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Examines the role of policy evaluation research and the influences on such research of political regime shifts. Using data from a number of western countries, the authors conclude that conservative or liberal shifts in political regimes do influence the nature of policy evaluation research. (JDH)

Maintains that the French family and school intentionally avoid the subject of politics. Reports the results of a survey of 13- to 18-year-old students regarding their sources of political information and level of interest in politics. (JDH)

Examines the role played in community life and in work associations by young people born of immigrant parents from North Africa. Maintains that they must be more fully integrated into the mainstream of French social and cultural life. (JDH)

Summarizes public opinion on perceived threats to peace, the means considered most effective to preserve and strengthen peace, and attitudes toward military resistance, nuclear weapons, and defense spending. The data presented span several years and are often reported for individual West European nations. (JDH)

Traces the development of radicalism from the 1789 French Revolution to the present. States that radical philosophy has its roots in rationalism and Enlightenment thought and was linked to positivism during the nineteenth century. Despite the failings of radicalism and the Radical Party, the radical tradition set precedents for current political parties. (GEA)

Discusses the activities of German intellectuals who became political activists in France and Germany during the French revolutionary period. Examines how literature became a means to revolutionize the philosophy of these writers. Describes the revolutionary continuum in Germany from the Mainz Republic to the 1848 revolution. (GEA)

Presents a model which describes the theories of kingship in Germany, France, and England between 800-1380 A.D. The three royal functions were defense of the realm, defense of the church, and material and moral improvement of royal subjects. (AM)

Purpose - This paper aims to outline the contents of the special issue on public management reform in countries in the Napoleonic administrative tradition, discussing alternative explanatory frameworks, and proposing paths for future research. Design/methodology/approach - This article provides reviews of the papers in the special issue. Findings - Same broad sets of factor affecting implementation of public management reform in Napoleonic countries are outlined, schematised in a specific table, and discussed in the light of potential alternative frameworks, like cultural analysis. Research limitations/implications - Research limitations include the availability of empirical evidence given the width of the phenomenon under investigation (public management reform in five countries). Implications for the development of a broader comparative research agenda on countries in the Napoleonic administrative tradition (and others) are proposed. Originality/value - The special issue, of which this paper provides an overview, fills a gap in the literature by providing systematic and comparative analysis of public management reform in tire under-investigated countries in the Napoleonic administrative tradition, arguably an important contribution to the widening of the comparative research agenda in public management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We compare the recent methodological profile of political science work in France and the United States, applying a standardized content analysis of the research methods to leading political science journals in both countries over time periods of equal length. We find that, compared with the United States, qualitative work clearly dominates quantitative work in France, and there has been no apparent change over time in that regard during the period under investigation (1998-2013). We also find that French political science research does not offer a strong supply of mixed methods. Finally, and contrary to what is observed in the United States, when French political scientists do use quantitative methods they seem reticent about using ordinary least squares (OLS) or more sophisticated statistical methods. We see these results as further indication that the French and the American political scientists are locked in their own national epistemology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Digital spaces, and in particular social networking sites, are becoming increasingly present and influential in the functioning of our democracies. In this paper, we propose an integrated methodology for the data collection, the reconstruction, the analysis and the visualization of the development of a country’s political landscape from Twitter data. Method: The proposed method relies solely on the interactions between Twitter accounts and is independent of the characteristics of the shared contents such as the language of the tweets. We validate our methodology on a case study on the 2017 French presidential election (60 million Twitter exchanges between more than 2.4 million users) via two independent methods: the comparison between our automated political categorization and a human categorization based on the evaluation of a sample of 5000 profiles descriptions; the correspondence between the reconfigurations detected in the reconstructed political landscape and key political events reported in the media. This latter validation demonstrated the ability of our approach to accurately reflect the reconfigurations at play in the off-line political scene. Results: We built on this reconstruction to give insights into the opinion dynamics and the reconfigurations of political communities at play during a presidential election. First, we propose a quantitative description and analysis of the political engagement of members of political communities. Second, we analyze the impact of political communities on information diffusion and in particular on their role in the fake news phenomena. We measure a differential echo chamber effect on the different types of political news (fake news, debunks, standard news) caused by the community structure and emphasize the importance of addressing the meso-structures of political networks in understanding the fake news phenomena. Conclusions: Giving access to an intermediate level, between sociological surveys in the field and large statistical studies (such as those conducted by national or international organizations) we demonstrate