Sciences Po Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics

In December 2023, the European Parliament and the Council reached an agreement to revise the Solvency II Directive, aiming to unlock €100 billion in private investment through a series of deregulatory measures. This marks a significant departure from the stringent insurance supervision framework that has shaped European policy since the financial crisis. Through detailed process tracing, this article examines the drivers behind this unexpected outcome and its broader implications for EU economic governance. Whilst this shift could be seen as part of the EU's growing prioritization of growth over stability, we argue that it is, above all, the result of France's sustained influence. Our findings suggest that the fragmented insurance industry played a limited role in the negotiations. Although the Commission actively promoted the Capital Markets Union and investment in the green transition, it largely acted as a reactive and pragmatic policy‐maker. Instead, we show that the reregulation of the European insurance sector was primarily driven by the sustained efforts of the French Treasury. However, rather than pushing for wholesale deregulation, French policy‐makers leveraged the Solvency II review to advance a cohesive asset‐led growth strategy at home – motivated by a desire for greater economic sovereignty through the inflow of liquidity into national companies. Taken together, these findings shed new light on EU financial regulation in the post‐Covid era, the evolving tension between the EU's interventionist shift and the rise of state activism and France's role in shaping European economic governance.

The strategies, decisions and beliefs of those who occupy prominent positions of economic power have influence on very large corporations and the markets they dominate, on vast amounts of economic resources, and on the rules of the game. However, the sociology of elites faces a dual challenge: divergent conceptualisations of what can be considered as a position of economic power and internationally incompatible sources of information hinder comparative analysis. The World Elite Database (WED) addresses this dual challenge, by generating, based on a consistent definition, standardised data for 16 countries. This research note introduces WED, its construction principles, and presents preliminary findings on how economic elites differ across countries.

This article applies an organizational, longitudinal and comparative perspective to study the varieties of managerial activities that have been historically developed inside the state since the early 1980s. Its aim is to assess the extent to which these activities have been influenced by New Public Management reforms while also evidencing the fact that many other types of management have been developed overtime. Based on an analytical typology categorizing the diversity of managerial tasks and on an original large‐scale dataset mapping internal structures in the French and German central bureaucracies and their transformations from 1980 to 2014, the article shows that managerial activities (notably in charge of support functions) were already well rooted in the two central governments. It also measures the late but significant effects of NPM reforms in the two countries, visible in the growth of steering and controlling activities which are even more visible in the French than in the German case. At last, it explores the likelihood of isomorphism in the organization of managerial activities either among ministries in charge of the same policy tasks or across managerial activities due to their inherent dynamics of diffusion.

Since 2008, growing scepticism about the ability of market forces to ensure financial stability and environmental sustainability has revived interest in credit controls. Credit controls were common in Europe before the ‘neoliberal turn’ of the 1980s. However, the decline in support for these policies in the 1970s is not well understood. This article examines Italy's shift away from credit controls, focusing on the role of central bank economists and the Bank of Italy's monetary policy ideas. By analysing the discourse and research of central bankers from 1973 to 1983, the article shows that persistent fiscal deficits were the main driving force behind both the introduction and the subsequent abolition of credit controls. It also highlights the influence of a new generation of economists, such as Tommaso Padoa-Schioppa and Mario Monti, on Italian economic policy, providing a case study that contextualises the economic ideas shaping policy making in the European Monetary Union.

What explains changes in the economic structures, institutions and policies of Advanced Capitalist Democracies (ACDs)? In this article, we suggest that the various answers to this question in the field of Comparative Political Economy (CPE) are essentially linked to two main approaches. The first approach emphasizes the role of electorates and political parties, their transformations, and their competition in shaping the evolution of ACDs. The second approach highlights the primacy of producer groups as the most powerful actors influencing the trajectory of ACDs. This review article introduces the debate between these two approaches and underscores its enduring relevance. It then discusses four recent important contributions that provide renewed perspectives on what remains a structuring cleavage in CPE, with implications for neighbouring fields in political science research. Through a systematic comparison of their analytical structure accross various dimensions, we show that their conception of the economy critically shapes their understanding of politics.

