Elvire Guillaud

Changing French capitalism: political and systemic crises in France

Frances model of capitalism experiences a crisis with multiple aspects. First, the French model of capitalism has undergone deep reforms since the 1980s. Second, the French political life is characterized by a political crisis: the vanishing of the space for mediation between the divergent expectations of the social groups composing the dominant social bloc. These crises are linked. First, because the institutional reforms undertaken since the 1980s have changed French capitalism, its institutional complementarities, the profile of socio-political groups, and have contributed to destabilizing social alliances. Second, because the political crisis has pushed policy-makers to turn to institutional change as a necessary condition for opening up new spaces of mediation. This contribution surveys the main changes experienced by the French model over the past 30 years, analyses the break-up of the traditional social alliances and presents the elements of the political crisis in relation to neoliberal structural reforms.

Preferences for Employment Protection and the Insider–Outsider Divide: Evidence from France

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.