that social networks data make it possible to qualify and quantify the activity of political communities in a multi-polar political environment; as well as their temporal evolution and reconfiguration, their structure, their alliance strategies and their semantic particularities during a presidential campaign through the analysis of their digital traces. We conclude this paper with a comment on the political and ethical implications of the use of social networks data in politics. We stress the importance of developing social macroscopes that will enable citizens to better understand how they collectively make society and propose as example the “Politoscope”, a macroscope that delivers some of our results in an interactive way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Margaret Kohn argues for a reappraisal of early twentieth-century left-republican French political theory, known as 'solidarism'. Solidarism recognises private property as legitimate, but at the same time argues that the collective nature of economic production gives rise to a claim to social property. It is social property that should underlie the case for social justice and social rights, not the standard liberal claims to individual autonomy. This paper provides an appraisal of Kohn's recovery of solidarism, taking as its main theme the relation between property and social justice. The paper first offers a typology of four theories of justice (right- and left-libertarianism, luck and relational egalitarianism) and discusses the relation of each of these to the concept of property. Then it argues that solidarism is akin to left-libertarianism in the way it formulates justice as a claim to social property. Finally, it argues that solidarists cannot escape grounding their theory in a non-property based fundamental principle, which makes the theory much less distinctive from egalitarian theories of justice than may appear at first sight. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pluralist norms, which prescribe certain attitudes of openness and mutual respect for diverging views, have long been considered a central pillar of liberal democracy. While democratic theorists have championed these values, they have been conflicted as to the capacity of political parties to carry them. Partisanship is widely recognized as an essential institution of democratic regimes but it has also been traditionally associated with intransigence rather than tolerance. This paper investigates this theoretical debate from an empirical standpoint, asking whether partisans can be carriers of pluralist values. It relies on focus-group methodology and software-assisted textual analysis to evaluate the extent to which the discourse of 117 party members in two different national contexts, France and Hungary, resonates with the pluralist worldview. The results of this study provide key empirical insights into the nature of partisanship, demonstrating wide variations in the extent to which partisans uphold pluralist principles, but also their capacity to do so at a stringent level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to explore the complex situation regarding the state of the international relations (IR) discipline in France. The paper analyses the development of IR within French academe, reviews the scholarly output of IR teaching and research institutions and makes proposals that could contribute to improving the situation.European Political Science (2009) 8, 239–253. doi:10.1057/eps.2009.7 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, written for the Forum section of Critical Policy Studies, is a personal account of public policy analysis in France which was first presented at the 2010 Grenoble Interpretive Policy Analysis conference. It aims to complement the piece published in this journal by Philippe Zittoun in 2010. It is not fully referenced, and only reflects the author's limited understanding and knowledge of different traditions of research in the French context. In contrast with many analyses in the social sciences that invent, or reinvent, some kind of 'French touch', I argue that there were always many contrasting intellectual traditions that were drawn on to analyze public policy in France, that none of them was dominant, and that many of them were not specifically French. Also, analysis of public policy was mainly developed within political science and sociology, where postmodern literature from Lyotard to Derrida was more or less non-existent The 'French theory' tradition, as invented in the United States, has had little or no influence on public policy analysis, with the important exceptions of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu. In other words, this short paper aims at rebutting the continuing external 'intellectual commodification' of French policy studies, while engaging with the unique sets of intellectual traditions that have emerged in France, with their cross-influences, in the study of public policy [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009 a French national commission was created to issue recommendations against 'the burqa' and raise the possibility of a ban on the practice in certain public settings. This paper explores the different normative stakes of politicizing the burqa and the form of Islamic Revival with which it is associated. Recent scholarship has sought to overturn orientalist depictions of Islamic movements but has insisted that bodily ethical practices, such as Muslim women's veiling, constitute forms of politics. Based on ethnographic research in a women's mosque community in a poor suburb of Lyon, France, I argue that these women are not engaged in a form of politics but rather, antipolitics, a movement originally conceptualized in the 1970s and 80s as a rejection of politics and a valorization of private life. Three components define their antipolitics: a reconfiguration of the private sphere against an intrusive state, a retreat into a moral community, and emphasis on spiritual conditions and achievement of serenity. In interrogating different meanings of politics and antipolitics, this paper suggests a rethinking of the relationship between 'political Islam' and piety movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the significance of resources in determining a group's ability to respond to the European Integration process. Both domestic and supranational opportunity structures are constantly shaped and re-shaped by EU policy processes. The single country case study of France is selected on