Governments and regulatory agencies make policy through a range of instruments from soft-law guidelines and executive orders to executive rules with the force of law. Based on her book, Democracy and Executive Power, Susan Rose-Ackerman’s essay highlights the link between cross-country differences in rulemaking practices and underlying constitutional frameworks. Based on the US, the UK, Germany, and France, the chapter illustrates how these countries’ disparate constitutional structures help to explain their divergent rulemaking practices. She stresses the existence of policymaking accountability under the rulemaking provisions of the US APA and its absence from the other cases. Nevertheless, whatever the legal framework, the author argues that bureaucrats should take account of outside input as they implement statutory language to make policy choices. The organization of the executive branch should encourage public input and promote bureaucratic competence. Contemporary pressures may indeed be moving all of these countries toward more accountable procedures – not just to protect individual rights but also to enhance the democratic legitimacy of executive rulemaking.

The accession of British colonies to the League was drafted so as not to set a precedent, yet by 1923, another British Dominion had acceded to the League. Chapter Four covers the unanticipated accession of Ireland to the League, and how Britain attempted to use League membership to manage more active anti-colonial struggles within its Empire. This chapter examines how Irish nationalists perceived the League, both as a promising vehicle of international recognition and liberation, but also as a tool of British imperialism. Furthermore, it explores the role the League played in the negotiations around the Anglo-Irish ‘Treaty’ that created the Irish Free State, and how the League acted as a guarantor of the agreement. Finally, this chapter observes how the Free State approached League membership, and how the entry of the so called ‘restless Dominion’ would test the doctrine of inter se.

Chapter 2 covers the period from 1960 to 1980 and analyses how teachers’ unions emerged as the most powerful force in education policy, often at the expense of other interest groups – most notably the private school associations and parental groups. The chapter investigates how this shift in influence shaped major education reforms of that era. It explains how governments found it relatively easy to expand secondary education to an entirely new generation, as teachers’ unions stood to gain substantial material benefits. In contrast, governments faced extraordinary difficulties in integrating the selective education systems into comprehensive school types aimed at promoting social inclusion, largely due to strong union opposition. Additionally, the chapter analyses how teachers’ unions, in fierce competition with other interest groups, consolidated and extended their influence at local levels across the case countries and the European Union.

France has been at the forefront of the philosophical reflection on freedom of thought, along with the related freedoms of opinion and of conscience. Today, freedom of thought is constitutionally protected under French law as affirmed in Article 11 which makes the ‘free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights of man’. However, freedom of thought has received limited attention in French legal scholarship and is seldom considered as a standalone and influential factor in legal disputes, some even suggesting that France may be falling behind other democratic states in terms of the effective affirmation and protection of freedom of conscience in particular. The aim of this chapter is to elucidate how the right to freedom of thought finds expression in French positive law, as well as how it has been used distinctively and practically by the courts, if at all. Following a concise examination of the underlying concept, this chapter considers the legal foundations of freedom of thought and its implementation within the judicial system, with particular focus on the Constitutional Council.

In France, certificats d’utilité were introduced by the Law n°68-1 of January 2, 1968. According to article L. 611-2 of the French Intellectual Property Code, French certificats d’utilité are regulated by the same rules as French patents, with the main exceptions being a shorter duration, the absence of requirement of a research report for the delivery of the title (certificate), and of the lack of opposition proceedings.

This chapter discusses literary representations of plants in the French and francophone tradition, referencing texts and writers from Europe, the Caribbean, North America, Western Africa, the Indian Ocean, and Southeast Asia. Without pretending to offer an impossibly exhaustive history or a complete list of references, this essay considers a diverse set of examples to signal the broad range of these imaginary encounters with the vegetal, as well as shifting (though sometimes overlapping) approaches to botanical knowledge from the Middle Ages to the present. It also examines how and why plants have served as potent allegorical figures, and then focuses on select images of the plants themselves, noting some of their most popular species as well as the ways in which literary authors have tried to understand the otherness of the vegetal.

This chapter opens a series of chapters with case studies on France, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Poland. The institution of French laïcité is commonly understood as referring to a strict separation of church and state. This chapter explains how laïcité has become entangled in the pseudo-constitutional notion of vivre ensemble and the rising significance of social norms for the substantiation of the legal concept of l’ordre public. This is inferred from two particular expressions of constitutional intolerance: first, the overly general and restrictive prohibition of the full-face veil in public spaces, which culminated in the S.A.S. v. France case. Second, it details the expansion of the legal concept of laïcité as expressed in the 2021 Law Concerning the Respect for the Principles of the Republic, which exercises extensive control over the organisation of religious institutions, sources of funding, and their political loyalty to the Republic.

