Note From the Review Editor
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Review Article
Note From the Review Editor Pepper D. Culpepper French Politics (2007) 5, 94–95. doi:10.1057/palgrave.fp.8200115
The fundamental goal of the review section of French Politics is to connect broad trends in political science to enduring or emerging issues in French politics or political science. We welcome all proposals that fit within this rubric, and those proposals that take seriously the injunction to ‘think big’ are especially encouraged. We do not intend to review single books, but review essays that use individual volumes as a take-off point to conduct a tour d’horizon of a research frontier — or a research backwater that should be a frontier — fit squarely within this vision. There are several new areas of exciting theoretical ferment we would hope to see covered in future review essays. The first concerns the connection between race and politics, especially as studied in the Anglo-American context, and the challenges of segregation and the French republican model. Important work in the field of American politics has demonstrated the effects of allowing multiple ethnic self-identifications, while France continues to struggle with a model of reconciling republican blindness to race with the fact of racial segregation and patterns of structural disadvantage. How politicians and interest groups operate against this changing identity background is a theme with pressing implications for real world policy and for how we should think of French republicanism in the coming years. A second theme of interest is the interaction of globalization with domestic politics. France provides a particularly interesting social lens through which to view the political effects of international liberalization, as it combines tight integration in international and European markets with a popular and elite rejection of the market as a socially acceptable organizing principle. There are important themes of party politics and ideological innovation at stake in this debate, and work that relates developments in these spheres to the current dilemmas of French politics would be very warmly received. Finally, and related to the above, there are many active debates in the social sciences and the quality of democracy and democratic representation, and in some of these debates the French experience has been a central referent. Does divided government, for example, respond to voter demands for checks and balances, or is it instead a cumulatively corrosive force, limiting the ability of governments to respond to citizen demand for policies and thus reinforcing
Note From the Review Editor
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dissatisfaction with democratic performance? Does participatory democracy offer a way to improve on some of the perceived shortcomings of representative democracy? If so, how will such experiments be legitimized in a country like France, in which the general will is at least philosophically incarnated through elected representatives only? There is much work going on in both the theory and empirics of democracy, and we would welcome review co
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