Sciences Po Grenoble

International audience

During recent years, empirical trust research has significantly advanced our understanding about the interdependencies of social and political trust. This progress can mostly be attributed to major improvements of measurement instruments in survey research. Research on the causes of both forms of trust have examined the top-down approach of trust building, which places importance on fair and impartial political institutions, such as the police and judiciary, as well as societal accounts of trust building that relate to the role of social networks and parents as well as perceptions of inequality. While there is a modest relationship between social forms of trust and political forms of trust, research has not entirely disentangled the flow of causality between the two. Recent insights into contextual and individual-level covariates of social and political trust may hold answers regarding future developments and political and societal consequences.

In response to policy-makers’ increasing claims to prioritise ‘people’ in smart city development, we explore the publicness of emerging practices across six UK cities: Bristol, Glasgow, London, Manchester, Milton Keynes, and Peterborough. Local smart city programmes are analysed as techno-public assemblages invoking variegated modalities of publicness. Our findings challenge the dystopian speculative critiques of the smart city, while nevertheless indicating the dominance of ‘entrepreneurial’ and ‘service user’ modes of the public. We highlight the risk of bifurcation within smart city assemblages, such that the ‘civic’ and ‘political’ roles of the public become siloed into less obdurate strands of programmatic activity.

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Abstract At the beginning of the 1990s a new discourse emerged at the European Union level, insisting on the necessity of ‘civil society’ participation in decision‐making processes. Based on a ‘strategic‐constructivist’ research design, this article addresses the question of the emergence of this participatory turn in the official discourse and its transformation into a norm. It argues that the continued activism of an elite forum, consisting of political and administrative actors as well as academics, created the momentum that brought the concerned actors to accept the participatory norm and to play the roles required by it. However, due to internal competition amongst norm entrepreneurs, and a changed political situation, this norm is still contested, making it difficult to assess how its implementation will function.

International audience

International audience

In claiming that ‘Mutual trust lies at the heart of all political processes’, the political philosopher John Dunn (1993: 641) reasserts a theme going back at least to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, and coming from them to us through the writings of de Tocqueville, Simmel, Tönnies, Durkheim, Weber, Parsons, Coleman, and Luhmann.1 In recent years, the theme has been reformulated in a powerful form by writers of the social capital school. According to them, social trust is the central element in a complex virtuous circle in which a set of attitudes, such as mutuality, reciprocity, and trust, are associated with social participation and engagement in community and civic affairs; these help to build the social and political institutions necessary for democratic and efficient governments; in turn, these create the conditions in which social and political trust can flourish. At the individual level, trust is the cornerstone ‘habit of the heart’, which is associated with a climate of social trust that enables citizens to cooperate with each other, build a common identity, and pursue common goals. At the structural level, effective community organisations, especially voluntary associations, are an essential part of the social framework necessary to build the social, economic, and political institutions of modern democratic society.

Abstract The multi-faceted concept of proximity is often used nowadays in many theoretical and empirical analyses. It mainly originates in some French regional scientists' attempt, in the early 1990s, to develop new conceptual and methodological avenues with a view to the study of the industrial and spatial dynamics. The wide diffusion of the resulting research findings is explained by the fact that these scholars realized early on that it was in their interest to collectively structure their works through the setting-up of a research group. The present paper sets out to outline the scientific and institutional trajectories of the French group “Proximity Dynamics”, while underlining the progressive broadening of its scientific and institutional dimensions, as well as the main theoretical research fields these trajectories have permitted to investigate.

This article suggests some tools for the analysis of social conceptions that shape the policy-making process. It defines the three dimensions of policy frameworks and their links with the related notions of paradigm and myth. It analyses the institutionalization of policy framework building and its impact on power relations within the French policy-making process.

The purpose of this article is to compare the core ideological beliefs of the Flemish Vlaams Blok and the French Front National. The analysis focuses on these parties' attitudes towards humanity, the world and the relationship between the individual and society. The 'de-construction' of the far right 'new society' utopia in both countries shows important similarities, although some aspects remain contingent on national contexts and historical circumstances. In spite of the VB and FN's alleged commitment to representative democracy, our analysis illustrates a set of ethnocentrist, authoritarian and anti-egalitarian values underpinning an essentially non-democratic ideology.

International audience

As a large-scale instance of dramatic collective behaviour, the 2005 French riots started in a poor suburb of Paris, then spread in all of France, lasting about three weeks. Remarkably, although there were no displacements of rioters, the riot activity did travel. Access to daily national police data has allowed us to explore the dynamics of riot propagation. Here we show that an epidemic-like model, with just a few parameters and a single sociological variable characterizing neighbourhood deprivation, accounts quantitatively for the full spatio-temporal dynamics of the riots. This is the first time that such data-driven modelling involving contagion both within and between cities (through geographic proximity or media) at the scale of a country, and on a daily basis, is performed. Moreover, we give a precise mathematical characterization to the expression "wave of riots", and provide a visualization of the propagation around Paris, exhibiting the wave in a way not described before. The remarkable agreement between model and data demonstrates that geographic proximity played a major role in the propagation, even though information was readily available everywhere through media. Finally, we argue that our approach gives a general framework for the modelling of the dynamics of spontaneous collective uprisings.

