Past OXPO Projects

To find out about the output and publications of past research projects, please consult the publication page as well as the 3 year report

Citizens Talking about Europe. French, British and Belgian Citizens in Political Discussion

Sophie Duchesne, Liz Frazer, André-Paul Frognier and Florence Haegel

Engagement in political discussion is now seen as a crucial element of political engagement and a condition of meaningful citizen participation. But it must be recognised that when a discussion turns 'political' citizens are taking risks - of entering into conflict, of disclosing aspects of identity and belief which open up difference from others, and of engaging emotion in a way that makes one vulnerable in social settings. Focus groups in Oxford, Paris and Brussels were conducted in the period 2005-2006. The work builds on advanced techniques of focus group conduct and data analysis developed by Duchesne and colleagues at CEVIPOF, Paris. Funding for the project is held jointly by CEVIPOF, Paris; Unité de science politique et de relations internationales, University of Louvain; and the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford.

For further details about this project, please click here.

Comparative Analysis of Elites

Jean-Pascal Daloz and Sudhir Hazareesingh

This project is designed as an interdisciplinary initiative. From a Political Science perspective, it concentrates on the comparative analysis of political representatives within European democracies, and particularly on the symbolic dimension of their role. In a more sociological vein, the programme also sets out to stimulate comparative studies of Elite Distinction, and encourages the participation of historians and anthropologists who can bring important temporal and cultural perspectives on the issues at stake.

A series of conferences and seminars have been organised over the last few years and most of them are to be published:

A symposium on ‘Elite Symbolic Superiority: Multi-Disciplinary Perspectives’ was held on 16 October 2008. Some historians, political scientists, anthropologists and sociologists from the UK, the USA, Norway and France met with their counterparts from the University of Oxford, and with three other academics from Scandinavia and the US. The aim of the workshop, organised in collaboration with Muriel Le Roux (CNRS/MFO), was to compare and contrast research on various types of elites (political, economic, scientific, artistic etc). The symposium proceedings are almost ready for publication. They will come out as a special issue of the bilingual journal Historical Reflections/Réflexions historiques (guest editor: Jean-Pascal Daloz), Fall 2010.

A symposium (convened by Tak Wing Chan, New College, and Jean-Pascal Daloz, MFO) on ‘Social Distinction: Comparative Studies’ was held on 5 December 2008, with leading specialists from France, Britain and other European countries. Papers on the UK, Russia, China, South Africa, Nepal and Mauritius were discussed. The proceedings of the conference and a few more papers received later have been sent for production to Brill Publishers. They will come out in a special issue of Comparative Sociology (guest editor: Jean-Pascal Daloz), 2010.

On 4 March 2009, Heinrich Best (Friedrich Schiller University, Jena) gave a lecture on ‘Europe’s Political and Economic Elites: What can we say about their Europeanness?’. He presented the main results of a major quantitative research sponsored by the E.U. Commission and was discussed by Kalypso Nicolaïdis.

On 20 May 2009, a workshop about ‘Current Research on Elites’ gave an opportunity for the PhD students (in Sociology or Political Science) of the MFO to present their research, which were discussed by John Higley (University of Texas at Austin and Chair of the RC on Political Elites of the International Political Science Association). John Higley also delivered a speech on ‘Problems in Elite Theory and Analysis’.

On Thursday 4 and Friday 5 June 2009, an international conference organized by Jean-Pascal Daloz (CNRS Fellow, Maison Française) and Sudhir Hazareesingh (Balliol) on ‘The study of political rituals’ was held at the Maison Française and DPIR. It explored what this scholarship has contributed to our understanding of the political, most notably the power, authority, and cohesiveness of the state; the unity and lines of fracture within society; and the role of myth and memory in the construction of nationhood. Among the participants: Pierre-Yves Baudot (Nanterre), Luc Borot (Maison Française); Jeroen Duindam (Groningen); Denis Fleurdoge (Montpellier); François Foret (ULB Brussels); Emmanuel Fureix (Paris-XII); Antoine Mandret-Degueilh (IEP Paris); Marc Stears (Oxford); Marine Roussillon (Paris-III); and Harald Wydra (Cambridge). Revised versions of most of the papers presented at the conference have been sent to International Political Anthropology and the Journal of Power and are being reviewed.

