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C’est en forgeant qu'on devient forgeron? Assessing legislative productivity in Fifth Republic France

  • Data, Measures and Methods
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French Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

This exploratory research note theorises about and tests the factors that have affected legislative productivity in France from 1960 to 2007. The empirical model accounts for intra-parliamentary dynamics such as the parties’ ideological placement on a left-right scale, the government's seat strength, coalition governments and intensity of opposition to the majority in the National Assembly. The model also considers features unique to the Fifth Republic, such as judicial review of bills by the Constitutional Council and presidents’ ‘sacking’ of prime ministers. External factors include strikes and social movements, as well as prime ministers’ and presidents’ job approval that are posited to impact lawmaking. The results of the analysis suggest how the model developed in this research may be extended to future analyses of parliamentary activity in the Fifth Republic.

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Notes

  1. The years are 1962, 1967, 1968, 1973, 1978, 1981, 1986, 1988, 1993, 1997, 2002 and 2007.

  2. In 1974 President Georges Pompidou died in office. Alain Poher assumed the presidency in April 1974 until the election the following month.

  3. The contrat de première embauche may be translated as ‘first job contract’. The legislation enabled employers to hire workers under the age of 26 whom they could hire for an undetermined time period, but allowed employers to terminate the contract within two years. Workers terminated in that time period do not have recourse to unemployement benefits.

  4. The years are 1974, 1981, 1986, 1988, 1993, 1995, 2002 and 2007.

  5. The other parties included the Centre national des indépendants et paysans (CNIP), Mouvement républicain populaire (MRP) and the Radicals. For the purposes of this analysis, the number of parties was counted as those for which Budge et al (2001) were able to determine ideological scores. Under de Gaulle and Pompidou the ‘right’ and ‘center’ parties constituted a conglomerate of two parties total according to these data based on party manifestoes.

  6. Jacques Chirac resigned preemptively in 1976 rather than allow Giscard to fire him.

  7. One might raise the objection that the dependent variable is indiscriminate because the data do not differentiate between ‘significant’ bills and all other bills. However, there is no accepted method to parse ‘significant’ bills in the French case. Cavanna's (2001) study is one attempt, but the data range only from 0 to 4 per annum and correlate at r=−0.01 with all bills passed. Regardless, the dependent variable considers Government bills, not private members’ bills. The Constitution of the Fifth Republic mandates that the National Assembly may only pass organic laws, leaving considerable regulatory authority to the Government. As such, including all Government bills is an appropriate measure for the model.

  8. ARCH model performs better than ARIMA (6, 0, 0) in terms of predictive capacity, though coefficients are similar.

  9. The author is grateful to Stéphanie Breuzard of the Paris office of SOFRES for providing the complete time series for Valéry Giscard d’Estaing's septennat from 1974 to 1981. Presidential and prime ministerial approval data are available from the author upon request.

  10. ‘Retraites: entre 1,1 million et 2,7 millions de manifestants’, Liberation, http://www.liberation.fr/economie/01012288707-le-trafic-ferroviaire-conforme-aux-previsions, accessed 28 December 2010. ‘Les plus grands manifestations en France depuis 15 ans’, La Depeche, 9 September 2010,http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2010/09/08/902705-Les-plus-grandes-manifestations-en-France-depuis-15-ans.html, accessed 29 December 2010.

  11. A correlation matrix of the independent variables does not reveal significant collinearity at P<0.60.

  12. If anything, the model may slightly underestimate the impact of the first cohabitation. The incumbent Socialist government of 1986, which is the united of analysis, passed 50 bills, whereas Chirac's new majority passed 67.

  13. Of the 345 seats (59.8 per cent) that the presidential majority holds at present, only 32 (5.6 per cent) are not UMP deputies affiliated with the Right.

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Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for research support from the University of Florida Paris Research Center, as well as the helpful assistance of staff at the Institut d’Études Politiques in Paris, France, and the Institut d’Études Politiques and Université d’Aix-Marseille III in Aix-en-Provence, France.

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Conley, R. C’est en forgeant qu'on devient forgeron? Assessing legislative productivity in Fifth Republic France. Fr Polit 9, 158–181 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/fp.2011.4

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