Just transition policies can be useful measures to address the new social risks of industrial decarbonization. However, while these policies are growing empirically, they remain arguably undertheorized. Navigating a largely unexplored field, this article aims to strengthen our understanding of just transition policymaking with a theory-generating ambition. It does so by asking: what explains the adoption of just transition policies? Following a Most Different Systems Design, Spain and Ireland have been selected as comparative case studies to reconstruct the political trajectories behind national just transition policies. Drawing from coalition theories, empirical analysis maps the preferences of and interactions between political parties and organised interest groups. The article relies on outcome-explaining process tracing and qualitative methods, including the analysis of policy and press documents, and thirty-nine semi-structured interviews with policymakers and other informants. The core argument is that just transition policies emerge as the result of green-red winning coalitions steered by powerful entrepreneurs, who engage in political exchanges with other socio-political actors in order to trade political support for decarbonisation, in exchange for economic support to affected societal groups.

A territory seeking to achieve energy autonomy (self-sufficiency or relative autarky) may be seen as a system of interrelated actors acting at multiple governance levels. Some actors are inherently connected to the territory where they either reside or work. This is the case of the local authority, which is the system's main facilitator, but also of inhabitants, farmers, and landowners, as well as the local energy operator, when there is one. Other actors are not as linked to the local system. They can have investment strategies of their own in the territory or outside it: industrial and service companies, real estate developers, and the national or regional energy operator. A third category of actors intervenes rather as an intellectual partner than as a direct investor but may also play the role of facilitator as they get closer and closer to the territory’s needs and desiderata: universities and research bodies, consultancy agencies, associations, NGOs, etc.

The contribution aims at exploring different approaches to the renovation of public housing contexts with a focus on the implemented actions in relation to contextual conditions and actor’s dynamics in two italian case studies. On the one hand, a public-led approach aiming at self-sufficiency objectives by focusing on a single neighbourhood's public assets and a pre-established network of involved actors; on the other hand, a third sector-led approach aiming at seeking synergies between neighbourhoods by integrating different ownership structures and building alliances between local actors. The proposed investigations offer researchers and practitioners’ different scenarios of intervention in public housing contexts.

This chapter presents an exploratory study of the application of a serious game in a teaching experience based on a course held at the Politecnico di Torino (Italy). The main research question is: how does a serious game contribute to the sustainability-oriented training of a planner, in terms of critically understanding the decision-making, the spatial, and the economic contexts? The chapter discusses the potentials and limitations of such innovative action and experiential learning approaches. The contribution is targeted at faculty and students in bachelor’s degree planning courses that deal with related issues of urban sustainability and energy transition.

While we know that the far right thrives when migration is salient in public agendas, what happens when this issue is no longer under the spotlight? Building on 25 face-to-face interviews with activists mobilized against migration during COVID-19 in Italy, this article explores far-right framing of migration as a non-salient issue. We find that far-right groups indeed reframe their messages vis-à-vis a less favourable political setting; yet they are also able to seize fresh opportunities to reactivate opposition to migration, notably via prognostic frames delivering ostensibly depoliticized views that hijack solidarity principles and emphasize pragmatic and technocratic approaches to border control and migration management. In uncovering the discursive strategies used by far-right actors to bolster their credibility and appeal when out of their comfort zone, this article contributes to the scholarly understanding of politicization and highlights the mechanisms by which far-right ideas are becoming normalized in the public sphere.

Comentário de Gabriel Feltran ao dossiê Terror e Intimidade: Perspectivas etnográficas e desafios conceituais.

In this contribution, I discuss the divergence of German and French public finances over the course of the last two decades. Major gaps in public deficit/debt levels and debt service costs have opened even under the presence of a common fiscal framework at the EU level. To explain these differences, I focus on three elements: the (non-)perception of budgetary and socio-economic crisis, differences in demographic conditions, and contrasting approaches towards the role of rules and expertise in fiscal policymaking. The contribution illustrates these points by providing two concise case studies on key developments in fiscal policymaking and institutions since the 1990s. I conclude with a brief reflection on German and French fiscal policymaking in the years to come.