A workshop on ‘The Distinction of Elites: Case studies’ was held at the Maison Française on 21 January 2010 within the framework of our research programme on elites: We had five presentations including one by Jean-Pascal Daloz and one by Simon Paye (MFO/Sociology).

A Conference on 'Dealing with Religious Dissension: Historical and contemporary models' (convenors: Luc Borot & Jean-Pascal Daloz) took place on 28-29 May 2010. The programme and podcasts can be accessed here.

The Dualisation of European Societies

Bruno Palier (CEVIPOF) and Martin Seeleib-Kaiser (Department of Social Policy and Social Work)

As a reaction to economic pressure for more flexibility and the necessity to create jobs for low-skilled workers, some European countries have chosen a dualisation strategy. Dualisation is the result of the tension between the need of the economy for more labour market flexibility and the bargaining power of labour market insiders, welfare state constituencies and their representatives. Not able to impose encompassing reforms, labour market and welfare state reforms in these countries often target the margins of the society. They increase the flexibility of the labour market by allowing more atypical and non-standard employment relationships such as fixed-term contracts as well as part-time work. At the same time, reforms of the welfare state have decreased the level of social protection for labour market participants in precarious employment. In these countries, the social protection for the long-term unemployed has often been decreased. Moreover, the unemployed are increasingly forced to take a job quickly, even if it is not as good as the previous one. As a result, the unemployed often end up in precarious employment.

This project aims at gathering several comparative papers in order to better understand the processes of dualisation, i.e. the deepening, widening and transformation of social dualisms through various policies. After a first seminar held in Oxford in April 2009 where the overall project was discussed and first draft of papers presented, a second seminar, held in Oxford in January 2010, discussed the final versions of the book chapters. This seminar was supported by the University of Oxford, the European Network Recwowe and OXPO. The revised papers were redrafted on the basis of general comments sent in advance and the circulation of a background paper giving overall orientation to all contribution. During the seminar, papers were presented and discussed by external discussants, specially invited to do so.

This project will now enter its final phase and a book proposal will be sent to a high-level publishing house. In June, authors will gather again during the Recwowe integration week to be held in Nantes, in order to discuss the final amendments to the papers. The final manuscript will be prepared for October 2010.

Echoes of Imperialism

Kalypso Nicolaïdis and Berny Sèbe (Maison Française)

The project "Echoes of Colonialisms" drew on the successful inter-disciplinary workshop Echoes of imperialisms, re-thinking European colonialisms organised jointly by Oxford University’s Modern History Faculty, the European Studies Centre, and the Maison Française d’Oxford. It was designed to bridge the gap between historians of the colonial fact, who do not traditionally explore the present implications of their findings, and political scientists, who hardly ever satisfactorily integrate the colonial past in their understanding of current international relations. It also brought together different areas in imperial studies which have tended to develop in isolation whether in history departments or ‘area studies’.

The European Union in International Security

Christopher Bickerton and Bastien Irondelle

A conference was organised in February on the European Union in international security, focusing in particular on its security and defence policy (ESDP). The conference brought together scholars from the UK, continental Europe and North America, with different theoretical perspectives, from institutionalist and network-based analyses through to constructivist, Foucauldian and social theoretical approaches. The conference explored the many ways in which we can make sense of the EU’s security and defence role. It will be published in a special issue of the Journal of Common Market Studies (JCMS) in 2011.

