Introduction

The previous chapter has just explained how policy studies emerged and developed in France in the 1970s and 1980s. This one picks up the baton to show how, from these humble but crucial beginnings, policy studies have since grown in France and become such an institutionalised and omnipresent part not only of sociology and political science, but also of expertise on public affairs. In so doing, two of its key features need highlighting from the outset.

First, as a field policy studies in France has expanded partly because its proponents have consistently allied studies of ‘new’ political phenomena (for example, local and EU public policies) with the concerted development and discussion of concepts and analytical frameworks (for example, governance, networks, political leadership). It is to be noted that gender policy studies have contributed to renewing these perspectives by opening new fields of studies (both the gender of policies and the policies of gender) while at the same time discussing classical notions (for instance the ‘referential’, see below) and perspectives (for example, the study of street-level bureaucrats) (see the recent syntheses by Engeli and Perrier, 2015; Mazur and Revillard, 2016). Although of course present in other national fields, this linkage between empirics and theory is particularly strong in France. For these reasons, we have chosen to present what follows around three fundamental debates which, through developing in layers over the last 30 years, structure and divide the French policy studies of today. The first concerns the role of ‘ideas’ in public policies, the second the relationship between institutions and actors, while the third is centred upon the role of the state and politics itself within policy-making, implementation and evaluation.

Second, this theoretical investment has gone hand in hand with an everincreasing engagement with research published in English. However, this involvement in international social science has nevertheless varied in intensity and intentionality over time. If, in the 1990s, this field of study was essentially autonomous from extra-national developments, by contrast the following decade was marked by importation and translation of approaches initiated elsewhere (Muller and Surel, 2000). Since the end of the 2000s, however, greater crossfertilisation between endogenous and exogenous perspectives has emerged, alongside a greater willingness to participate assertively and cumulatively in international scientific fora.