Emiliano GrossmanSciences Po Paris | IEP · Centre d'études européennes (CEE)
Emiliano Grossman
PhD, HDR
Associate Professor at Sciences Po, Editor in chief of European Journal of Political Research
About
137
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Introduction
I am an associate professor of political science at the Centre d'études européennes of Sciences Po in Paris. My research interests range from media influence in politics and partisan government to the effects of political institutions and politicians' careers. I have been coordinating the French Agendas Project over the past few years. I teach comparative politics at Sciences Po.
Additional affiliations
June 2003 - present
June 2003 - present
Publications
Publications (137)
Anti-elite and anti-political resentment have become a permanent feature of political life in many if not most contemporary democracies, leading to support for populist parties, systematic anti-incumbent voting, and new types of movements, such as the Yellow Vests protests that shook France in 2018–2020. The aim of this paper is to explain the unus...
Do media influence policy making? To what extent can governments or other actors manipulate this influence? Our understanding of the relationship between media and policy making remains limited, as separate research agendas look at parts of the puzzle in public policy, political communication, and related fields. This article tries to bridge these...
Are election campaigns relevant to policymaking, as they should in a democracy?This book sheds new light on this central democratic concern based on an ambitious study of democratic mandates through the lens of agenda-setting in five West European countries since the 1980s. The authors develop and test a new model bridging studies of party competit...
The absence of significant agenda-setting effects of party platforms in the UK, as found in all other countries, seems counterintuitive: the comparative literature would predict the greatest impact in majoritarian systems, while counter-majoritarian institutions are meant to dilute governing parties’ policymaking powers. Comparing different politic...
What determines the issue content of party competition? The extant literature is torn between issue ownership theories predicting contrasted partisan profiles and more strategic views of electoral platforms emphasizing parties’ incentives to converge on the priorities with the greatest payoffs. This chapter argues that parties are like snakes in tu...
What determines changes in the focus of laws over time? Before turning to the impact of democratic mandates, this chapter examines alternative explanations focusing on globalization, the rise of regulatory politics and its effects on redistribution; social change and the emergence of post-materialism; friction and cognitive constraints resulting in...
This chapter explores the implications of mandate theories of democracy through the lens of agenda-setting, looking at the impact of priorities emphasized in party manifestos on the legislative agenda. It examines the respective impact of the priorities in the manifesto of the party of the prime minister, the parties in the government coalition (wh...
This chapter presents the five cases. They are all wealthy Western European democracies. They feature quite a few similarities, concerning the evolution of turnout, electoral volatility, or the growing success of far-right parties. Yet, they also allow for some variation regarding their electoral systems, ranging from very majoritarian to very prop...
This introduction briefly presents the central debates, challenges and puzzles addressed in the book. The focus is on the policy relevance of election campaigns, approached through the lens of two core requirements, i.e. differentiation in the electoral supply and mandate responsiveness. The chapter describes the climate of scepticism that prevails...
Representative democracy relies on elections and party government. Parties play a key role to the extent that they aggregate citizens’ preferences and that they organize political competition. This in turn implies that parties, once in power, implement the programme they were elected for. There is a growing literature arguing that it is increasingl...
This chapter presents a general theoretical framework to analyse party competition and its effects on policymaking. There are two perspectives: that parties still matter for policymaking despite signs of decline and that parties are driven by instrumental considerations and will do what it takes to get elected. This chapter adopts an intermediary p...
This chapter focuses on public-policy analyses through the lens of agenda-setting. Approaches in this tradition assume that no objective fact is a problem in itself and that any problem needs to be constructed. Problems are necessary preconditions to policy change, but decision-makers’ attention is limited and the competition for attention is fierc...
Electoral systems provide distinctive accountability mechanisms in democratic polities and thereby affect government responsiveness to citizens. In this article, we concentrate on the effects of proportional vis‐à‐vis majoritarian electoral rules. We expect members of parliament to be more responsive under majoritarian rule, because these MPs have...
One of the functions of parliamentary questions in modern legislatures is to pressure executives to pay attention to specific issues. But can these questions effectively influence executive decisions? There is surprisingly little empirical research in this area. Adopting an agenda-setting perspective, this article examines the extent to which issue...
