The objective of this program is to move beyond intuition and representation, around the BRICs metaphor or the « West vs the Rest » expression, and look more critically and systematically at the « non-Western » dynamics of international politics. Our approach will be both empirical, using internal knowledge of specific countries, and theoretical, relying both on the English School general framework for the analysis of global order, and the French sociological tradition of research on international politics.
In 2008, the conference on 'The Fifth Republic at Fifty' took place. This conference was organised in two parts:
A paper taken from the conference on 'The Fifth Republic at Fifty' was published in the seventh volume of French Politics.
Two further conferences were organised in 2008-09. The first one, which took place on the 22nd November 2008, was organised in association with David Levy and the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. It was the opportunity to discuss approaches to the reform of public service broadcasting in both Britain and France, following the Copé Commission and the new draft broadcasting law compared with the BBC Charter Renewal and the UK debate over the future of public service broadcasting.
The second one, called ‘Political Leadership in France: Presidents & Prime Ministers of the Fifth Republic’, was held on the 2nd May 2009. It was co-organised by David Bell, Jean-Pascal Daloz (see below, convenor of the Elites programme), and David Goldey. The objective of this conference, to which both British and French participants contributed, was to compare the style of leadership of presidents and prime ministers, and notably to analyse logics of continuity and discontinuity. The idea is to follow with a second event next academic year, in order to improve the papers and prepare an edited volume.
The programme also supported the organisation of the conference "The Role of Patronage in Portuguese and Lusophone Politics" (Michel Cahen’s participation in the conference).
In October 2009, a colloque was convened by Dr David Levy, Director of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and Dr D.B. Goldey for OXPO, gathering students of, journalists working in, and consultants for the print media and the new on-line services. The papers were informative and thought provoking and dealt with the problems--some common to Britain and France, some not--of newspapers, which cannot compete on timeliness with broadcasting or the net, and whose advertising revenues are being squeezed by long term social changes as well as the present crisis, but whose functions or investigation, the checking of facts and reflection (at least for the quality press) are not replicated in the other media. Newspapers were losing younger readers and it was still unclear whether they could replace print readers and advertisers by making their own on-line services profitable.
On 3 March 2010, Patrick Le Gales (CNRS & Centre d'etudes europeenes, FNSP) led an excellent seminar at the Maison Francaise, "A New of Territorial Policies & Politics in France: intentions & consequences", where he discussed the recent Sarkozy's attempt at a recentralization of power after a cycle of decentralization. The new reforms were inspired by an urgent need to control and reduce expenditure by local and regional authorities and to unload on them new responsibilities but without matching finance from the centre. The proposed institutional reforms would strike at the power base of the Senate and at the (indirect) mode of election of senators, and their passage is still in doubt.
This programme aims to establish links between the POLINE network in Paris (Nonna Mayer, Marie Duru-Bellat, Louis Chauvel, Agnès Van Zanten and Daniel Sabbagh) and colleagues from Oxford (Nancy Bermeo and Tak Wing Chan).
The POLINE network was established in 2009, with the following agenda:
equality is at the heart of the democratic ideal. Yet, in most democracies
today social inequalities are either persisting, as in France, or are
on the rise, as in the United States. And even when inequalities are not
increasing, the feeling that they are too important is a predominant concern
of Western populations. What are the political consequences of this paradox?
The objective within this research priority is to consider inequalities as not just a matter of income and wealth, but also linked to gender, age, ethnicity and residence, since economic inequalities are increasingly intertwined with these factors. Furthermore, understanding the subjective and objective side of these inequalities enables us to study the link between inequalities and discrimination, and underlines the importance of how inequalities are perceived, by the individual and by society. The emphasis ought to be systematically put on the political dimensions of inequalities, where the “political” refers both to the impact of social inequalities on political preferences and behaviour, and to the actions taken to govern inequalities.
POLINE investigates the following objects:
More information regarding the network's activities is available on the POLINE website.
Desmond King and Patrick Le Galès want to explore new ways to conceptualise the state and to study in particular the importance of public policy to understand the state. The team plans to have meetings in Oxford and Paris for exchange. Le Galès organised a panel at the French political Science Association in Toulouse in September 2007 to review the current debates around the sociology of the state with Desmond King (Oxford), Jonah Levy (Berkeley), Stephan Leipfried (Bremen) and Pierre Birnbaum. King presented an important paper which has been widely discussed.
For the preparation of the future working plan of CEVIPOF, King was involved in reviewing the section on the state which is one the three priorities of the centre for the next four years.
In May 2008, King organised a high profile workshop at Nuffield College with Larry Jacobs on 'State and inequality in the US'. Le Galès gave a short presentation and was involved as a discussant. King’s seminar will be echoed in 2010 by a seminar on the state in Europe.
King and Le Galès plan to organise a conference on the European state in 2011.
This programme aims at analyzing the chronological dimension of daily life by using state of the art sequence analysis methods and by developing new tools to conduct inductive sequence analysis. Sequence analysis is a family of methods capable of describing and finding patterns in sequential data. The most popular method is Optimal Matching (OM), which was introduced and adapted to the social sciences in the 1990s. We plan to use sequence analysis to conduct a comparative analysis of British and France daily life rhythms. Man Yee Kan (St Hugh’s College, Department of Sociology) and Laurent Lesnard (OSC) have applied this method to the latest UK and French time use surveys to describe work patterns at the level of the day and week. The next step is to move from description to modelling. We plan first to develop methods to elaborate a small number of ideal-typical daily life sequences and to classify observed everyday activities according to this theoretically derived typology (an operation Lazarsfed called substruction). Second, we will use more conventional event history models to model patterns of daily life.
This programme is funded by a British Academy and CNRS agreement.