International audience

A key factor in modern democracies’ legitimisation is the extent to which policies submitted for public approval before an election translate into material outcomes once a political party has won power. Current research finds no clear empirical evidence for partisanship in policy-making nor has any unified theory been offered or tested systematically. This article addresses that gap by offering a conditional approach to policy-making undertaken by parties in government. It suggests that partisan influence on policy depends on both office-holders’ capacity for implementing policies evoked during their electoral campaigns and on governing parties’ incentives to implement electoral promises. Data from French Agendas Project datasets is used to compare the contents of governing parties’ pre-election manifestos with legislation passed in France between 1981 and 2012. Panel negative binomial regressions on electoral and legislative agendas support the expected outcome, namely that issues featuring in governing parties’ electoral manifesto have had an impact on their subsequent legislative agendas, with the effect depending on both partisan capacities and incentives. Party programmes do matter in policy-making, albeit only under certain conditions.

ABSTRACT Gerontocracy, in its narrowest sense, refers to political systems ruled by elderly people, whether de jure or de facto. Although formal gerontocratic rules are progressively disappearing, contemporary political systems are still governed by individuals who are significantly older than the mean voter. This article reviews existing explanations for the prevalence of gerontocracy. To summarize main findings, gerontocracy cannot be explained by the leadership qualities of older rulers: aging leaders do not perform better in office and voters seem to be aware of it. Instead, existing research suggests that gerontocracy can be explained by strategic considerations. In autocracies, the selectorate tends to choose aging leaders in order to reduce their expected tenure length. In democracies, voters are more likely to select experienced candidates, which they expect to be more effective at advancing the interests of their constituency: this premium put on experience mechanically lengthens political careers and increases the age of the average politician. Finally, older voters, which participate more in politics, tend to prefer older politicians, because they (correctly) expect them to better defend their own interests.

The European Union's attempts to improve its democratic character increasingly often lead to debates about how to include civil society organizations in its decision-making processes. However, this interpretation of participatory democracy seems at odds with democratic traditions in a number of member states. Among those, France is said to be at the diametrically opposite end of the EU democratization debate spectrum. French democratic thought is based on government through electoral representation. The aim of this article is to analyze both theoretically and empirically the discourse and participatory processes in both the EU and France. While normative approaches to democratic patterns in the EU and French political debate show important differences, empirical evidence suggests that the misfit between the European and French conception of democracy is less developed than one might believe.

The aim of this article is to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of Europeanisation studies when used to study periods of crisis. The conceptual consensus surrounding the definition of ‘Europeanisation', understood as the impact of European integration at the domestic level (the so-called ‘top-down approach’), is put under pressure in a crisis situation, where the salience of an issue increases and leads to high politicisation and resistances at the domestic level. These resistances trigger the political adjustments at the European Union (EU) level. The article will illustrate these difficulties in analysing the impact of the EU's new economic governance instruments: the implementation of these instruments has led to opposition at the domestic level, which then immediately influences policy frames at the EU level. Based on the concepts of ‘timing’ and ‘politicisation', this article will develop a model that enlarges the top-down Europeanisation concept in order to account for crucial feedback loops that occur in situations of crisis.

How can an international organization be made adaptable? Having been designed to fulfil a specific mandate, international organizations should disappear from the world stage once .the initial conditions that led to their establishment no longer exist: their constituents (governments or activists) will not support them when their mandate becomes obsolete or their added value is reduced. Nonetheless, they survive external shocks, resource traps, and even the growing indifference of their founding fathers. The explanation lies in their successful resistance to constituents’ control; counter-intuitive adaptation to external change; unplanned expansion through mandate enlargement; and a snowballing albeit unintentional trend to build up networks. Overall, the relative success of international organizations can be measured as a global balance between performance and resilience, exploitation and exploration, autonomy and cooperation. To reach that balanced stage they must be altogether dualistic (coupling the technical with the political); adaptive (converting slack into innovation); organic and ambidextrous (setting new challenges while pursuing current activity). Since they combine components that come from local, national, regional and transnational recipes for survival and performance, they are complex hybrids made up of public agencies, private firms, third sector associations, and expert, activist, or lobbying interest groups.

Abstract Over the past twenty years in France, the politique de la ville (a public policy initiative targeting impoverished urban areas) has constituted one of the main sources of renewal of the discourse concerning social participation. This article looks at whether it has led to a genuine democratisation of policy making. The following four questions are discussed: Have participatory procedures improved the efficiency of public policy? Have they fostered the strengthening of the social bond? Has setting up new procedures improved deliberation between political and nonpolitical actors? And has this new policy generated a renewal of local elites and modified the decision-making process? The authors conclude that these different attempts have had only a very limited impact.