Abstract
We focus on France and the president’s power to control the composition of the cabinet. We use probabilistic methods to examine the party-political sources of presidential power. We also use both crisp-set and fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis to identify the specific combination of conditions that has allowed some French presidents to shape the composition of the cabinet more than others. We show that the president’s control over the cabinet was particularly great during the first four years of the Giscard d’Estaing presidency from 1974 to 1978. We present an in-depth qualitative case study of this period to tease out the reasons why presidential control over the cabinet was so strong. We focus on the party politics in the legislature.
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- 1.
The list is available at: http://www.gouvernement.fr/les-gouvernements-de-la-veme-republique (accessed 22 October 2015). We find the same numbering at: https://www.data.gouv.fr/fr/datasets/composition-des-gouvernements-de-la-veme-republique-1959-2014/ (accessed 22 October 2015).
- 2.
Only the 1986 legislative election was held under a different electoral system from all the other elections since 1962.
- 3.
While there is a strong positive correlation between the values for the presidential power variable and the natural log of democracy variable, we find that the latter variable does not return a significant result if we include it at the expense of the presidential power variable. This suggests that the latter is not merely capturing the effect of the elapse of democratic time.
- 4.
In addition, another set of conditions is also worth noting. This is Row 4. Here, the consistency level is 0.83, which is on the border of acceptability. If we recode this Row as True, then the solution formula is unified government*ENLP~number of parties in government~caretaker, or the presence of both a unified government and a high number of legislative parties, in the absence of both a large number of parties in government and a caretaker government. Five cabinets meet these conditions, but one does not. The cabinets meeting the conditions where the outcome is present are Pompidou 1 (January 1966–April 1967), Barre 3 (April 1978–May 1981), Ro card 2 (May 1988–May 1991), Cresson (May 1991–April 1992), and Bérégovoy (April 1992–March 1993). The Pompidou 2 government (April 1967–July 1968) also meets these conditions, but the outcome is absent. Again, there seems to be a particular legislature of interest. This is the ninth legislature from 1988 to 1993. All three governments during this legislature meet the conditions in the truth Figure and presidential control of the cabinet was high. Perhaps more importantly, though, this result suggests that the presence of unified government and a high number of legislative parties are the main conditions of interest. They were present in the solution formulas for Rows 1 and 2 and they are present again here.
- 5.
Here, the inclusion of the caretaker government condition does make a substantive difference to the outcome.
- 6.
We note that in the fsQCA analysis, the level of consistency for Row 4 is not high enough to recode this inconsistent set of outcomes as true. This suggests that we are right to focus on the Giscard presidency.
- 7.
The csQCA and the fsQCA results are both highly sensitive to the calibration of the number of parties. As discussed in the text, for the csQCA, we could record a score of 0 when there is only one party in government, and a score of 1 otherwise. Similarly, for the fsQCA, we could record a score of 0 when there is one party in government, a score of 0.6 when there are two, and a score of 1 when there are three. This recalibration generates different sets of sufficient conditions. For the csQCA, there are two sets, one comprising three caretaker governments (Fillon 1, Messmer 3, and Raffarin 1), plus another more potentially interesting set comprising the Fabius cabinet (July 1984–March 1986), plus the Rocard 2, Cresson, and Bérégovoy cabinets (June 1988–March 1993 inclusive). This latter set has a consistency of 1.00 and a raw coverage of 0.22, while the conditions sufficient for the outcome are unified government, a single-party government, and the absence of a caretaker government. When we recalibrate the fsQCA dataset in this way, then the set of sufficient conditions includes only one case, the empirically and theoretically uninteresting Fillon 1 cabinet.
- 8.
It is worth remembering that in Model 6 of the multivariate analysis, there was a significant positive correlation between Giscard and the non-partisanship of the cabinet.
- 9.
In fact, one minister resigned after just 12 days in office and his ministry was abolished. In the statistical analysis, we recorded a figure of 18.75 per cent for the Chirac government, but in practice, the percentage of non-partisans was 20 per cent for most of the period. This simply strengthens the idea that this was an unusual period in terms of non-partisanship from 1962 to 2016.
- 10.
Available at http://discours.vie-publique.fr/notices/747001600.html, accessed 3 April 2017.
- 11.
Available at http://discours.vie-publique.fr/notices/767001600.html, accessed 3 April 2017.
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Elgie, R. (2018). Party Politics and Presidential Control of the Cabinet in France. In: Political Leadership. Palgrave Studies in Political Leadership. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34622-3_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-34622-3_6
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