Martial Foucault

Punctuated equilibrium in French budgeting processes

Abstract We use data on French budgeting to test models of friction, incrementalism and punctuated equilibrium. Data include the overall state budget since 1820; ministerial budgets for seven ministries since 1868; and a more complete ministerial series covering ten ministries since 1947. Our results in every case are remarkably similar to the highly leptokurtic distributions that Jones and Baumgartner (2005) demonstrated in US budgeting processes. This suggests that general characteristics of administrative processes create friction, and that these general factors are more important than particular details of organizational design. The legendary centralization and administrative strength of the French state, especially when compared to the decentralized separated powers structure of the US system, where the theory was developed, is apparently not sufficient to overcome cognitive pressures causing friction. Further, our French data cover a wide range of institutional procedures and constitutional regimes. The similarity of our findings across all these settings suggests that administrative structures alone are less important than the cognitive reasons discussed in the original model.

The Compleat Economic Voter: New Theory and British Evidence

Almost all the prolific work done on economic voting has been based on the classic reward–punishment model, which treats the economy as a valence issue. The economy is a valence issue, but it is much more than that. This article explores two other dimensions of economic voting – position and patrimony. Investigating a 2010 British survey containing relevant measures on these three dimensions, the authors estimate their impact on vote intention, using a carefully specified system of equations. According to the evidence reported, each dimension of economic voting has its own independent effect. Moreover, together, they reveal a ‘compleat’ economic voter, who wields considerable power over electoral choice in Britain. This new result confirms and extends recent work on American and French elections.

Patrimonial Economic Voting: Legislative Elections in France

Patrimonial economic voting has been neglected in favour of classical economic voting studies. This assertion holds less, however, with French election investigations, where the neglect is relative rather than absolute. Whereas classical economic voting holds the economy to be a valence issue, patrimonial economic voting regards the economy as a positional issue. Voters who own more property, in particular high-risk assets, are held to be more right-wing in their political preferences. This patrimonial effect shows itself to be statistically and substantively strong in one of the few election data-sets with sufficient measures available – surveys on the National Assembly contests of 1978, 1988, 2002. The electoral effect exceeds that from the traditional ‘heavy variables’ of class and income. Moreover, further work might show its impact comparable to that of classic sociotropic retrospective evaluations of the national economy. Certainly a case can be made for further study of patrimonial economic voting, as compared to classical economic voting.

Forecasting the 2012 French Presidential Election

ABSTRACT WhowillwinthenextFrenchpresidentialelection?Forecastingelectoralresultsfrompolitical-economymodelsisarecenttraditioninFrance.Inthisarticle,wepursuethiseffortbyestimatingavotefunctionbasedonbothlocalandnationaldatafortheelectionsheldbetween1981and2007.Thisapproachallowsustocircumventthesmall N problemandtoproducemorerobustandreliableresults.Basedonamodelincludingeconomic(unemployment)andpolitical(approvalandpreviousresults)variables,wepre-dictthedefeat,althoughbyarelativelysmallmargin,oftheright-wingincumbentNicolasSarkozyinthesecondroundoftheFrenchpresidentialelectiontobeheldinMay2012. T heincumbentpresident,NicolasSarkozy,willfacea tough challenge during the French presidentialelectioninMay2012.Forthefirsttimesince1981,when the right-wing president Valery Giscard-d’EstaingwasdefeatedbytheSocialistchallengerFrancoisMitterrand,the2012electiontakesplaceindifficulteco-nomictimes.Asthesittingpresidentforthelastfiveyears,SarkozywilllikelybeheldaccountableforthepoorperformanceoftheFrencheconomy.ThelargenumberofdeclaredcandidatesfromtheRightrunninginthefirstroundoftheelectionisinterpretedasasignofthedissatisfactionwithSarkozy’srecordamonghisownfollowers,andsomespeculatethathemaynotevengettothedecisivesecondround.Is the victory of Sarkozy’s main challenger, the SocialistFrancoisHollande,aforegoneconclusion?Toaddressthisques-tion,wedevelopedaforecastingmodelbasedonlocalandnationaldatawhosevalueswereknownseveralmonthsbeforetheelec-tion. Based on the results of this politico-economic model, weconcludethatNicolasSarkozywillrunacompetitivefightbutwillultimatelyloosehisbidforre-election.After17yearsofwait-ing,thereturnofaSocialistattheElyseeappearshighlyprobable.Thisarticleisdividedintofourparts.First,webrieflyreviewthe literature on French forecasting models. Next, we providedetailsabouttheFrenchelectoralsystem.Then,weintroduceourmodelandthedatausedforitsestimation.Finally,wepresentanddiscusspredictionsderivedfromthismodel,includingourforecastforthe2012election.