the basis of the state's longstanding traditions of civil society exclusion. The influence of the EU in transforming these Jacobin predilections is explored with reference to a comprehensive European environmental implementation programme (NATURA 2000). Resource Mobilisation theory reminds us that a group's resource base is a decisive variable in attempting to influence decision makers. It is argued, first, that the European Commission has empowered some French civil society actors with resources allowing them to mobilise on more levels for longer, while failing to influence others. Second, it is revealed that this empowerment is dependent upon the level of financial incentives offered as well as the overall favourability of the group to the EU project itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though the impact of EC law on the legal status of national powers has been fairly well examined, little attention has been paid to the overall evaluation of the relations developed between national authorities. The paper argues that the mutation of the Judiciary and the Executive role vis-à-vis the Legislature appears to be an application of an emerging doctrine in EC public law that conspicuously resembles the 'Checks and Balances' theory of American constitutionalism. The action of one public authority is— or must be—countered by the reaction of another for the benefit of EC law. Apart from identifying the features of this 'principle' in comparison to its equivalent American doctrine, the paper deals with the question of a possible coexistence of this new model of governance with the traditional one. The comparative perspective is necessary here. Whereas in Germany the constitutional model appears to cope with European demands, in France it seems largely opposed to such a dynamic conception of the separation of powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the connection between the technological and political transformations of late 18th-century France. Its subject is the efforts of state military engineers to produce functionally identical artifacts (interchangeable parts manufacturing). These efforts faced resistance from artisans and merchants attached to the corporate-absolutist ancient régime, for whom artifacts were idiosyncratic, and ‘thick’ with multiple meanings. I argue that to oblige artisans to produce standardized artifacts, the military engineers defined these artifacts with instruments such as technical drawing and the tools of manufacturing tolerance, which the engineers then refined in increasingly rule-bound ways to forestall further subversion by artisans. Hence, I offer a historical account of how the ‘objectivity’ of these artifacts was the outcome of social conflict and negotiation over the terms of an exchange. In particular, I explain why engineers eventually turned to projective drawings (including the descriptive geometry) over alternative ways of representing artifacts (such as free-hand, academic, and perspectival drawings). And I document the origins of manufacturing tolerance, in which the dimensions of an artifact were circumscribed with gauges and machine-tools to preclude possible sources of disagreement. The paper closes with its own ‘thick’ narrative of how standards of production emerged out of social conflict in a particular community on the eve of the French Revolution—a process which reflected the emerging political ‘toleration’ of the French state for its citizen-producers. The SCOT programme can be used to provide a political account of how the operation of seemingly ‘objective’ artifacts can be coordinated across vast physical, temporal and cultural boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the concept of ‘ordinary citizenship’ (Staeheli et al., 2012) to explore the relationship between mobility, citizenship and political space in the European Union. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Britons living in South West France, the paper examines the ways in which citizenship is meaningful to migrants as a complexity of legal frameworks, normative structures and everyday activities. While EU citizenship has been advanced to underpin the formation of a closer Union, we demonstrate that contemporary forms of citizenship among these lifestyle migrants are shaped to a large extent by performances of national belonging, and individual interactions with other people at the local or community level. We argue that a bi-national structure of citizenship, or one based on domicile better accounts for the experiences of these migrants than supranational EU citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary This paper documents changes in the field of water management in France, through the analyses of the activities of water professionals. Hydro-territory professionals work for local authorities in charge of water management at the watershed scale. Their functions appear to be fuzzy. Yet, this paper assumes that this fuzziness is a crucial feature as it manifests an ability to deal with “wicked” problems. Based on quantitative and qualitative inquiries, this paper discusses to what extent these new kind of professionals present themselves as, or differentiate themselves from, experts, facilitators or policy entrepreneurs. It contributes to the studies that highlight the new water professional as a transdisciplinary engineer capable of dealing with negotiation, cooperation or communication issues. Yet, the main result of our study is to show the embedded dimension of hydro-territory professionals, considering water governance as a long term issue of adjustment, assembling, fitting, in a territory and across scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until now, political science has focused mainly on institutions or political actors and much less on the content of politics, the issues political actors and institutions deal with. Based on the seminal work of Jones and Baumgartner ((2005), The politics of attention: How government prioritises problems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press), the article will study MPs' issue attention in Parliament and will investigate the source of punctuation in attention allocation. Even if a growing literature is dedicated to this issue, the two main sources of friction – cognition and institution – have not yet been directly tested. Based on an exhaustive database of the parliamentary questions in the French National Assembly between 1988 and 2007, the paper will focus on the dynamics of issue attention in the parliamentary