As a follow up to the JCMS special issue project, we propose to organize a roundtable discussion at the International Studies Association conference, ISA, in Montreal in March 16-19, 2011. Participants will be asked to respond to the issues raised by the JCMS issue which should have been published by then. A transcript of this roundtable will be proposed to JCMS as a follow-up article to be published in a later issue in the journal. Participants will be experts in European and international security.

Europe's Muslim Neighbourhoods

Kalypso Nicolaïdis, Kerem Öktem and Sonia Tebbakh

The research project aims to examine the conflicts associated with Islam and Muslims as significant ‘others’ in the internal politics of European countries and in their relations with Muslim majority countries, especially since 9/11. It attempts to address the rather unsatisfying state of debate by generating cross-cutting and comparative research on three EU members with a high level of variance in policy responses and with sizable immigrants’ communities of Muslim background: Germany, UK and France. The research agenda is based on the interrelated questions of the interaction of Muslim minorities and foreign policy choice, the construction of a Muslim identity in European debates and their representation in the public sphere.

A conference “Mutual Misunderstandings: Muslims and Islam in the European media, Europe in the media of Muslim majority countries” was held in May 2007. The conference papers were published in an edited volume funded by a grant from the Gerda Henkel Foundation to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.

Extra European Contributions to the Making of the Modern Political World.

Romain Bertrand and John Darwin (Nuffield college)

This program aims to set up a conference or series of joint research seminars between CERI and Oxonian colleagues, in collaboration with J.F. Bayart (CERI) and Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau (who is setting up a new master course in Global History at Sciences Po, starting next year). The idea so far is that we should focus this series of workshops on the issue of “Extra-European Contributions to the Making of the Modern World”. This would allow us to cope both with the ongoing renewal of World History and with the comparative dimension we’d like to stick to in order to work with colleagues coming from different “area studies” backgrounds (Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, African Studies, etc). The series could be either co-organized with the Yale Comparative Research Center, Columbia and the New School, or remain “UK-focused” with people from Oxford, Cambridge, the LSE and SOAS taking the lead.

The French-British Foreign Policy Observatory

Karoline Postel-Vinay, CERI, and Kalypso Nicolaidis, Oxford European Studies Centre

The conference 'Constructive Mésentente: Franco-British Views on Europe’s Global Role', scheduled at Oxford on 12-13 May 2006 was the first event of this Observatory.

The Labour Market Integration of Immigrants in the UK and France: A Longitudinal Approach

Christel Kesler (Nuffield College) and Mirna Safi (OSC)

This project compares immigrant/native-born inequalities in the labour markets of Britain and France. We take advantage of increasingly harmonised Labour Force Surveys that can be used to analyse not only cross-sectional inequalities, but also dynamics of inequality over time using the panel structure of the data. The two countries present particularly good cases for comparison, because they are the two largest post-colonial countries, yet have adopted divergent "philosophies of integration" (Favell 1998), and, perhaps more importantly given our focus on the labour market, they also have very different welfare state and labour market institutions. Political debates surrounding "integration" rest on still far too little empirical evidence, particularly of a comparative nature, as we pursue in this project.

We envision two papers growing out of our collaborative work. The first, currently underway, is primarily descriptive and cross-sectional. Using Labour Force Surveys compiled from 1992 onwards, we will illustrate cross-national differences in immigrant/native-born inequality with respect to labour force participation, unemployment, wage quintiles, and contract type. The advantage of having data from a number of years is that we compile enough cases to look at a range of immigrants by detailed countries or regions of origin. With less detail in origins, we can also look at trends over time in the size of various inequalities. The second paper will exploit more fully the panel structure of the data. We can construct one-year panels (i.e., with two observations) for both countries for the entire period and 5-quarter panels for a more limited time frame of recent years. Our focus here will be shifts into and out of employment states (employment, unemployment, inactivity), and how these dynamics vary across the two countries and between immigrant and native-born workers.