Cybercrime is a major challenge facing the world, with estimated costs ranging from the hundreds of millions to the trillions. Despite the threat it poses, cybercrime is somewhat an invisible phenomenon. In carrying out their virtual attacks, offenders often mask their physical locations by hiding behind online nicknames and technical protections. This means technical data are not well suited to establishing the true location of offenders and scholarly knowledge of cybercrime geography is limited. This paper proposes a solution: an expert survey. From March to October 2021 we invited leading experts in cybercrime intelligence/investigations from across the world to participate in an anonymized online survey on the geographical location of cybercrime offenders. The survey asked participants to consider five major categories of cybercrime, nominate the countries that they consider to be the most significant sources of each of these types of cybercrimes, and then rank each nominated country according to the impact, professionalism, and technical skill of its offenders. The outcome of the survey is the World Cybercrime Index, a global metric of cybercriminality organised around five types of cybercrime. The results indicate that a relatively small number of countries house the greatest cybercriminal threats. These findings partially remove the veil of anonymity around cybercriminal offenders, may aid law enforcement and policymakers in fighting this threat, and contribute to the study of cybercrime as a local phenomenon.

The article puts French scholarship regarding gay and lesbian political participation into international (US and European) perspective, with a focus on homosexual movements, mobilization processes, and electoral behavior. The article draws lessons from the available evidence and identifies several gaps: while homosexual movements have been well covered internationally and to a lesser extent in France, the “micro” level of gay and lesbian individuals has been largely neglected. Individual politicization and voting behavior of LGBT people have received little attention in the US and are absent of European and French political science, delineating a large research agenda.

This essay assesses the pre-adoption, adoption, implementation and impact of party parity penalties established in 2002 to promote gender equality in the National Assembly. The analysis argues that while the penalties were implemented and increased over the years and had some success in enhancing women’s numerical representation, from 12.3% of all MPs in 2002 to 38.7% in 2017, rather than being “more than meets the eye,” the parity sanctions were actually far less. The limited scope and authority of the parity penalties and the gender-biased norms of key gatekeepers and political elites in the political parties and the high courts have circumscribed the extent of the progress in women’s numerical representation and the quality of that representation; women MPs in the National Assembly still remain marginalized in a variety of ways in comparison with their male counterparts. Thus, the outcome of the party parity sanctions, in GEPP terms, is “gender accommodation” over “transformation.”

Cet article interroge la relation d’enquête qui s’est nouée avec des personnes bénéficiant de la protection internationale prises en charge par un opérateur de l’État, dans le cadre d’une thèse en Cifre. Il questionne ce que le recours à des entretiens biographiques a pu induire comme formes de docilités et résistances de la part des personnes enquêtées, que ce soit dans le récit d’elles-mêmes mais aussi dans la possibilité (ou non) de refuser l’interaction et par conséquent l’injonction à se raconter.

How do bureaucrats implement public policy when faced with political intermediation? This article examines this issue in the distribution of land rights to informal settlements in the municipality of São Paulo, Brazil. Land regularization is a policy established over three decades, where politicians’ requests for land titles to their constituencies play a relevant role. Based on interviews and documents, this study finds that bureaucrats adopt a twofold approach to regulate distribution: they document informal settlements, enacting eligibility criteria; then, they manage and prioritize beneficiaries, accommodating qualifying political demands. In this process, they enforce eligibility rules consistently across cases, constraining political intermediation to a rational scheme. Therefore, bureaucrats reconcile nonprogrammatic politics and policy rules by separating eligibility assessment from beneficiary selection. This paper bridges urban distributive politics and street-level bureaucracy literature by revealing that policy implementers may use technical expertise to curb political influence and negotiate conflicting interests and constraints.

Comments on Bas van Heur’s bibliometric article about urban studies as a global field of research, and how to improve their inclusivity and decentralization.

Structural duration conveys stability but also resilience in central government and is therefore a key issue in the debate on the structure and organization of government. This paper discusses three core variants of structural duration to study the explanatory relevance of politics. We compare these durations across ministerial units in four European democracies (Germany, France, The Netherlands, and Norway) from 1980 to 2013, totalling over 17,000 units. Our empirical analyses show that cabinets’ ideological turnover and extremism are the most significant predictors of all variants of duration, whereas polarization in parliament as well as new prime ministers without office experience yield the predicted significant negative effects for most models. We discuss these findings and avenues for future research that acknowledge the definition and measures for structural change as well as temporal aspects of the empirical phenomenon more explicitly. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.