A popular refrain in many countries is that people with mental illnesses have “nowhere to go” for care. But that is not universally true. Previously unexplored international data shows that some countries provide much higher levels of public mental health care than others. This puzzling variation does not align with existing scholarly typologies of social or health policy systems. Furthermore, these cross-national differences are present despite all countries’ shared history of psychiatric deinstitutionalization, a process that I conceptualize and document using an original historical data set. I propose an explanation for countries’ varying policy outcomes and discuss an empirical strategy to assess it. The research design focuses on the cases of the United States and France, along with Norway and Sweden, in order to control for a range of case-specific alternative hypotheses. The chapter ends with brief descriptions of contemporary mental health care policy in each of the four countries examined in this book.

This chapter begins the second part of the book, which tests the main empirical implications of localized peace enforcement theory using data from Mali, a land-locked country in West Africa. Though Mali experienced three coups, a separatist civil war, and an Islamist extremist insurgency from 2012 to 2024, no source of conflict has been more fatal or detrimental to Malian society than communal violence. The chapter starts by providing a very brief history of identity-based conflict in the country. It also places Mali within a broader historical context and demonstrates that its experience of interethnic tensions is representative of countries with colonial legacies. The chapter then draws on detailed interviews with forty-eight local leaders to describe what communal violence and peacekeeping look like in Mali from the residents’ perspective. Given the theoretical importance domestic perceptions of peacekeepers, these interviews offer crucial insights into the plausibility of localized peace enforcement theory. There are distinct advantages of studying the Malian case, which the chapter describes in a brief overview of international interventions by the UN and France from 2012 to 2024.

To set the stage for the US–French case comparison, this chapter shows how the political economy of mental health care was similar in the two countries prior to the Second World War (the critical juncture that initiated deinstitutionalization). One difference, though, stands out: the possibility of coalition formation between workers and managers in public mental health services. On the labor side, French public sector trade unions acquired full legal rights after the war, but the maturation of their US counterparts was late, limited, and staggered across the states. On the management side, the organization of French public psychiatric managers was better equipped to enter into this coalition than its American counterpart. I discuss how these differences came to be. Special attention is paid to the economic interests that drove psychiatrists’ intra-professional conflicts and how their gradual settlement produced diverging organizational outcomes. A discussion of potential confounding factors closes.

Midcentury French policy-makers seemed less committed to expanding public mental health care than their US counterparts, but the psychiatric “sectorization” policy nonetheless took off and ultimately increased the supply of services by the end of the 20th century. This chapter identifies the political factors that produced such results. The presence of a public labor–management coalition in mental health care facilitated three positive supply-side policy feedback cycles, producing the distinctive “French way” of deinstitutionalizing the mentally ill.

This chapter considers the strategic dimension of conflict in North America between the outbreak of fighting between the French and colonial Americans in the Ohio valley in 1754 and the formal end of the War of American Independence in 1783. While this thirty-year period saw several local struggles between colonists and Native peoples, the focus here is on the two major conflicts – the Seven Years War (1754–1760 in North America, 1756–1763 in Europe) and the War of Independence (1775–1783). Both wars were global struggles, extending well beyond North America – the Seven Years War from its outset, and the War of Independence from 1778, when the French became belligerents. Even so, the chapter will concentrate on the American aspects of these struggles, and only indirectly address the Caribbean, west African, European and Asian dimensions. It will aspire to cover all the participants in the North American parts of the two wars – settlers, Native peoples and Europeans, particularly the British and the French.

The role of France in David Hume’s intellectual biography is difficult to overestimate. He visited that country three times, wrote the Treatise in La Flèche, and reached the peak of his success during the years he spent in Paris (1763–66), where he was welcomed as a highly valuable member of the Republic of Letters. He cared greatly about the circulation of his writings in France, and actually succeeded in establishing his reputation across the Channel. The History of England made him an outstanding historian, the Natural History of Religion an authoritative esprit fort, but it was the Essays that confirmed him as a subtle political thinker and, what he cared about most, as a profound philosopher in the eyes of his French readers. Before and besides being translated in the form of collections, many of Hume’s essays were translated, summarised, commented on, reviewed, and discussed individually, giving rise to a complex and divergent reception. The present chapter provides an overview of this reception, based on first-hand research on eighteenth-century French translations, reviews, commentaries and criticisms of the Essays.