Introduction: The Institutions of the French Republic at 50

The creation of France's Fifth Republic in 1958 was certainly an extraordinary event. It was the last time that a Western European state was at the brink of civil war. From an institutional point of view, the political system created by the new constitution represented a novelty. While similar systems had existed in the past, French-style semi-presidential government has become a major reference in comparative politics. More importantly and more recently, the ‘third wave’ of democratisation has seen a great number of new semi-presidential regimes, inspired by the French model (Skach 2007). Half of the EU's new member states, for instance, have adopted this system (Grossman and Sauger 2007: 41).

This special issue deals with the evolution of the institutions of the French Fifth Republic and their interaction with the political life in contemporary France. Fifty years after the adoption of the constitution, the Fifth Republic has undergone major changes, be they economic, societal or political. The general thesis of this volume states that the regime of the Fifth Republic has not only changed because of exogenous shocks or more incremental transformations over its 50-year course. It has changed also because of internal problems or tensions inherent to semi-presidential government more generally. We will look in particular at how institutions have evolved, at the causes of eventual changes, as well as their consequences for some major dimensions of French political life. Therefore, we will look in particular at the extent to which classical analyses like that of Duverger still account for the functioning of the Fifth Republic.

France in Comparative Perspective: Duverger and Beyond

The most influential analysis of the Fifth Republic remains that of Maurice Duverger (Duverger 1996). In particular, he developed an original analysis of two key features of the Fifth Republic in comparative terms: the specific impact of the two-round electoral system and the semi-presidential nature of the regime.

Though widely applied to the Fifth Republic, his analysis of two-round electoral systems with single member districts (SMD) is in fact rooted in the experience of the Third Republic. In his ‘third law’ he inferred that this type of electoral system generates a political life structured into two blocks, rather than two parties, as is the case for one-round electoral systems with SMD. In fact, Duverger is a little more subtle: he claims that two-round SMD ballots tend towards generating multi-partisan systems with weakly institutionalised and highly interdependent parties (Duverger 1992).

The other major contribution concerns Duverger's work on semi-presidential regimes (Duverger 1986). Duverger defines semi-presidentialism by two factors: 1. a president elected through direct election and with significant personal powers; 2. a prime minister and a government accountable to parliament. In the subsequent comparison between seven semi-presidential regimes, Duverger (1986: 14) explains variance according to three variables: the constitutional powers of the president, the presence or absence of a parliamentary majority and, finally, the president's relation towards this majority. This discussion has evolved and more recent classifications try to further specify this typology, essentially through a more subtle analysis of the effective relations between president and prime minister (Elgie 1999; Shugart 2005; Siaroff 2003).

The contributions in this volume try to ‘update’ Duverger's questions while keeping alive his initial ambition to position the French case with regard to other international research agendas. The French Fifth Republic's institutions have been studied enough to understand how they constrain politics. The overall research question that structures all contributions in this volume concerns the interaction of institutions and political behaviour. This question was and remains paramount, especially in the context of changing institutions. Yet we also want to look at theories arguing the other way round: how do changes in political behaviour affect the working of institutions? This admittedly older viewpoint remains equally crucial to understand ongoing changes and the structural forces constituting the Fifth Republic.

Fifty years are, of course, not the end of history and, especially, of political analysis. A major objective of this special issue consists in re-examining existing theses about the working of French institutions. The life of institutions is necessarily the result of their encounter of politics. While this is, of course, common knowledge in contemporary comparative politics (e.g. Huber and Shipan 2002; Strøm et al. 2003; Tsebelis 2002), Duverger's work has certainly been groundbreaking in that it always combined and distinguished these elements.

Our objective will be to better explain institutional incentives and potential conflicts arising from contradictory incentives. Based on the very abundant work on institutions, we look at both inter-institutional relationships and the inner life of those institutions. This concerns intra-executive relations (Elgie 2009), executive–legislative relations (Grossman 2009; Lazadeux 2009), the life within parliament (Costa and Kerrouche 2009; Sauger 2009) and the role of judicial politics (Brouard 2009).

While answering these questions, we aim at renewing data and knowledge on the functioning of the French Fifth Republic. Therefore, all contributions are deeply anchored in empirical research. Most of them draw on new datasets or original research.