One of the functions of parliamentary questions in modern legislatures is to pressure executives to pay attention to specific issues. But can these questions effectively influence executive decisions? There is surprisingly little empirical research in this area. Adopting an agenda-setting perspective, this article examines the extent to which issue...
Publications have become the single most important factor of career evaluation in the social sciences, as well as in most other academic disciplines. This has in turn led some scholars to examine the existence of potential biases in peer-reviewed publications. Teele and Thelen (2017) have shown that political science is not free from such biases. T...
Cet article s’interroge sur l’européanisation de la compétition partisane nationale. Nous revenons sur le débat concernant les effets de l'intégration européenne sur la vie nationale en examinant la politisation des enjeux européens à travers leur traitement dans les programmes électoraux. En mobilisant les données du Comparative Agendas Project, n...
A key component of democratic governance is that elected governments implement their promises. This chapter advances previous work on electoral pledges by systematically linking governments’ announcements in speeches to their actual legislative behavior. Results show that introducing a political topic during a government speech substantively increa...
The concluding chapter emphasizes several central points and contributions of the book. It first provides a summary of the extent of the emerging infrastructure that the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) has developed. It shows the many possibilities provided by this infrastructure, as illustrated by the comparative chapters in the volume. The chap...
The French Agendas Project was initiated as a way to better connect research on France to comparative research on institutions and public policy. This chapter provides a good overview on the research undertaken over the past decade. It also explains methods and specificities concerning the French datasets. In addition to its original focus on insti...
The introductory chapter responds to several goals. It first provides some historical elements concerning the emergence and the development of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP). The project grew out of individual national projects, which initially only aimed at providing a historical and more systematic infrastructure to the study of public pol...
n late 2018, a series of massive demonstrations brought parts of France to a standstill. Emiliano Grossman argues that the so-called ‘yellow vests’ are a response to an intense crisis of political trust that could have profound consequences for France. [First paragraph]
The introductory chapter responds to several goals. It first provides some historical elements concerning the emergence and the development of the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP). The project grew out of individual national projects, which initially only aimed at providing a historical and more systematic infrastructure to the study of public pol...
A key component of democratic governance is that elected governments implement their promises. This chapter advances previous work on electoral pledges by systematically linking governments’ announcements in speeches to their actual legislative behavior. Results show that introducing a political topic during a government speech substantively increa...
The concluding chapter emphasizes several central points and contributions of the book. It first provides a summary of the extent of the emerging infrastructure that the Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) has developed. It shows the many possibilities provided by this infrastructure, as illustrated by the comparative chapters in the volume. The chap...
The French Agendas Project was initiated as a way to better connect research on France to comparative research on institutions and public policy. This chapter provides a good overview on the research undertaken over the past decade. It also explains methods and specificities concerning the French datasets. In addition to its original focus on insti...
This book summarizes recent advances in the work on agenda-setting in a comparative perspective. The book first presents and explains the data-gathering effort undertaken within the Comparative Agendas Project over the past ten years. Individual country chapters then present the research undertaken within the many national projects. The third secti...
This article examines the continuing importance of the left–right dimension for voting behavior in Western Europe. We test the extent to which economic internationalization may affect the capacity of this dimension to structure party preferences. We explore two dimensions of internationalization, long-term openness and short-term changes, assessing...
La montée en puissance des mouvements et des partis populistes se confirme désormais à chaque élection nationale. De plus en plus souvent, ces partis sont même en mesure de participer au gouvernement. Le discours populiste se distingue plus par la forme, souvent très similaire d'un pays à l'autre, que par un contenu précis. Il est vrai, cependant,...
In modern legislatures, political parties use parliamentary questions for two main purposes: to elicit information from the government and to press the government to pay attention to a specific issue. Although the literature agrees on the importance of both the information and agenda-setting functions, there is still little research on which of the...
A key factor in modern democracies’ legitimisation is the extent to which policies submitted for public approval before an election translate into material outcomes once a political party has won power. Current research finds no clear empirical evidence for partisanship in policy-making nor has any unified theory been offered or tested systematical...
