Atelier PACTE-LET

Introduction

In this panel, we would like to examine the specific approaches and methods developed by French policy analysis understand the distance with Anglo-Saxon policy analysis and explain the difficulties for the two traditions to discuss together.

French policy analysis is influenced by the early policy analysis stream which was imported by some researchers. But, as any importation process, this transfer produced an hybrid result with the French dominant approaches. In 1970's, the debate in French social sciences is organised around the structuralist approach (with Pierre Bourdieu) and the individualist one (with Raymond Boudon). Questions about the State, institutions and the respective roles of structure and agents' will are some of the most important debates.

To understand the situation in political science, one must underline the role of Michel Crozier, who then develops an individualist sociology of organisations and disturbs the established positions. Crozier opens the black box of the State and showed the importance of participants Government, their strategy and their power conflicts. Most of French policy analysts have been influenced by this sociological approach including heirs of the Weberian tradition. Influenced by this approach but as a reaction to it, another part of the scientific community, more influenced by Gramsci and Foucault, developed a "cognitive" approach that endeavoured to connect strategic analysis and the role of actors with political regulation's specificities and the role of ideas. Bruno Jobert and Pierre Muller opened here a new way in 1987 with their book "The State in action" (L'État en action), which became prominent among policy analysts in the subsequent years

In this way, Policy Analysis in France does not need to "rediscover" institutions, because it has always nurtured a flourishing debate about them. Today, this debate has slightly evolved, towards a sociological approach of the actors who produce policy instruments on one hand,  an analysis of public policy in more structural terms (role of ideas, institutions, "heavy variables", etc.) in the other hand.

 This panel's papers may they be empiric or theoretical, try to highlight the specificities of French Approaches, and point out the difficulties to set up an international discussion. They also question the promise of the discursive/pragmatic approach to reconcile the French and the anglo-saxon traditions. 

A Narrative Policy Analysis of the Franco-German Reconciliation

The Franco-German Elysée Treaty (22.01.1963) created an organization that still exists today: the Franco-German Youth Office. Although the Office has been progressively marginalized, at one time it was a significant program. During the 1960's, it implemented a policy of mass youth exchange between the two countries. This policy is a reminder of the dream of European federalists to build a European "demos" through the socialization of a new generation. This paper relies on the so called "cognitive frames" in Policy Analysis to analyse the intellectual underpinnings of the Franco-German Youth Office program. I show that the actors agreed on a voluntarist policy narrative which forecasted the end of the old Franco-German antagonism after the development of such a mass youth exchange policy. I argue that this narrative was an ideology. It was not politically neutral. It was constructed by some political actors and served their interests. Yet, it succeeded in creating a new reality. It made sense for everybody, including the participants of the programme. The fact that this narrative succeeded in generating believes is not trivial. It allows us to understand how the Franco-German Youth Office spread political norms in its sphere of influence. I show that Paul Ricoeur's theory of "emplotment" is very useful to understand the process. As any other narrative, this one drew together disparate and somehow discordant elements - events (the Franco-German wars), characters (young people, the old generation), and actions (the meeting of young people) - into the concordant unity of a plot that has a temporal span. 

A Gramscian Way out of the Aporias of French Cognitive Approach to Policy Analysis

This contribution aims to present the ontological and epistemological aporias of the french cognitive approach to policy analysis (Jobert and Théret 1994; Muller 1994; 2000; 2005; Palier and Surel 2005). Our contention is that, despite undisputable achievements as an heuristic set of tools, this approach suffers fundamental shortcomings when scrutinized at an abstract level. Nevertheless, we think that it might be possible to overcome those hortcomings with the reactivation of the gramscian reference made by some of the tenants of the cognitive approach.

Then, our task is twofold. Firstly, we will sketch the ontological and epistemological problems raised by the cognitive approach. This will be done through the presentation and critique of the central concepts of one of its variants, Pierre Muller's Referential Approach. This will lead us to a close look at the aporias touching three fundamental points: First, the relation between representations of the Global. Referential and the Sectorial Referential. Then, the conception of the structure-agent relations. Finally, we'll analyse an issue that runs across all the approach: the conceptualisation of discourse and ideas. Secondly, we will try to build an inner way out of those aporias by strengthening and deepening the gramscian reference of the cognitive approach. This will be done by taking Cultural Political Economy

(Jessop 2004) and Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 2003) as examples of more integrated approaches. We will then review the contribution those approaches could make to the solution of the aporias we exposed in the first part of the contribution.

Public policy analysis and Discourse: the Missing Link.

The role of discourse in policy research has attracted increasing attention over the last decade or so, coming from two different directions: on the one hand there are the scholars in public policy who have started to get intrigued about what they call the "ideational", "cognitive" or "ideological" aspects of policy, also referred to as "values" or "référentiels" (P. Muller). On the other hand, discourse analysts have become more and more interested in policy issues.  Although both approaches have produced valuable insights into the role of discourse in public policy, there remain gaps in-between these two approaches, which in fact hardly ever really communicate.

In this paper, I will take the case of French Policy Analysis as a paradigmatic example of such a missing link between Discourse and Public Policy analysis. Whereas discourse analysts hardly engage with the notion of public policy, policy analysts tend to have a rather vague and under-problematised notion of "discourse" (or their more or less conceptual equivalents). As a result, discourse as a constitutive dimension of public policy is under-conceptualised. Therefore, as the case of the French policy analysis wil illustrate, it remains difficult to assess the precise role of discursive dimension in the continuity and change of public policies over time, and to explain variations and similarities among policies across contexts.

Post Foucaldian analysis and the New Theory of Discourse could help us to progress towards a discursive public policy analysis. More than any other discourse-analytical strand, it focuses on the conditions of possibility of discourses in time and space and insists on the importance of inter-discursive structure of power, namely through the concept of articulation and rearticulation. Moreover, it is grounded on a pragmatic definition of discourse that allows for a study of discourse as social action. Among "cognitive approach", the french "referentiel" approach may be considered as the most promising premise. The last part of the paper will reconsider the "referentiel" concept in such a perspective.