The Politics of Institutional Change

There have not been very many substantial constitutional amendments during the Fifth Republic after the most substantial of those changes, the introduction of the direct election of the president in 1962. Only three major revisions followed: the 1974 reform of the access to the Constitutional Council, the successive reforms of the parliament and the reduction of the presidential mandate from seven to five years. These reforms do not seem to have altered the fundamental features of the Fifth Republic (Elgie 2009).

The 2000 revision of the presidential mandate may turn out to be the single most important change to French institutions. It has brought the presidential term in line with the parliamentary term. More precisely, parliamentary elections now always follow presidential elections within a few weeks, although this is not a constitutional provision (Blais and Loewen 2009).

The two other institutional changes are the reform of access to the Constitutional Council and the successive reforms of the parliament. Using original data, Sylvain Brouard's (2009) paper is to provide a longitudinal view of referrals to, the composition and the rulings of the Constitutional Council. The notoriously weak Assemblée nationale has clearly improved its standing since 1958. Sébastien Lazardeux's paper will critically discuss those changes in the light of the actual use of scrutiny powers (Lazardeux 2009).

But change may not just result from institutional amendments. Especially since the socialist victory in 1981, the institutional life of the Fifth Republic has been put under strain by highly volatile partisan politics. In fact the decisive factor to understand the different phases of the Fifth Republic in Duverger's analysis has been the presence of a hostile or a friendly majority in parliament. He thus clearly assumes that there are interactive effects between institutions and political behaviour.

Given this stress on political behaviour, the first major question that arises is whether changing patterns in political behaviour have affected formal or informal institutions. Blais and Loewen's paper on the French electoral system (and in fact systems, since presidential and legislative systems are indeed quite different) shows that the electoral strategies of parties have changed coalition politics (Blais and Loewen 2009). Some analysts go as far as to claiming that France has seen the emergence of a quasi two-party system with one party government (Grunberg and Haegel 2007).

Yet political behaviour has changed in a variety of ways: declining cleavages and party dealignment, the rise of ‘unconventional politics', the judicialisation of politics, etc. There is a host of theories and hypotheses explaining how and why politics has changed. Explanations on how those changes affect the life of institutions have been less systematic. Simon Bornschier and Romain Lachat (2009) depict major evolutions in the structures of cleavages throughout the Fifth Republic. Building on their results, both Grossman's (2009) and Sauger's (2009) papers try to understand how the growing complexity of the policy space affects agenda setting and legislative behaviour. Change has not been systematic, however: successive alternations have not had any significant effect on public spending (Baumgartner et al. 2009).

Outline of the Volume

The various contributions mobilise a variety of approaches and are all based on empirical data. The opening paper by Robert Elgie (2009) provides a comparative perspective on semi-presidential government in Western Europe with special reference to France. He questions whether France can actually be considered as an archetype, rather than an exception among contemporary semi-presidential regimes. The following group of articles deals with several aspects of executive–legislative relations. Grossman (2009) studies how intra-executive relations have evolved over time and the determinants of cabinet turnover. He shows that the institutional advantages of the president continue to play an important role and that the evolution of the party system has not significantly affected presidential pre-eminence. Lazardeux (2009) analyses instruments of parliamentary control, showing that the parliament has made substantial use of the instruments at its disposal. The following contribution by Sauger (2009) focuses on the coherence of parliamentary groups, showing that defections have become less common, as the party system consolidated. Costa and Kerrouche (2009) examine MPs as a professional group and identify the main prerequisites of contemporary members of the Assemblée nationale.

The next group of articles analyses other central political institutions. Blais and Loewen (2009) take up Duverger's analysis of the electoral system and provide a systematic analysis of its different effects on pre-electoral alliances and strategic voting. Their study points to several ways in which Duverger's analysis has to be completed. The analysis by Bornschier and Lachat (2009) stresses the importance of the evolution of the political space to explain the evolution of the party system. They show that – beyond institutions – value change and changing policy issues are a fundamental determinant of this political space. Brouard (2009) shows how strongly the Constitutional Council is tied into politics and policy-making under the Fifth Republic, presenting and testing an ‘electoral model of constitutional veto politics'. Baumgartner, François and Foucault (2009), finally, provide an original analysis of the political dynamics of French budgets. Contrary to major contributions in comparative politics, they find no evidence for a left–right divide in French spending.

The concluding contribution by Grossman and Sauger (2009) takes a long term view of the political dynamics of the Fifth Republic. The authors show that the founding tension between a presidential and a partisan logic still prevails. Yet, the authors identify four different phases with a specific mix of the two logics.