Contenu du sommaire : Regards croisés sur les élections

The return of the patrimonial effect ? Thirty years ago, the “patrimonial”, or “property-ownership”, effect discovered by Jacques Capdevielle and Élisabeth Dupoirier aroused the interest of political scientists in France and abroad in what was viewed as a heuristic subject. Since then, the “patrimonial” variable has been almost completely forgotten. Using 2007 French presidential election data, this article demonstrates that the presence of a patrimonial strategy remains a key factor in determining how the individual relates to politics and voting. Owning various kinds of property tends to blur the income-based distinction between “poor and wealthy” people and to neutralize the political norms embraced by the social, cultural or professional groups to which people belong. The patrimonial effect persists when the effects of other social variables are controlled for by logistic regressions.

“Mood”, a new tool for analysing public opinion dynamics and its application to xenophobic trends in France (1990–2009). This article serves two main objectives. Firstly, we present a statistical method designed to track long-term public opinion trends and cope with incomplete and irregular series breakdowns, an enduring problem in this field of research. This method, invented by James Stimson in the US, is widely associated with the concept of the “public policy mood”. Secondly, based on this method we have constructed a “tolerance-towards-immigration” mood index based on CNCDH (French National Consultative Commission on Human Rights) barometer survey and tried to track its development over time. It turns out that theFrench public grew increasingly tolerant towards immigrants during the period from 1990 to 2009, and that trend cannot be explained solely by generational renewal. We argue that prejudice levels now obey the thermostatic theory and vary according to the current administration's political leanings.

The miracle of the June 2009 Iranian presidential election. Structural rules under Iranian electoral law admit of arbitrary and fraudulent practices of all sorts. The mandatory screening of eligible candidates, the absence of signing sheets and the existence of a significant proportion of mobile polling stations figured were part of the electoral process practiced in all nine previous elections – as well as in that of June 2009. In the latter, the candidate who was declared the winner received both a portion of the votes from mobile polling stations and a large share of the votes cast for the candidates Karoubi and Rezai. Adding up the figures called into question by our analysis, it looks as though this election would, in a best-case scenario, have led to a run-off between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi.

A reconfiguration of local media and political spheres ? This article deals with relations between local authorities and the media, their structural changes after successive waves of decentralization, concentration processes and the ever-changing shapes of press groups. The empirical data used here comes from a PhD study of journalists in the regional daily press, and from a new survey on communication tools used by the major municipalities of the Loire-Atlantique and Vendée departments and on all the existing media in those towns. The analysis points up the diversification of the institutional communication mix, a trend towards normalization of local news content, and the simultaneous sealing-off and dualization of political and media spheres.

Joining with civil society against “Bolkestein” : the European Parliament yielded to a europeanized movement against services liberalization. This article explains how, despite a wide consensus on the need to liberalize services as the very cornerstone of the Lisbon Strategy, opponents succeeded in significantly diluting the deregulatory force of the draft EU Services Directive. A study of organized mobilization by left-wing political parties, trade unions and the alter-globalist Attac movement in three countries – Belgium, France and Germany – reveals institutional and discursive explanatory factors that were closely interrelated. The opponents succeeded in Europeanizing the conflict, and their strategic discourse invoking a social Europe, on the one hand, and stressing the close nexus between the citizenry and the European Parliament, on the other, largely determined the fate of the Bolkestein Directive, which ended in a parliamentary compromise.

A new paradigm shift in French political science ? In every social science, operative paradigms at any given time evolve ; some disappear, others gain and hold currency for a while. The paradigm configuration has already shifted several times in French political science. Nowadays we are seeing a new shift, determined by changes in scientific methods as well as social changes. Rational choice theory, hitherto generally out of favour in France, may well figure prominently in the next constellation of prevailing paradigms. The papers anthologized in the book Le choix rationnel en science politique, débats critiques [“Critical Debates on Rational Choice in Political Science”] specify the rationality content covered by the theory, its scope of validity and the analytical methods it employs.