Edited books
Fillieule, Olivier, Haegel, Florence, Hamidi, Camille, et al, (eds.). Sociologie plurielle des comportements politiques : Je vote, tu contestes, elle cherche…. Paris : Presses de Sciences Po, 2017. 398 p.
Je vote, tu contestes, elle cherche… La montée de l’abstention, celle des partis d’extrême droite, l’émergence d’une consommation engagée ou de formes de mobilisation des minorités ethniques, la place de l’identité nationale, le rôle des associations dans la vie démocratique… la sociologie politique se trouve au défi d’expliquer le maintien ou les transformations des formes de politisation.
Ce défi , Nonna Mayer l’a relevé tout au long de sa carrière, en alliant ouverture intellectuelle et rigueur méthodologique.
Hommage à la sociologie politique plurielle que cette pionnière de la survey research expérimentale à la française a pratiquée et soutenue, l’ouvrage dresse un état des lieux des recherches et des controverses qui animent aujourd’hui ce champ de la science politique. Il compose ainsi une introduction à l’analyse des comportements politiques.
http://www.pressesdesciencespo.fr/fr/livre/?GCOI=27246100723590
Grossman, Emiliano et Sauger, Nicolas. Pourquoi détestons-nous autant nos politiques ? Paris : Presses de Sciences Po, 2017.
Nous sommes parfois séduits par leurs promesses, mais, très vite, ils nous déçoivent. Si cette séquence se répète régulièrement depuis près de quarante ans en France, le phénomène gagne en intensité. Entre les citoyens et leurs représentants, la rupture semble consommée.
Ce désenchantement à l’égard du politique, il faut l’expliquer et lui donner sens pour espérer en sortir. Est-il dû à l’ineffi cacité des politiques publiques ? À l’incapacité, voire à la corruption, des élites ? Au pessimisme atavique des Français, impossibles à gouverner ?
Armés de leurs outils de politistes, Emiliano Grossman et Nicolas Sauger dressent un diagnostic précis de ce mal français, en identifient les causes et, propositions à l’appui, offrent des voies de guérison.
http://www.pressesdesciencespo.fr/fr/livre/?GCOI=27246100925490
King, Desmond et Le Galès, Patrick, (dir.). Reconfiguring European States in Crisis. Oxford: OUP – Oxford University Press, 2017. 512 p.
Reconfiguring European States in Crisis offers a ground-breaking analysis by some of Europe’s leading political scientists, examining how the European national state and the European Union state have dealt with two sorts of changes in the last two decades. Firstly, the volume analyses the growth of performance measurement in government, the rise of new sorts of policy delivery agencies, the devolution of power to regions and cities, and the spread of neoliberal ideas in economic policy. The volume demonstrates how the rise of non-state controlled organizations and norms combine with Europeanization to reconfigure European states. Secondly, the volume focuses on how the current crises in fiscal policy, Brexit, security and terrorism, and migration through a borderless European Union have had dramatic effects on European states and will continue to do so.
Editorships of Special Issues
Belot, Céline, Boussaguet, Laurie, Halpern, Charlotte, (dir.). Gouverner (avec) l’opinion au niveau européen. Politique européenne. mars 2017, vol 2016/4, n° 54. ISSN 16236297. 202 p.
