Women’s rights as a career strategy: the political trajectories of the members of the Women’s Rights Delegation in the French National Assembly

In the French National Assembly, being appointed to the Women’s Rights Delegation is not something many MPs ambition to do. The Delegation holds little legislative or oversight power, benefits from very little media coverage and lacks resources as few other parliamentary bodies. Based on interviews with former members and a trajectory analysis of all MPs who were appointed to this Delegation since it was created, this paper aims at analysing the effects such appointments have on parliamentary careers, and most specifically on women’s careers.We will show that party groups across the political spectrum tend to massively appoint female backbenchers to the Delegation, even when they express no interest in participating in its activities, as they tend to be considered “natural experts” of such topics. These unwanted nominations sometimes transform into a feminist “awakening”, leading some previously uninterested female MPs to specialise and embrace women’s representation as a gateway to more promising career opportunities, as they promptly accumulate new parliamentary and extra-parliamentary responsibilities. We will therefore argue that in this case, specialisation does not occur by choice, but constitutes a necessary adaptation for these female backbenchers to raise their status and differentiate inside their own party groups, in a context of constrictive institutional expectations of gender roles

Thermographie infrarouge : diagnostic des centres de stockage de déchets

International audienceLa législation française imposant un suivi et un contrôle des centres de stockage des déchets, des méthodes de caractérisation se développent. On se propose de démontrer l'intérêt d'utiliser la thermographie pour réaliser ce type d'études. Après avoir exposé les conditions particulières de mise en oeuvre de cet outil sur un site naturel, deux exemples d'application seront montrés. Le premier concerne la localisation des foyers en combustion sur un site. Le second concerne la localisation des zones à fortes activités thenniques. Afin d'établir le lien entre activité chimique et activité thermique, des mesures simultanées de ces deux paramètres ont été réalisées sur un site. Les résultats obtenus par ces deux méthodes sont discutés et comparés. Un inventaire des champs d'application de cette méthode dans un contexte français est finalement proposé

Genre, droit et politique | Charles Bosvieux-Onyekwelu, Véronique Mottier (dir.)

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Twenty years of attempts at reforming committees - A tale of reforms missing the mark in the French National Assembly

International audienceThe French Parliament’s committee system, as it was created by the constitution of the Fifth Republic, was purposely designed to be as weak as can be: a limited number of standing committees, with wide areas of expertise and close to no legislative or oversight power, relegated to producing non-binding opinions on the bills. Yet, as time passed, and never more so than in the past 20 years, several ambitious legal reforms were passed to give more legislative and oversight powers to the committees, and strengthen the National Assembly as a whole. Yet, the National Assembly in 2020 does not appear any stronger, nor any more independent as an institution, than it was 20 years ago. This chapter aims at assessing the obstacles that may have hindered the desired effects of these reforms and identifies both subtle changes – increasing public scrutiny and an augmentation of the importance of the president’s figure for example – as well as unaltered core characteristics of the French institutions and political system, as potential hurdles to the reforming intent

Against All Odds - A Story of the Parliamentary Decision in the French Parliament

In 2012, the Women Rights Delegation in the French National Assembly suggested to pass a bill forbidding the purchase of sexual acts. Most ministers and a large portion of MPs ranged from not enthusiastic to fully opposed to the idea, making it statistically unlikely the law would ever come to be. Yet, in 2016, the bill was passed.This paper offers to dissect the process that led to this surprising success in-depth, in order to hold out a better understanding of the weight of procedures, party cohesion and media-coverage on parliamentary decision.The success of the bill can indeed be attributed to four strategies. Firstly, the use of reasonably discrete procedures and of the margins of the parliamentary calendar allow the bill to develop, overcoming the overloaded agenda problem. Then, an intra-partisan campaign of systematic lobbying is put in motion by MPs, alternating between threats and friendship pleas, turning party discipline from unsurpassable obstacle to political resource. Moreover, abolitionist groups and MPs synchronize to keep prostitution on the news, making sure the media coverage favours them. In the end, a prostitution-related political scandal serve as an opportunity to enlist the government as a supporter of the bill

‘Equality is a cross-party thing’: party-cohesion and consensus-building around gender equality in the French National Assembly

The French National Assembly, like many other parliaments, is known for its strong party cohesion. When we listen to the MPs in the plenary, however, they tend to state that, on issues related to gender equality, discipline is not necessary. As they imply, these issues would be, almost by nature, consensual.This contribution questions what lies behind this idea of consensus. Using a set of interviews, archives and roll-call vote-analyses, we show that the idea of consensus on these issues, far from describing an objective reality, is more a series of performative statements that aim to normalize what is in effect, for some MPs, quasi-systematic indiscipline. This idea of consensus, however, is also weaponized by these undisciplined MPs to obtain the re-building of party cohesion around their position, through calls to loyalty, or blackmail.Relying on a neo-institutionalist framework, we highlight the different ways voting behaviours around gender equality issues are symbolically framed and reframed to fit different understandings of party loyalty. We advocate in favour of understanding legislative work as an activity that is also deeply symbolic, and argue that more attention should then be drawn to parliamentary rules as objects of negotiation rather than imposition

La capacité d’amendement des députés en contexte – Monographie pour une proposition méthodologique

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Making Committees Matter? – A Tale of Reforms Missing the Mark in the French National Assembly

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