Legislatures in Europe

Olivier Rozenberg and Katrin Auel

This project aims at developing collaborative research between Oxford and Sciences Po in the field of legislative studies. After decades of leading a life in the shadow, legislative studies have regained academic attention in recent years. The neo institutionalist turn in comparative politics, in particular, has provided researchers with a number of new approaches for the study of legislatures and stimulated new cross-national research. Yet, despite this renewed interest in parliaments, scholars remain concerned about the ‘decline of legislatures’ (Bryce 1921) and the ‘de-parliamentarisation’ of politics. Parliaments are believed to be increasingly marginalized both through domestic and European/international developments, resulting in a serious expectation-capability gap. While parliaments are still considered by the public to be the main democratic bodies to legitimise political authority and legislation, they appear to be increasingly ill-equipped to meet public demands and expectations. Therefore, parliaments and assemblies are not only an interesting object of study per se, but also important for our understanding of contemporary challenges to democratic politics within nation states. In that perspective, the project will focus on three aspects for future collaboration. The project will raise three main questions: How do members of national parliaments adapt to the challenges of European integration? How can we evaluate, ‘behind closed doors’, the real parliamentary influence within domestic politics? Methodologically, how can we mix rational choice institutionalism and agency theory on one hand, with other innovative theoretical approaches such as sociological institutionalism, based on parliamentary culture or parliamentary roles, and path dependent historical development (historical institutionalism)?

A large part of our activities has been devoted to preparing an international conference on ‘Europeanisation of Parliamentary Behaviour’, that will be held in Oxford on 21/22 July 2009 with leading scholars on the topic of the role of national legislatures in European governance (Catriona Carter, University of Edinburgh; Enikö Györi, University of Budapest; Hans Hegeland, Swedish Parliament; Ron Holzhacker, University of Twente; Philipp Kiiver, University of Maastricht; Tapio Raunio, University of Tampere; Carina Sprungk, Harvard University; Paul Stephenson, University of Maastricht). The purpose of the conference is to develop a new research perspective on the European activities of national legislatures by focussing less on institutional aspects and more on the actual behaviour of backbenchers. In our view, the almost exclusive focus in the literature on the institutional adaptation to the process of European integration and, in particular, on formal rights of influence, has led to an incomplete account of parliamentary involvement in EU affairs: On the one hand, formal capabilities do not necessarily equal actual parliamentary behaviour. One the other hand, this perspective tends to ignore other important parliamentary functions such as public debate and holding the government to account. Our understanding of the role of national parliaments in the EU will therefore greatly benefit from the study of parliamentary behaviour because it will enable us to gain a more comprehensive picture of parliamentary involvement in EU politics. The conference, for which we have secured financial support from Mansfield College and the Department of Politics and International Relations, will discuss this new research agenda and present research addressing both new empirical questions on and theoretical approaches to the study of legislative behaviour in EU affairs.

In addition, a conference on Parliamentary violence was organised in Paris in January 2009 in relation with the standing group on legislatures of the French Political Science Association. Jean-Pascal Daloz, from the Maison Française d’Oxford, was invited as a discussant on that occasion.

In July 2009, an international conference on the Europeanization of parliamentary behaviour was organized in Oxford with leading European specialists of the question. The conference constituted an important step towards the establishment of an international research network and in the promotion of a new approach within this field of research.

For more information about this project, please click here. pdf

Memory and Democracy in Europe

Marie-Claire Lavabre, Maison Française and Robert Gildea

Research on collective and political memory has improved very much in social sciences. At the same time, the analysis of memory related questions has become more internationalized or at least less related to specific territories or areas. The political management of images and the interpretation of the past (Nazi, colonial, dictatorial or communist) will be investigated, in relation to democratic concerns and European integration above national identities. Theoretical traditions, social memories, temporalities and histories however are staggered. This project aims to inquire into the question of collective memory in Europe from three main perspectives: the lieux de mémoire, first developed in France but now extensively exported; the travail de mémoire and the cadres de la mémoire, with a specific focus on the policies of memory and their possible effects on shared recollections of the past.

