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This article seeks to understand how the “welfare elite“ have governed the French health insurance system, gradually becoming the custodians of such policies over time. It sheds light on the institutionalization of the health insurance system, based on the creation of new agencies allowing for the circulation of its members within an “iron triangle“. This process explains why neither the dual supervision of the Directorate of social security as of 2007, nor the subsequent events of 2008 financial crisis, did not call into question the capacity of this elite for acting autonomously. These social managers, whose profile and trajectories are analyzed for the period 2007-2020 on the basis of an empirical survey using a programmatic action framework, were able to resist the senior civil servants in Bercy with regard to health insurance expenditure control, while also expanding health insurance coverage.

Existing research on the French grands corps de l'État (the major State institutions and administrative bodies) has so far focused on the circulation of their members — their spinning off or “swarming“ between agencies — or, on the contrary, their entrenchment within the administrative, political, and economic elite. In contrast to this approach, this article analyzes the work carried out within the Conseil d'État (Council of State), the Cour des comptes (Court of Auditors), and the Inspection générale des finances (General Inspectorate of Finance). It shows that these three administrative grands corps have revamped their institutional mission since the 1970s. It elaborates a framework to account for the internal working methods of the grands corps and then explains how that work was recontextualized by renewed professional competition within the French State and emergence of new social demands for expertise. Finally, it studies how the grands corps have reconciled new institutional imperatives with their existing corporative logic.

This research examines the collective mobilization that occurred after a stray cat was discovered dead and mutilated in Draguignan (Var), leading to the creation of several Facebook groups, as well as a petition on Change.org. It sheds light on the emotional drivers of collective action, in the context of changing attitudes towards animal rights and with a focus on the digital dynamics of the mobilization. It shows the circulation of affects, as well as the investigative labor carried out by the participants. It also describes the skills developed by the movement's leaders in order to lead and moderate online interactions, as well as the active role played by the Change.org platform. Finally, this article highlights the uncertain boundaries of an instance of collective action based on moral outrage mediated by online platforms, which are prone to forms of punitive denunciation.

Why is it that participatory mechanisms, no matter how sophisticated, seem unable to truly influence public action ? By analyzing how pilot attempts at State participation in France have been institutionalized since the 1990s, this article sheds light on the institutional power struggles that have governed the participation of citizens. These struggles have increasingly neutralized the power that participatory mechanisms could potentially exert with regard to the administration and the executive branch. Understanding the organizational policies that structure the very existence of these mechanisms will enhance our comprehension of the political use of democratic innovations.