A partir du cas spécifique que constitue le système politique européen, ce numéro spécial s’interroge sur la relation entre opinion publique et action publique, comme une contribution à l’analyse de la capacité politique de l’Union européenne (UE). La réponse apportée par la littérature à cette interrogation centrale pour le fonctionnement de tout système démocratique (Dahl, 1989 ; Manin, 2012) est en grande majorité américaine (Stimson, 1998, 2004 ; Soroka et Wlezien, 2010 ; Druckman et Jacobs, 2015). Essentiellement fonctionnaliste, elle est soit formulée de manière normative – « Un des principes fondamentaux d’un gouvernement démocratique est que l’action publique doit être une fonction de l’opinion (…) Savoir si et jusqu’à quel point ce principe correspond à la réalité est un indicateur critique de la gouvernance représentative » (Wlezien et Soroka, 2007, 800) –, soit de manière pragmatique sous la forme du « Who leads whom ? » (Canes-Wrone, 2006). Partant du constat d’un recours de plus en plus courant aux enquêtes d’opinion par les gouvernants, cette seconde approche s’est développée au cours des vingt dernières années pour interroger l’usage des données d’opinion dans l’action publique (Enns et Wlezien, 2011). Quel rôle joue le recours à l’opinion publique dans la mise sur agenda, la prise de décision, mais aussi le discours politique ? Fait-elle figure d’aiguillon, constitue-t-elle une contrainte ou au contraire une opportunité pour les gouvernants ? Comment se matérialise le recours à l’opinion, à travers quels dispositifs concrets, et quels en sont les usages et les effets en termes de capacité politique et d’action publique ? [Premier paragraphe de l’introduction]
http://politique-europeenne.eu/fr/n-54-20164-gouverner-avec-lopinion-au-niveau-europeen/
Articles in peer-reviewed journals
Mesnel, Blandine. Les agriculteurs face à la paperasse : Policy feedbacks et bureaucratisation de la politique agricole commune. Gouvernement & action publique. mars 2017, n° 1, p. 33-60.
Based on a fieldwork in the French agricultural sector, this article analyses the political and social consequences of red tape on farmers. It proposes to use the notion of red tape as an analytical category, and to consider its effects on the relationships between citizens and public authorities. In a first step, we describe the different dimensions of individual experiences of administrative constraints. For this purpose we distinguish learning, compliance and symbolic costs associated with paperwork. In a second step, the article explores several hypotheses regarding the administrative aspect of policy feedbacks based on the analysis of farmers’ relationship to bureaucratic and political authorities. Overall, this case study encourages the general study of red tape as a political experience, and underlines the symbolic aspects of such experience.
https://www.cairn.info/resume.php?ID_ARTICLE=GAP_171_0033
Wickberg, Sofia. Scandales et corruption dans le discours médiatique français : la partie émergée de l’iceberg ? Ethique publique. février 2017, vol 18, n° 2.
This article is concerned with how corruption is socially constructed in the French press media, both from a problem definition and a rhetorical perspective. Based on a corpus of 307 articles published between 2005 and 2015, this article uses frame analysis to identify the most common interpretive frames. Based on the findings, it is argued that corruption is generally presented through an episodic framing, as a problem of individual misconduct and deviance, and that the rhetorical tools used to emphasize the topic’s newsworthiness tends to present corruption through a scandal frame and frequently generalize the problem to the entire social group. The mediatisation of corruption contributes to putting the issue on the agenda, however the way the issue is framed, focussing on individual behaviour, tends to depoliticize the issue and to limit societal attributions of responsibility, and thus suggests little policy implications or opportunities for change.
https://ethiquepublique.revues.org/2745
Reports
Rozenberg, Olivier. The Role of National Parliaments in the EU after Lisbon: Potentialities and Challenges : PE 583.126. Bruxelles : Parlement européen, 2017. 70 p.
This study was commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the Committee on Constitutional Affairs of the European Parliament. It assesses the implementation of the Treaty of Lisbon provisions on national parliaments as well as other related developments since 2009. The issues that are specifically investigated include the treaty provisions regarding national parliaments, Early Warning Mechanism, dialogue between national parliaments and the European Commission, the extending networks of inter-parliamentary cooperation, the parliamentary dimension of the budgetary and economic coordination and finally, the challenges raised by the on-going developments of the European legislative procedure.
https://spire.sciencespo.fr/hdl:/2441/9v6undv7h8p0rmvntkv29970k
Working papers
Eisl, Andreas. Explaining Variation in Public Debt : A Quantitative Analysis of the Effects of Governance. MaxPo Discussion Paper 17/1 Max Planck Sciences Po Center on Coping with Instability in Market Societies n°17/1. 2017.
