Legislative Politics: Going International, While Staying Native
Résumé
This chapter proposes an assessment of the state of the study of legislative politics in France. It starts with a review of how the study of legislative politics has developed comparatively over time and identifies the major current debates in the comparative literature. Then it turns to the French case, explaining its weaknesses and peculiarities, and assessing the current state of legislative studies in France. We see that, for a long time, legislative studies were rare in the landscape of French political science. Things, though, have evolved since the end of the 1990s, when there was a renewed scholarly interest in central institutions and actors of the French political regime as well as the emergence of new work that was better connected with the methods, theories, and topics of mainstream legislative studies. Finally, we underline some dimensions of the agenda for the future study of legislative politics in France.