La vie à l'assemblée, angle mort de la science politique française

Abstract

Legislative studies are an important branch of political science in the United States and most European countries, but French scholars, during the past twenty years, have somewhat neglected the analysis of parliamentary behaviour. This research note argues that this low interest in the life of national and local assemblies can be explained by the conjunction of two factors: on the one hand, the weakness of parliamentary intervention in France, which results from the increasing importance of the executive branch, at the expenses of assemblies, in the formulation of public policy; on the other, the emancipation of political science from law as well as its openness to the sociological approach during the 1980s and 1990s.