The project is supported by some networks or research groups:
RAMSES network, the network linked to the seminar Histoire et sociologie de la mémoire (Laval/EHESS/Centre d’études européenne de Sciences-Po, with Philippe Joutard, Bogumil Koss and Marie-Claire Lavabre), and the doctoral and post-doctoral students of the research group on the sociology of collective memory (CEVIPOF/IHTP, Marie-Claire Lavabre and Henry Rousso).

The French Institutes gathered in a conference in December 2007, where MC.Lavabre gave a speech on “Presence of the past. Memory and societies in the contemporary world”. This was published in the journal “Transversales”. She wrote a chapter for a volume edited by K.Nicolaidis,– Peut-on agir sur la mémoire en méditerranée? - on the Algerian case. Lastly, a chapter Historiography and memory is forthwoming (in Avi Tucker Historiography and Philosophy Compagnion. Blackwell).

A seminar, "Memory in the UK: the state of the art", is planned for April 2010. The seminar aims to identify the specificity of different cases (France, Germany, Italy, Spain, UK, Poland, Bulgaria etc). The different disciplines and approaches which contributed to raise the question of memory will be investigated (oral history, history workshops, sociology etc...) in order to establish a chronology of the research on memory in each country, and to identify issues at stake in the questions related to collective memory as well as its audience. The seminar pays attention to the comparison between the different cases and will be open to specialists on memory and to doctoral students.

Policy Instruments, Instrumentation and Policy Changes

Pierre Lascoumes and Patrick Le Galès, with Christopher Hood and Des King

The question of policy instruments offers a unique perspective for thinking about and comparing changes in public politics. Our perspective does not define or describe public policies only by their objectives. The “policy process” is not just about problem solving or attempts to answer the initial question from start to finish. Public policies are defined as the implementation of an ensemble of solutions ready to serve to solve problems that political life identifies, for its own reasons, as public problems. One could approach the analysis of public policies and of its transformations by the instruments as much as by the problems. This project brings together British and French researchers to work on two hypotheses:

• policy instruments define it just as much as its objectives and constitute modes of government or forms of the exercise of power;
• the tools put into action produce specific effects, independent from the goals pursued, which shape public policies and its consequences.

A first working session took place in March 2003, in Oxford, on policy instruments. The papers will be published in an issue of the journal Governance in 2006, with articles by C. Hood, D. King, P. Le Gales, P. Lascoumes and others (issue accepted). To see a list of the papers to be published in Governance, please click here.

A second conference took place on 20-21 December 2003 with the same researchers (amongst others) on the subject of Instruments d'Action Publique et Technologies de Gouvernement. Further publications are planned.

A new phase of the research will soon begin on the Europeanization of the instruments of public policy. The research will be comparative (France, UK, Italy and Finland). Funding for this phase comes from the NewGov (New Modes of Governance) programme.

 

Rethinking Europe in a Non-European World (RENEW)

Franziska Brantner, Andrew Hurrell, Hartmut Mayer, Kalypso Nicolaïdis, Karoline Postel-Vinay

Oxford University's new research project "Rethinking Europe in a Non- European world" (RENEW) seeks to overcome the Euro-centric focus of the study of European built issues in world politics. It brings together the expertise around the university and in its wider network of collaborators to address these questions from a critical historical, legal, and strategic viewpoint. It focuses in particular on how non-European actors, including in its borderlands, perceive Europe's global status and make sense of its attempts to diffuse its norms. A workshop "Europe in a Non-European World: The Parameters of the Debate" was held on February 8/9 at Nuffield College and European Studies Centre, convened by Franziska Brantner, Kalypso Nicolaïdis and Andrew Hurrell (with Karoline Postel-Vinay and Zaki Laidi). This workshop's objective was to map the challenges and set the parameters of the debate.

