The fragmented French executive: Ministerial cabinets in the Fifth Republic

Ministerial cabinets are small informal groups of personal advisers attached to each Minister. Originally a political body they have in the Fifth Republic become a pivot in the politico‐administrative system. To a large extent the role of cabinets can be understood by analysing their environment—that is the needs of the Minister to whom they are responsible, the central administration and the nature of the cabinet itself. These three variables form a useful framework within which the activities of cabinets can be assessed. ¹     

Party mandate theory and time-series analysis: a methodological comment

In 1990 Ian Budge and Richard Hofferbert published an article in support of “the doctrine of the party mandate”, using evidence from regression analyses relating the content of postwar US party platforms and governmental outputs in terms of yearly expenditure rates. Their approach was severely criticized by Gary King and Michael Laver (1993) but has been maintained by the authors in a subsequent extension of their analysis to include data from Australia, Canada and seven European States. The present article takes issue with both the approach followed by Budge and Hofferbert and the alternative approach recommended by King and Laver. It is argued that the trend problem has not been adequately dealt with and the formalization of the mandate model lacks conceptual consistency. Three major suggestions emerge from the discussion: (1) the formal mandate model should be extended to include a “divergence term” designed to separate positive from negative mandate effects; (2) the analysis should pay closer attention to the parameter restrictions that follow from the theoretical model; and (3) the regression equations should be interpreted heuristically in terms of “cointegration” or “causal-trends” models.     

The French Fifth Republic as an Opportunity Structure: A Neo-institutional and Cultural Approach to the Study of Leadership Politics

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.     

Social mobility and the demand for public consumption expenditures

The collective choice of public consumption expenditure is reconsidered when voters are socially mobile. In accordance with previous work on social mobility and political economics, the analysis concerns a class of mobility processes that induce mappings from initial income to expected future income that are monotonically increasing and concave. The paper abstracts from the explicitly redistributive role of government and concentrates on public consumption which is modeled as a classical public good. In equilibrium, provision is sensitive to the degree of social mobility, theoretically linking social mobility to public consumption. Further, empirical puzzles about the impact of voting franchise extensions on the growth of government spending are addressed within the context of social mobility.     

Unity in Diversity: Contending Conceptions of the French Nation and Republic

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.     

Political fragmentation, party ideology and public expenditures

In this paper we propose an original model of competition for effective political power between majority and opposition coalitions. The model indicates that the electoral margin of the majority and the fragmentation of both coalitions are key variables that determine their effective political power. We estimate the model in the case of the French départements. Our econometric results support the model and show that the per capita social expenditures in the French départements depend on the effective political power of the majority.     

Superfund expenditures and cleanup priorities: Distributive politics or the public interest?

Using data on all final National Priorities List (NPL) sites, this study employs an integrated model of distributive and public interest politics to determine whether the overall pace of cleanup efforts and funding of the 8.5 billion Superfund program over the past eight years reflects self-interested congressional influence or public interest objectives. Despite the fact that both EPA and Congress have substantial incentives to promote the Superfund program, the results indicate that once a site is on the final NPL, there is little committee-based congressional influence over the distribution of site cleanup or funding, although evidence exists that legislators can hasten a site's transition from proposed to final status on the NPL. The chief determinants of cleanup pace and level of funding are the site's Hazard Ranking System (HRS) scores, whether federal funds are financing the cleanup, and whether the site is designated as a state priority.     

New public management and the reform of French public hospitals

New public management (NPM) is not only an Anglo‐Saxon debate but also a French one, with some of its elements constituting structural components of the French state apparatus. How did it make its way into French hospitals? What core mechanism was at the center of NPM implementation in hospitals? We discuss the redisorganization of the health system under NPM, as it attempted to reassert the central government's power over regions and how it alienated the medical profession. The paper highlights inherent contradictions and other false promises within NPM. It was unable to contained cost, could no enhance accountability or increase civil participation. We then investigate post‐NPM reforms in French healthcare. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Executive Power and Republican Principles at the Founding of the Fifth Republic

This article examines the understanding of executive power in the debates at the founding of the Fifth Republic in 1958. The examination discovered a concept of executive power quite different from the real executive power revealed in the history of the Fifth Republic. The framers of the constitution intended to place the prime minister at the head of the executive power and to shield him from removal by the President of the Republic. The direct election of the president, brought about by the problematic constitutional amendment of 1962, provided the legitimacy for the de facto dominant role of the president apart from the two cohabitation periods.     

Memory and partisan identity: the case of the French Communist Party

Abstract. The French Communist Party pays particular attention to the writing and the recounting of its own history. Its militants consent often to an important training effort. The understanding of historical memory by the dimension which connects French Communism to 'true socialism', would prohibit reasoning which would have an objective of re-instating the memory of French Communists as an element of a partisan identity, rather than the falsification of which the nature of history might have been the object. Maurice Halbwach's notion of 'collective memory' fits this project. Consequently, some elements of the party's historical memory, especially autobiographies of communist party leaders, are compared to the opinions or life experiences collected from militants. In this comparison between published memories and oral life stories, models and constant themes appear. But one must also insist on the discrepancies between interviews, and on the differences between life stories and published autobiographies. If autobiographies provided life patterns founded on invariable elements and methods of historical interpretation, other factors were of influence, such as how long the subject has belonged to the party, the family continuity in the partisan group, school background.     

The British Labour Party and leadership election mandate(s) of Jeremy Corbyn: patterns of opinion and opposition within the parliamentary Labour Party

This paper offers the first systematic evaluation of opinion within the 2015–2017 parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) towards the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. We do this by identifying whether individual parliamentarians remained supportive of Corbyn as their party leader or not, and then relating opinion on this to a series of variables that form the basis of a unique data set on the PLP. By constructing this data set we are able to test, via logistic regression analysis, a series of hypotheses based around (1) demographic variables – i.e. age, gender and trade union membership; (2) political variables – i.e. year of entry, constituency region, marginality, main competition and the endorsement of their constituency Labour Party (CLP) in the leadership election of 2016 and (3) ideological variables – i.e. views on continued European Union [EU] membership, immigration, intervention in Syria and the renewal of Trident.     

The determination of local public expenditures and the principal and agent relation: A case study

The principal and agent relationship is important in the public sector. There, elected or appointed representatives act on behalf of the citizens of their jurisdictions. This paper examines the importance of the budget referendum, which allows the principals to approve or disapprove the proposal of a set of agents, in the context of local public expenditure decisions. We test the null hypothesis that the institution of referendum, when compared to a nonreferendum institution, does not lead to significantly different expenditure behavior.     

Interstate migration,income and public school expenditures: An update of an experiment

This article re-examines the relative importance of per capita income and net out-migration (Weisbrod's welfare-maximization hypothesis) as determinants of expenditures for public primary and secondary education. A repetition of Weisbrod's experiment shows that the existence of a high correlation between per capita income and migration in the 1950s would have made it difficult to distinguish between their relative importance. An update of the experiment yields results contrary to the hypothesis that communities (states) are welfare maximizers. They support the contention that per capita income is a primary determinate of educational expenditures.