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This article presents the results of two studies on social policy concerning the aged people, the handicapped adults and the children having mental disorders or deficiency. During this twenty years period, the official policy has apparently changed. The social services were invited to maintain these peoples in their ordinary background (family) and to avoid more seggregative solutions. On another part the public authorities seemed to impose them an effort for managing an efficient use of their ressources. But reality is sometimes far from these ambitious objectives.

There is today a renewal in the study of Public Administration in Political Science. This is on two levels : the analysis of the State and that of Public Policy. Such a change in perspective, aiming as it does to develop the study of administration from its currently too specific position, is accompanied by a heightened interest in comparative analysis. Indeed, the crisis affecting all industrialised countries necessitates comparison as a mean of evaluating both the impact of the crisis and the capacity of each state to react. The development in comparative studies has meant that various methodological questions must be asked, both in the definition of the object under analysis and in the approach and modes of reasoning to be adopterd. According to the author, an examination of these points represents a necessary starting-point to the progressive development of a truly comparative framework.

Unlike the situation in the field of traditional comparative government, research aiming at comparing public policies throughout different countries has considerably increased since the beginning of the seventies. This new type of policy - rather than total governmental systems • oriented research actually seems to correspond to ongoing fragmentation processes isolating individual policies from each other, which we can observe in fiscally stressed modern industrialized welfare states. This contribution shows that this single policy oriented approach, however, may run the risk of loosing a general view of structural determinants, common to most or all public policies of a country due to specific policy characteristics of countries under comparison. In fact, this new type of policy oriented comparative analysis has not yet brought up what ASHFORD calls a «comparative policy based explanation of the state». While such an ambitious goal initially only has been set up by a few scholars, comparative policy analysis research activities since their beginning have been subjected to other (less far-reaching) objectives which, nevertheless, turned out to have been unrealistic too. Neither those who expected to become enabled to precisely determine policy transfer conditions nor those who searched for new policy explanation hypothesis have been satisfied. The contribution of comparative policy research to policy reform debates within involved countries remained relatively poor. By means of a tentative evaluation of comparative analysis done in the field of environmental policies, mainly based upon the work of VOGEL, the article tries to show that such initial hopes could not have been fulfilled because of genuine limits inherent in the approach itself. Such limits are based in the necessary conceptual rigidity and selectivity of serious comparative policy analysis which furthermore /nust inevitably be guided by existing research hypothesis, developed under carefully controlled national policy conditions. Conceptual rigidity and selectivity nevertheless may be considered as the main causes for the strength of comparative policy analysis. The consequent search for a limited and well defined set of possible explanatory variables often enables scholars to find out policy relevant determinants in their country they would not have asked for without cooperating in a comparative context. Thus the approach helps to overcome cultural biases and leads politicians and public administrations towards a better understanding of country specific determinants of policy success or failure. Furthermore, this approach allows testing hypothesis on a broader range and thus it contributes considerably to the development of theory on public policy explanations. Especially if including regional and local policy implementation processes the approach is likely to discover explanatory patterns for implementation policy outputs and impacts, which are in fact common to policies of different countries with varying policy programs.

Do the experiences of referendum recently organized in some french local communities foreshadow new methods of policy making ? There is no easy way of judjing the «quality» of referendum as a democratic tool of municipal management. However, the use of a multicriteria panel (source of initiative ; terms of vote ; degree of representativity ; impact on the policy of government ; ...) allows some provisory conclusions : a local referendum seems frequently to be a political marketing gadget ; the degree of control exercised by the political authorities is always very high ; a lot of référendums can acquire a plebiscitary character ; the others have to be seen mainly as acting in a supportive role to municipal power (their functions are decisional legitimation or arbitration of conflict inside the municipal council or between the political authorities and local pressure groups). Through the studied experiences, the municipal referendum appears as a «method of government» in the elect's service before it is a process of citizen's participation to municipal policy-making.