A second RENEW workshop is planned. It will elaborate and fine-tune our approach to de-centering the analysis of Europe's role in the world, which is at the heart of RENEW. The workshop will also serve for discussions of project themes. Furthermore, several public events are planned for 2007/08, ranging from a conference on “Europeanizing the Past? - Echoes of European colonialisms” (together with the Modern History Faculty) to a discussion of Europe’s neighbourhood policies as perceived from the outside (together with RAMSES).

Sociological and Political Foundations of National Identity: Great Britain from a Comparative Perspective

Sophie Duchesne and Anthony Heath

In recent decades, numerous and important research projects have been dedicated to the study of national identity and nationalism. Most of these works agree on the very modernity of nations, that is, on their artificial, historical and partially arbitrary character (Adam Smith’s being the most important exception). The process of identification with one’s nation is part of a process of delimitation of one's own group and exclusion of others. The affinity between nationalism and xenophobia is an argument for that. But identifying with the nation is also an inclusive process, because it refers to the kind of solidarity with one’s fellow countrymen that is evoked by national feelings and guarantees a kind of civic inclusion necessary to democracy. In the current context of growing mobility and globalisation, feeling strongly attached to one’s nation is a motive for people to vote and commit themselves to civic life. Furthermore, the nation being a remote and abstract political community, but now so familiar that most people believe it to be natural, it is also the framework of learning a kind of abstract bond that is more and more necessary, as the process of territorial or continental integration goes on. No other territory or group seems to have yet emerged, which is capable of focusing the views that the citizens have of themselves, as inclusively and cohesively as the nation does.

Recent research on the development of European identity has provided some evidence in support of the heuristic distinction between these two dimensions of territorial identification, the exclusive and the cumulative ones, by showing how European identity grows along with national identities rather than against them in most continental European countries. Here, the nation seems to be the matrix of most feeling of belonging and solidarity. Qualitative research conducted in France showed that this cumulative effect of national identification is due to its territorial nature, namely, to the way the link between fellow countrymen is imagined through a common possession of the national soil. But the British way of identifying with the nation seems quite different. Many books have been published in the last couple of decades about Britishness, but they are mainly based on historical research or theoretical thinking. More empirical and sociological work is in progress, but mainly quantitative, at least for the English.

Hence, this project aims at analysing in detail the meaning of British identity for the English, from a comparative point of view, referring to the previous French qualitative study. Empirically, it will explore the diverse ways English people of different origins and different social and geographical backgrounds imagine the British nation. The emphasis will be put on the tensions and contradictions that come across in individual feelings. All efforts will be made to encompass all possible aspects of the imagined community, and to link the interrogation to the changing context of Britain, namely devolution, European integration, immigration. Theoretically, it will aim to better understand the dynamics of the different dimensions, exclusive, cohesive and cumulative, of national identification.

An article outlining the concept of national identity used in the research has been published in Immigrants and Minorities 2003 (Vol. 22/2&3).

As part of this project, a workshop on National Identity and Euroscepticism: A Comparison Between France and the United Kingdom took place on Friday 13 May 2005. This was organised by Sophie Duchesne and Julian Mischi, on behalf of Maison Française d'Oxford; European Studies Centre, St Antony's College; and Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford. For further details of the workshop and papers presented, please click here.

On 13 January, the presentation of Christophe Jaffrelot and Alain Dieckhoff’s new edited volume on French trends of research on nationalism, “Revisiting Nationalism” took place.

“The State and Ethnic Definition: Lessons from Nigeria and Beyond," a conference convened by Kathryn Nwajiaku on 11 February 2006 with the support of the ERG. For further details about the conference and the papers presented, please click here.

“Middle East and North African Immigration in Europe”. This conference will be held on 6 May 2006, organised by Ahmed Al Shahi and Richard Lawless, in collaboration with Sonia Tebbakh (ERG Lavoisier post-doctoral fellow) at the Maison Française. More information will be posted shortly.