Nicht allein der Brexit, auch die bereits länger anhaltenden Krisen in der Finanz-, Währungs- oder Migrationspolitik lassen sich als Anzeichen dafür deuten, dass die Frage nach der Souveränität in der EU ungelöst ist. Während nationalistische und populistische Strömungen das Projekt der europäischen Integration als Angriff auf das Prinzip der Volks...
Nous sommes parfois séduits par leurs promesses, mais, très vite, ils nous déçoivent. Si cette séquence se répète régulièrement depuis près de quarante ans en France, le phénomène gagne en intensité. Entre les citoyens et leurs représentants, la rupture semble consommée. Ce désenchantement à l'égard du politique, il faut l'expliquer et lui donner s...
This chapter begins by reviewing the study of executive politics comparatively. It then reviews the study of executive politics in France, showing how scholars based in France were once at the cutting edge of international scholarship in this area. However, with the turn of French political science to political sociology, the study of the French ex...
The larger comparative theory-building and stocktaking goals and questions, and the plan of the book, are presented in this chapter. The major dynamics and developments of French political life are discussed in terms of explaining and understanding the evolution of French politics. The next section provides an overview of French political science t...
This chapter returns to the questions that were introduced in the Handbook’s Introduction. The first section identifies four distinct periods in the study of French politics, revisiting the outside-in/inside-out themes of the Handbook. The second section focuses on the individual chapters in more detail and classifies them in terms of what they tel...
The Handbook is organized into three parts: the first part identifies foundational concepts for the French case, including chapters on republicanism and social welfare; the second part focuses on thematic large-scale processes, such identity, governance, and globalization; while the third part examines a wide range of issues relating to substantive...
The study investigates the impact of media coverage of protest on issue attention in parliament (questions) in six Western European countries. Integrating several data sets on protest, media, and political agendas, we demonstrate that media coverage of protest affects parliamentary agendas: the more media attention protest on an issue receives, the...
A growing body of work has examined the relationship between media and politics from an agenda-setting perspective: Is attention for issues initiated by political elites with the media following suit, or is the reverse relation stronger? A long series of single-country studies has suggested a number of general agenda-setting patterns but these have...
This article analyses different standard measures of legislative turnover. Two main concerns are discussed: (1) the very definition of turnover: incoming MPs versus first-term MPs; and (2) the level of analysis: the whole chamber versus political groups. To illustrate this discussion, turnover in the French lower chamber, the Assemblée Nationale, i...
Le choix entre les modes de scrutin majoritaires et proportionnels ne se résume pas à un choix entre justice et efficacité : il détermine également en partie le rapport de confiance que tissent les citoyens avec les institutions démocratiques. Les résultats présentés dans ce Policy Brief montrent que, dans les systèmes majoritaires, les gagnants de...
1ères lignes : Dans son dernier ouvrage, le sociologue économique allemand Wolfgang Streeck, directeur sortant de l’institut Max-Planck de Cologne, adopte une vision longue de l’évolution du « capitalisme démocratique ». Ce concept désigne le fragile compromis entre démocratie et économie de marché qu’une grande partie des pays occidentaux ont négo...
This article investigates why François Hollande, the new French President, has become so quickly unpopular after his electoral victory in May 2012. We ask whether this has to do with a lack of effective policy change compared with the 10 preceding years of conservative government and the context of economic crisis. We assess the impact of political...
How much leeway did governments have in designing bank bailouts and deciding on the height of intervention during the 2007-2009 financial crisis? By analyzing the variety of bailouts in Europe and North America, we will show that the strategies governments use to cope with the instability of financial markets does not depend on economic conditions...
1ères lignes : Est-ce que les médias déterminent l’élection ? Des soupçons sont formulés à chaque échéance électorale. L’élection présidentielle de 2012 n’a pas fait exception. Notamment, les petits candidats ont régulièrement fait état de leur mécontentement. Et pourtant, les règles sur « l’équité » et « l’égalité » dans la distribution du temps d...
The concept of “divided government” is more complicated than scholars have allowed. In the USA, truly unified government, where the president enjoys a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate as well as a majority in the House, is rare. In France, truly unified government has been more common, but divided government has also occurred several times....
