Éric Kerrouche

The French Assemblée nationale: The case of a weak legislature?

This article sets out the situation of the French National Assembly. It focuses on the activity of French deputies in order to assess their real power. After the main aspects of the Fifth Republic are presented, the article scrutinises the influence of deputies and reveals that, even if the governments domination of the legislative process is real, there is still room for manoeuvre amongst deputies. Indeed, even if the deputies of the Right and Left conceive their roles differently, their influence remains a fact either because of strategic calculations from the government or because of the organisation of the legislative arena itself.

Why do French MPs Focus More on Constituency Work than on Parliamentary Work

The relationship between French members of the National Assembly and citizens is paradoxical. On the one hand, the French political culture, constitution and history favour a very abstract conception of representation: MPs are supposed to act as trustees and collectively to embody the French Nation. On the other hand, they are deeply involved in their constituencies and express a great level of satisfaction being there. In order to understand how French MPs reconcile the national and local dimensions of their mandate, the data gathered through face-to-face interviews with MPs are described. Then a scale analysis is provided in order to sum up the local–national orientations of the MPs. Using this scale, it is possible to test the impact of several variables on the territorial focus of MPs: electoral incentives, political ambition, ideological factors and working conditions at the local and the national level.

Are French Laws Written in Brussels? The Limited Europeanization of Law-Making in France and Its Implications

Evaluating the power of national political systems in the European Union (EU) and the cross influence of national and European levels of governance strongly divides scholars, politicians, and citizens. Since the beginning of the 1990s, public debate surrounding European integration has often featured questions concerning its impact on the national political system and especially on the balance of power between legislative and executive bodies. The “democratic deficit” concept stems from the hypothesis that reinforcement of the European Community was weakening parliaments and giving increasing power to governments (Moravcsik 1994) via the EC Council and European Council. On another dimension, the work of Majone (1996) on the “European regulatory state” follows the famous statement of Jacques Delors about the dominance of EU over national legislation. Nevertheless, in the academic field, there is still no general agreement on the identity of “winners” and “losers” in European integration, as evidenced in the various integration theories and their divergent conclusions. One of the reasons for these ongoing controversies is the lack of solid and systematic data on Europeanization, and especially Europeanization of national laws.

Up and Down, Old and New: Values and Value Systems of MPs and Voters in France

MPs are often criticised as being homogeneous. This is well known in terms of social background or gender, but the criticism also holds for values and norms. MPs are said to share normative agreements on the essential points and demonstrate differences on second-order issues. This criticism is even more widespread regarding the new politics based on the cultural divide, notably vis-à-vis politicians from the extreme right as far as immigration, European integration or globalisation are concerned. In this contribution, these criticisms are addressed by investigating the degree of normative agreements and disagreements of French MPs. Furthermore, the differences both in old and new politics between MPs on the one hand and the electorate as a whole and their supporters on the other hand are evaluated. It is concluded that MPs are definitely not all the same and the degrees of difference among MPs or with the electorate are far from being those expected.

From Theory to Practice: Citizens’ Attitudes about Representation in France

French institutions, political culture and history have favoured a very abstract conception of representation: MPs are expected to embody collectively the French Nation, but little is known about citizens’ concrete views on representation. In this paper, data gathered through a citizen mass survey are used. To overcome the usual abstract considerations on representation, respondents were asked their opinion on an MP who would endorse amendments proposed by an interest group. In the questionnaire, two features were changed randomly: the MPs political leaning and the type of interest group. It is shown by means of an original experiment that the ‘general’ conception representation has disappeared from citizens’ attitudes: despite the enduring legitimacy of the general will approach in the public sphere, French citizens appear to promote a conception of representation close to the Madisonian views on pluralism involving a strong attachment to the logic of territorial electoral linkage.

THE ‘VALUE CONNECTION’: MPs, VOTERS AND VALUES IN THREE EUROPEAN COUNTRIES

This article investigates an unconventional dimension of representation: the degree of congruence between citizens’ and MPs’ values. Our main goal is to compare the values of the general public to those of the MPs through elite survey data (PARENEL) and national mass surveys. Several hypotheses deriving from the scientific literature are tested in order to examine the elite–public linkage. Our results confirm other findings: MPs are more polarised than their voters, they are more open-minded and do not replicate their voters’ values whatever the electoral system at stake.