Editorial: An Introduction
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Data, measures and methods
Editorial: An Introduction Michael S Lewis-Beck French Politics (2003) 1, 135–136. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fp.8200028
Traditionally, the gathering of French data, and their analysis, is often fun but seldom easy. Political scientists on the data trail in France are made to realize that they are in a foreign country, after all. Aside from the obvious language difference, the data — and the approaches to them — can be different. The comforting Anglo-Saxon rules of research, not always followed, are even challenged. Data have been more likely to be found by grubbing around in libraries or offices. My first paper on French politics, concerning the voting patterns of the French peasantry over the Fourth and Fifth Republics, was based on wading through carefully guarded volumes and ribboned folders in the Sciences Po library, in search of published cross-tabs. Data for several papers on presidential popularity came from individual meetings with bureaucrats working for the IFOP polling organization, perusal of economic documents in the Beaubourg library, and some tiring visits with staff of the governmental data collection agency, INSEE. The scores on the vote variables in my election forecasting articles were found in special issues of the newspaper, Le Monde. The survey research I have done in France has been, of necessity, brokered through commercial polling agencies, who tend not to have the same concerns that academics have. The French component of the Euro-Barometer, although thin soup, has sometimes served as my database, because of its ready availability, compared to earlier academic surveys. However, the French data scene is changing, and that is largely what this section of the journal is about. For example, I was fortunate to share in the preparation of the 1995 French National Election Study, now archived at the ICPSR data bank in Ann Arbor. French data are increasing in mass and order, and are moving from the Paris library stacks to the international electronic archive. These pages are to be devoted to taking advantage of those changes, providing the English-language scholar of French politics information on the contents, location, and availability of data sources, data sets, and ongoing data collection. We will be publishing, for instance, essays on where to get popularity scores on political leaders, or time series on macroeconomic
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indicators, or a pool of national election surveys. Or perhaps the featured entry will be on the design of the most recent French National Election Study, or on sources of aggregate data by region on public spending. Then again, there could be an essay on data storage at the Grenoble data bank, or one about the data–gathering operations at the Regional Observatories. Other essays will focus upon issues such as trends in defence spending, with a view to placing them in historical and comparative perspective. Besides data, the section will focus on measures and methods especially important in the contex
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