This article presents a descriptive analysis of French ministers since the beginning of the Fifth Republic. We find that ministers are generally appointed aged about 50 years; that women’s representation has increased, but is still less than 30 per cent in the most recent cabinets, and that women often hold more junior positions; that the proportio...
Social scientists have long hand-labeled texts to create datasets useful for studying topics from congressional policymaking to media reporting. Many social scientists have begun to incorporate machine learning into their toolkits. RTextTools was designed to make machine learning accessible by providing a start-to-finish product in less than 10 ste...
Dans quelle mesure les électeurs prennent-ils en compte les positions des candidats sur des enjeux précis dans leur décision de vote ? Pour répondre à cette question, nous analysons une enquête postélectorale, réalisée après le second tour de l'élection présidentielle en France de 2012. Nous regardons le positionnement des électeurs et le placement...
The duration of the legislative process is one of the most important indicators of legislative productivity and gridlock. Focusing the Council of the European Union, we contend that endogenous coalition dynamics within the legislature largely determine efficiency in lawmaking. Our model of legislative bargaining suggests that governments in the Cou...
This chapter argues that the emergence of a European policy-making state in the area of financial regulation was long successfully resisted by national coalitions, reticent to all forms of internationalisation. This is because finance represents the economy's backbone and, as such, is embedded in long-standing economic traditions that should prove...
This chapter argues that the emergence of a European policy-making state in the area of financial regulation was long successfully resisted by national coalitions, reticent to all forms of internationalisation. This is because finance represents the economy's backbone and, as such, is embedded in long-standing economic traditions that should prove...
French electoral competition and issue ownership
Based on new data from French electoral party platforms between 1981 and 2007, this paper develops an original interpretation of the French electoral competition. Rather than focusing on the study of cleavages and alignments, we understand the political game in terms of attention to various election...
How much leeway did governments have in designing bank bailouts and deciding on the height of intervention during the 2007-2009 financial crisis? This paper analyzes comparatively what explains government responses to banking crises. Why does the type of intervention during financial crises vary to such a great extent across countries? By analyzing...
Après les députés, A. François et E. Grossman dressent un portrait du ministre type sous la Ve République et suivent l'évolution de leur carrière au sein du gouvernement. Les résultats ne surprendront pas, mais frappent par leur constance, de 1958 à aujourd'hui.
This research note describes the population of the French members of the Assemblée Nationale (deputies) from the beginning of the Fifth Republic. Through a statistical analysis of the makeup of 13 legislatures (from 1958 to 2007), it, on the one hand, provides a portrait of the deputies, and, on the other hand, describes the evolution over time of...
Why did the services directive proposed by Internal Market Commissioner Frits Bolkestein lead to such virulent reactions in France? This article examines several potential explanations focusing on political economy, public opinion and the timing of events. While all of these elements contribute to the difficult political context, they are insuffici...
The recent history of financial integration in Europe can generally be considered a success story, notwithstanding the crisis that has plagued financial sectors in Europe and elsewhere since 2007. There has been significant progress in the area of regulatory integration; however, an in-depth analysis requires also taking into account what happens o...
Quelle est la population des députés français depuis les débuts de la Cinquième République ? Au travers d'une analyse statistique de la composition des 13 législatures, A. François et E. Grossman dressent un portrait du député français et suivent l'évolution des pensionnaires de l'Assemblée Nationale. Il apparaît que la structure socioprofessionnel...
This article, as an introduction to the Symposium, discusses the determinants and evolution of attention to defence and foreign policy issues in France. It thereby contributes to existing debates on the relative power of presidents in this area. It then provides a short overview of the different contributions to the symposium. It argues that there...
This report provides a wide picture on a new database on the weekly government statements in France. They provide detailed information on the effective agenda of French governments over time. A detailed topic coding, moreover, allows for an analysis of the evolution of relative attention to different topics. This report presents a series of researc...
This paper analyzes the publication strategies of French political scientists based on online polling figures from 2009. The figures reveal a great diversity of publication strategies, probably due to the lack of unity in French political science scholarship. It also points up the widespread disconnect between membership of the core academic commun...
