media circles. This is an organisation in which intellectuals play a pre-eminent role, placing their own knowledge and expertise at the service of a political cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that there is not one conception of the French nation and Republic among French Republicans, but two. One theory is assimilationist and centralising. It regards the Republic as one and indivisible and the French nation a cultural whole. The other is more regionalist, envisaging a republic that is perhaps indivisible, but certainly diverse and respectful of local cultures. The article traces these contending conceptions through three constitutional debates: the debate on the reform of the Empire in 1946; the debate on the adoption of the Maastricht Treaty in 1992; and the recent debate on decentralisation, which was re-launched at the beginning of the 2000s by the left and subsequently taken over by the right. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes results of the 2002 elections in France. Total votes garnered by different presidential candidates; Impact of the elections on the country's politics; Outcome of parliamentary elections.

Investigates the relation of farm conflict to the dynamics of Europeanization of agricultural policy in France. Mediation of market forces; Role of European institutions in the production and transformation of farm conflict; Evidences of instances of domestication in other sectors.