Public Spending, Public Deficits and Government Coalitions

This study examines the relationship between types of government and level of public spending. There are two competing perspectives about the consequences of coalition governments for the size of public expenditures. The most common argument is that government spending increases under coalition governments, compared with one-party governments. Another line of thought contends that coalition governments are often stalled in the status quo due to the veto power of each member. Our analysis of public spending in 33 parliamentary democracies between 1972 and 2000 confirms the latter argument that coalition governments have a status quo bias. We find, particularly, that single-party governments are apt to modify the budget according to the current fiscal condition, which enables them to increase or decrease spending more flexibly. By contrast, coalition governments find it difficult not only to decrease spending under difficult fiscal conditions but also to increase it even under a more favorable context, because each member of the coalition has a veto power.

Public Budgeting in the French Fifth Republic: The End of La République des partis?

This article reviews trends in state spending across the Fifth Republic. Considering the partisan divisions in French political life and the importance accorded to elections and partisan control of government, one might expect substantial differences in spending patterns by governments of the Left and the Right. Instead, we find only a small number of statistically significant differences and when we do find them, governments of the Right are the higher spenders. The reasons for this are the different historical periods during which the Left and Right have been in power. As the Right dominated French politics for the first half of the Fifth Republic, it oversaw a period of the most dramatic growth in the state, across virtually all sectors. Growth in state spending declined steadily over the decades but particularly after the oil crisis and other events in the 1970s. Since 1981, when governments (if not presidential control) have alternated on a relatively regular basis, austerity and limited growth in spending have been the rule, no matter which governments have been in power. The article demonstrates these facts with a comprehensive overview of public spending across 11 categories. The results are presented graphically, with statistical t-tests, and finally with regressions controlling for growth in the economy. In all cases, no linkage between left-wing control of government and higher spending is found.

Public support for European defence: Does strategic culture matter?

This article identifies previously ignored determinants of public support for the European Union’s security and defence ambitions. In contrast to public opinion vis-a-vis the EU in general, the literature on attitudes towards a putative European army or the existing Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) suggests that the explanatory power of sociodemographic and economic variables is weak, and focuses instead on national identity as the main determinant of one’s support.This article explores the possible impact of strategic culture, and argues that preferences vis-a-vis the EU’s security and defence ambitions are formed in part through pre-existing social representations of security.To test this proposition, ‘national’ strategic cultures are disaggregated and a typology is produced that contains four strategic postures: pacifism, traditionalism, humanitarianism and globalism. Applying regression analysis on individual-level Eurobarometer survey data, it is found that strategic postures help explain both the general level of support for CSDP and support for specific Petersberg tasks.

General Policy Speech of Prime Ministers and Fiscal Choices in France: “Preach Water and Drink Wine!”

Since the inception of the Fifth French Republic, the Prime Minister pronounces an expected inauguration address of general policy in which main public policies are announced. Usually a hierarchical priority of policies is raised from this address. As a consequence the government aims at allocating budgets in accordance with such a ranking. Nevertheless public budgeting processes are regularly faced with incrementalism, which causes huge problems when some unexpected problems arise. Furthermore, during the electoral cycle, governments face a paradoxical problem: once elected they are supposed to transform their electoral promises into public policies but at the same time they are forced to propose a new electoral platform for being re-elected.

How terrorism affects political attitudes: France in the aftermath of the 2015–2016 attacks

Abstract This study investigates what impact the terrorist attacks in Paris (2015) and Nice (2016) had on political attitudes in France. Drawing on nine cross-sectional surveys, it tests the premises of three major theories of opinion change that predict contrasting shifts in opinion among ordinary citizens according to their ideological position in the aftermath of terrorist attacks: the Reactive Liberals Hypothesis (RLH), the Terror Management Theory (TMT), and the Bayesian Updating Theory (BUT). In line with both RLH and BUT, the findings show that left-wing sympathisers shifted toward the right following the attacks. However, the results suggest that, in line with BUT, the attacks only had a significant impact on attitudes toward security, while they had no effect on attitudes toward immigration, or toward moral and socio-economic issues.

The politics of fiscal rules within the European Union: a dynamic analysis of fiscal rules stringency

ABSTRACT Over the last 25 years, fiscal rules (FRs) have been proliferating in Europe bringing in-depth change to the architecture of fiscal institutions. This paper investigates different theories explaining the changes in national fiscal rules stringency (FRS) using a panel of 28 European countries from 1990 to 2013. The authors found evidence that fiscal stress prevents fiscal reform in the short term, and leads to stronger fiscal rules in the long term. This pattern corresponds to the ‘war of attrition’ argument formulated by Alesina and Drazen [(1989) ‘Why are stabilizations delayed?’, The American Economic Review 81(5): 1170–88]. The authors found evidence that countries eager to join the EU showed their commitment to Maastricht targets by incorporating FRs into national laws. Countries facing financial difficulties after the 2009 sovereign debt crisis were coerced into adopting more stringent FRs to obtain fiscal support from the EU. Both cases support the idea that coercive diplomacy might explain the strength of national fiscal rules in the EU.