The Comparative Agendas Project brings together researchers who are developing systematic indicators of the attention given to political problems in their own national political systems. The main objective of the project is to build up a standardised taxonomy, in order to compare the activities linked to these problems over time and space. The cons...
Dès les débuts de l’intégration européenne, les groupes d’intérêt, plutôt que les mouvements sociaux, ont été au centre de l’attention. On a longtemps espéré que l’Europe politique pourrait être tirée par l’Europe économique, pour reprendre les termes de Jean Meynaud et Dusan Sidjanski, et entraîner d’autres acteurs dans ce mouvement. Les « solidar...
Fifty years after the creation of the Fifth Republic, French politics is undergoing profound changes. The election of Nicolas Sarkozy has announced a general review of the French political system. A special committee – the comité constitutionnel – is currently drafting a catalogue of potential reforms. Debates focus on issues like presidentializati...
This paper presents an original way of testing the 'partisan hypothesis'. Building on the substantial literature on the party-policy link, we test this link with respect to issue attention, rather than spending or macroeconomic outcomes. We examine the evolution of issue attention through the systematic analysis of agenda setting of three major Fre...
Fifty years after the creation of the Fifth Republic, French politics is undergoing profound changes. The election of Nicolas Sarkozy has announced a general review of the French political system. A special committee – the comité constitutionnel – is currently drafting a catalogue of potential reforms. Debates focus on issues like presidentializati...
Chapitre 1. ISBN-10 2-7246-1115-2 ; ISBN-13 978-2-7246-1115-1
This article adopts a long-term view of the Fifth Republic. It argues that there are historically two partly contradictory readings of the institutions created by the constitution of 1958: a presidential and a partisan reading. The first grants the president the role of a consensual arbiter at the heart of the executive. The partisan reading or log...
This article examines the evolution of intra-executive relations under the Fifth Republic. In particular, it looks at the presidential decision to change or reshuffle governments. It shows that the president has used the institutional privileges to reshuffle and replace governments very much in his own best interests. Moreover, we try to understand...
This paper adopts a long-term view of the Fifth Republic. We argue that there are historically two partly contradictory readings of the institutions created by the constitution of 1958: a presidential and a partisan reading. The first grants the president the role of a consensual arbiter at the heart of the executive. The partisan reading or logic...
Relations between state and society in Europe tend to vary greatly and are often based on compromises negotiated over centuries that have evolved only slowly over time. This is why the very foundations of modern democracies in Europe often reflect particular attitudes of the state toward organized economic and societal interests—attitudes which in...
The character of international trade has changed dramatically over the past twenty years. Previously published as a special issue of The Journal of European Public Policy, this volume provides a ‘state of the art’ study of the new trade politics.
Projects
Projects (6)
PIs: Caterina Froio (Sciences Po CEE) & Nonna Mayer (CNRS, Sciences Po CEE), in collaboration with Sciences Po Médialab
Triggered last October by the 80km/h speed limit on country side roads and the rising price of gasoline, the Gilets Jaunes/Yellow Vests (YV) has turned into a proliferating social movement, active online and offline, disrupting and polarizing the French political debate ever since. A host of studies are exploring its origins, its claims and its followers, at Sciences Po Bordeaux (Bedock et al.2018), Sciences Po Grenoble (Guerra et al., 2018), Lille University (Le Lann et al.2018), Cevipof (Rouban, 2019) and Fondation Jean Jaurés (Fourquet and Manternach, 2018). The focus of our project is different, questioning what the movement does to the French political polarization both in term of discussions and electoral competition. To what extent do the YV’s ideas, combining calls for social justice (taxing the rich, fighting inequalities, increasing wages and purchase power) and political discontent (anti-elites, anti-representative democracy, promoting horizontal and direct procedures such as the RIC/Citizen initiative referendum), influence and polarize public opinion, party politics and elections?
The project includes two working packages,
WP1: Political polarization on social media
WP2: Political polarization in elections
The research team brings together advanced and early-career researchers (Dominique Cardon, Jean-Philippe Cointet, Anja Durovic, Florence Ecormier Nocca, Emiliano Grossman, Florence Haegel, Olivier Rozenberg and Nicolas Sauger).