questions at three levels to show that: the general punctuation hypothesis is valid for the parliamentary question agendas; the comparison between the levels of punctuation of the institutionally unconstrained written question agenda and the institutionally constrained question to government agenda is consistent with the idea that higher institutional friction induces higher punctuation in attention allocation; and the dynamics of issue attention in the parliamentary question agendas at the individual level exhibit strong patterns of cognitive friction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we examine two methods of public participation, namely consensus conference ( conférence de citoyens) and public hearing ( débat public). While both methods are used in order to involve the public in decision making about science and technology policy, they differ in a number of aspects. Consensus conference seeks the active participation of a selected group of citizens who are expected to elaborate cooperatively a text of recommendations. Public hearing seeks to inform the public and to collect as many reactions by it as possible. In our analysis, we consider the characteristics of these two methods described in the social and political sciences literature as institutional constraints that can play a role in the production of argumentative discourse. We focus our study on the discourse produced in two concrete instances of the application of these participatory methods on the deliberation over the development of nanotechnology in France. More specifically, we study the expression of counter discourse and seek to describe how the participants in the two deliberation processes end up managing the institutional constraints in order to have their criticisms expressed. In this way, we propose a bottom-up approach to the theorization of the role that institutional context plays in the practice of argumentation, and discuss the descriptive adequacy of existing definitions of the deliberative genre within argumentation studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial models of voting have dominated mathematical political theory since the seminal work of Downs. The Downsian model assumes that each elector votes on the basis of his utility function which depends only on the distance between his preferred policy platform and the ones proposed by candidates. A succession of papers introduces valence issues into the model, i.e., candidates' characteristics which are independent of the platforms they propose. So far, little is known about which of the existing utility functions used in valence models is the most empirically founded. Using a large survey run prior to the 2007 French presidential election, we evaluate and compare several spatial voting models with valence. Existing models perform poorly in fitting the data. However, strong empirical regularities emerge. This leads us to a new model of valence that we call the intensity valence model. This new model makes sense theoretically and is grounded empirically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the protracted crisis in Côte d'Ivoire. It highlights the feasibility of democracy and reconciliation in the country. The article focuses on the spoilers that hinder the peaceful settlement of the conflict that divides the country into two zones controlled by the rebels and the government. Analytical, descriptive, and historical methods form the basis of the methodology. Additionally, content analysis will be used to explain the idiosyncrasies of the stakeholders in the Ivorian political scene. Some researchers and observers of the crisis have argued that the way forward is the organisation of credible elections. However, the main the principal thesis of the paper is that the burning issue is how to reconcile the fractionalised society in a divided country as a way to forge national unity and reconciliation among the various ethno-linguistic and religious groups that constitute Côte d'Ivoire. In the final analysis, the paper suggests a new constitutional arrangement that will be based on a legitimate Federal System for the political leaders to speak the language of peace. The present presidential and unitary system of government that favours a "winner takes all" will be extremely difficult to foster reconciliation and avoid the disintegration of Côte d'Ivoire as a political entity carved out by France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the conditions under which commissions succeed in influencing policy change. The paper tackles three questions: What do governments gain by establishing a commission? What are the tools employed by commissions in order to make their recommendations and ensure that their output will have political significance? And how do commissions influence policy outcomes? Five different types of influence are introduced and tested by focusing on the role of pension commissions in France, Sweden, and the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the political debates surrounding the adoption of the 2004 French law on religious signs using key concepts from political theory. The analysis of the arguments used to justify this law shows that the issue of the Islamic headscarf has recently been tackled by political elites through a symbolic framework influenced mainly by a communitarian version of republicanism. The paper then critically discusses three contemporary alternative ways of dealing with the issue of cultural diversity through Taylor's, Kymlicka's and Laborde's theories, respectively, and finally advocates a radical liberal approach more compatible with a respect for pluralism and a strict definition of individual rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent advances in the field of ecological inference have provided researchers with new tools to estimate voter transition rates in two-party systems, based on contingency tables. Although some researchers have moved from the 2×2 case to the broader R×C ecological inference problem, voter transition estimation remains a difficult and tedious goal. As a result, scholars of multiparty systems still struggle with their data. In this paper we follow a new approach and we propose a new method that deals with this issue. Using two data sets, one from the French presidential elections in 2007 (first and second round) and one from the Greek parliamentary elections (2004 and 2007), we demonstrate that the proposed method provides good estimates of voter transition rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the classic accounts of Frankish partitions in 511 and 561 in light of the agenda of Gregory of Tours in the later 580s. While the partitions’ political origins have long been emphasized, the concern here is with the political motivations of the source on which we depend, almost exclusively, for our knowledge. This discussion questions whether there were ever actually definite agreements to divide the kingdom, and suggests claims about shared inheritance supplied a ‘genealogical charter’ that justified and deflected attention from the interests of people like Gregory, in what was a continuously contested, evolutionary process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existing literature concerning conspiracy and conspiracy theories is particularly huge, especially if considering political and social sciences. However, many works revealed some weaknesses, such as the importance of assumptions and generalisations in political sciences studies or the neglected/exaggerated role of conspiracy in many historical works. So, it appeared that new political history could bring a significant and lightning contribution, taking into account the various dimensions and the complexity of the topic as well as the role of the context. The proposal of the paper, based on the empirical study of postwar Italy and France, could be summed up in three points. The first would be to consider the political nature of conspiracy and conspiracy theory, and to narrow the scope of the study to well-defined political groups. The second, not to take for granted pre-existing interpretations and narratives on this topic. The last, to pay major attention to the complex interactions of the representations, events, propaganda and political cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses internal and hidden politics of changes in bureaucracies by focusing on the introduction and use of policy instruments as institutional change without radical or explicit shifts in administrative systems. Beneath public administrative reforms, it examines the use of “low-profile instruments” characterized by their technical and goal-oriented dimension but also by their low visibility to external actors due to the high complexity of their commensurating purpose and the automaticity of their use. The core case study of the paper offers a historical sociology of a technique for calculating the growth of the French civil service wage bill from the mid-1960s to the 2000s. The origins, uses, and institutionalisation of this method in the French context are explored to emphasize the important way of governing the bureaucracy at times of crisis through automatic, unobtrusive, incremental, and low-profile mechanisms. While insisting on the salience of techniques for calculating, measuring, classifying, and indexing in the contemporary art of government, it also suggests the need for observing and explaining “everyday forms of retrenchment” in bureaucracies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the discourses to be read in painted representations of colonial motifs (and their modes of display) in France between the mid-nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, i.e. until the dawn—but not the completion—of decolonisation. It will analyse selected images, some of which have become emblematic as triumphant and/or enduring manifestations of colonial domination. It will question the readings and uses of such images from the time of conquest to the post-colonial era. This article's focus, however, will be less on the well-rehearsed dominant discourses than on gaps, silences, unanswered questions, misgivings and various non-dits which can be detected, on closer examination, in these works, their modes of diffusion and their reception by contemporaries. It will look for signs of ambivalence in the rendition of colonial scenes by the artists themselves (such as Vernet or Fromentin), who visited the sites of battle scenes in Algeria shortly after gruesome events had taken place. In particular, the paper will look for haunting visions of what had happened there, beyond the official, hegemonic discourse which was fashionable at the time, and which, in some cases, these artists had been commissioned to illustrate. The main argument concentrates closely on discourse and counter-discourse analysis, as well as the fluidity and the transferability of discourses across the colonial/post-colonial divide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper, which is based on recent field research, suggests an interpretative model of territorial government in France. Relations between national and local authorities as well as policy- making processes suggest that the centralized state has faced a major decline of its hegemony and that decentralization reforms have induced a polycentric dynamic. Seven basic characteristics and three key properties of the model are discussed. The emerging model fits neither a new localism nor a new centralist pattern. It is the product of ongoing and incremental trade-offs between centrifugal and centripetal rationales. This complexity reflects a situation that is under the rather conservative, as well as tight, control of national politicians who hold multiple local elected mandates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The three terms Roots, Rock and Breizh (or‘Brittany’) seem to make unlikely companions: their meeting looks more like a collision than a confluence. However, these disparate forces have fashioned a unique cultural dynamic in Brittany. This paper analyses this cultural-nationalist movement. It considers its socio-cultural context, presents some case studies of particular singers and festivals, and evaluates the movement's significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Gaullist settlement of 1958 reconfigured the political institutions of France, introducing into the republican mainstream a new form of leadership politics. Adapting the literature on political opportunity structure (POS) theory, and using the French left as a case study, can help us understand how political parties, ideology and leadership adapt to political institutions and norms. It also illuminates what the consequences are of such adaptation in the contemporary period, particularly as regards the institutionally bound roles of political ‘character’, protocol and discourse. The paper appraises the relevance and appropriateness of POS theory to leadership politics in France. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]