This paper examines the main political influence factors accounting for the variation in public debt accumulation on a global scale. This allows for a reassessment of the recent focus on a regime type theory of public debt and for a test of an alternative governance theory. I argue that political stability, the rule of law, the control of corruption, government effectiveness, and regulatory quality promote lower public debt accumulation by reducing the incentives for governments to “borrow from the future,” by increasing state capacity to collect taxes and effectively use public funds, and by providing more security and equity to private investment, inducing higher economic growth and tax revenues. Both theories are tested against a number of controls stemming from theories of public choice, theories of governmental distributional conflict, as well as from politico-institutional and macroeconomic explanations of public debt accumulation. Applying different specifications of quantitative models, the two governance indicators political stability and regulatory quality show consistent effects on public debt accumulation, partly confirming the proposed governance theory. Furthermore, the paper can reproduce a public debt-reducing effect of more democratic regime types across a number of model specifications – though without a high degree of robustness.
https://spire.sciencespo.fr/hdl:/2441/67pdgvv1o1924au1fvpb4bng12
Garritzmann, Julian L, Hausermann, Silja, Palier, Bruno, et al. WoPSI – the World Politics of Social Investment : An international research project to explain variance in social investment agendas and social investment reforms across countries and world regions. LIEPP Working Paper n°64. 2017.
The “World Politics of Social Investment” (WoPSI) project aims at explaining variance in social investment agendas and social in-vestment reforms across democratic countries in different regions of the World. Virtually all capitalist economies grapple with challenges of demographic change, slow economic growth, poor employment performance and increasing poverty rates. In dealing with these pro-blems, a social investment strategy appeals to a wide audience, both political and academic. However, social investment reforms and per-formances in democratic countries around the globe are highly une-qual and remain fragmentary: different countries have implemented different types of policy instruments, with different functions, at diffe-rent points in time, and to different degrees. Despite a growing number of scientific contributions on social in-vestment reforms and their effects, a systematic mapping of the de-sign of social investment agendas and policies in different democra-tic countries around the globe is still lacking. Moreover, we lack an explanation for the variance in the development of social investment policy reforms. This is where we locate the research interest of the project presented in this paper. In order to understand why social investment agendas and policies have developed differently across countries, we need to study the politics of social investment reforms. Thus, we ask: How do social investment agendas and social in-vestment policy reforms vary across democratic countries around the globe? Under what political conditions do social investment agendas and/or reforms develop? In this paper, we situate these questions in the existing state of the literature, and we outline a way to answer these research questions in the context of social policy reforms in Latin America, East Asia, as well as Western and Eastern Europe. We argue that political coali-tions (actors and their interests), as well as the institutional embed-dedness of social investment politics are key factors in explaining the high variety of social investment agendas and policies between countries.
https://spire.sciencespo.fr/hdl:/2441/5rob5aq5l98ll9et3sg8meehvg
MOREL, Nathalie, Zemmour, Michaël, Touzet, Chloé. A Bismarckian Type of Fiscal Welfare? : Insights on the Use of Social Tax Expenditures in French Social and Employment Policy. 2017.
This article argues that situated approaches are necessary to reveal institu-tion-specific or regime specific structures, forms and uses of fiscal welfare instruments. We base our analysis on the French case, for which we have previously built an exhaustive database of social tax expenditures (STEs) for the year 2014. We find that France displays a specific structure of fiscal welfare. Most STEs are concentrated in the fields of employment, family and health policy; most STEs concern social security contributions. We identify specific forms of fiscal welfare which might be common to other Bismarckian countries, principally centred around three types of use, i) the reduced taxation of family and couples, which is a core element of the fami-lialist organisation of social policy after WWII ; ii) the use of STEs as a privileged instrument of employment policy in the constrained realm of minima wages and high levels of social security contributions ; iii) the use of STEs to quietly divert resources away from the sheltered social security funds and into collective private insurance plans, fuelling their develop-ment.
https://spire.sciencespo.fr/hdl:/2441/7871b36qbr9vp8n795mc0r7rin