General Policy Speech of Prime Ministers and Fiscal Choices in France: “Preach Water and Drink Wine”
Résumé
Since the inception of the Fifth French Republic, the Prime Minister
pronounces an expected inauguration
address of general
policy in which main
public policies are announced. Usually a h
ierarchical priority of policies is
raised from this a
ddress. As a consequence the government aims at allocating
budgets in accordance with such a ranki
ng. Nevertheless public budgeting
processes are regularly faced with in
crementalism, which causes huge pro-
blems when some unexpected problems ari
se. Furthermore, during the elec-
toral cycle, governments face a para
doxical problem: once elected they are
supposed to transform their electoral
promises into public policies but at
the same time they are forced to propose a new electoral platform for being
re-elected.
All along the Fifth Republic in 1958, France has experienced 17 governments
and then 17 addresses of general policy. The regular shift of majority since the
beginning of the 1980s outlines the (in)capacity of incumbent governments to
satisfy a majority of voters. In this perspective, this chapter aims at testing
whether priorities of governmental action are matched with the ranking of
budgetary allocations. For that, we propose to analyze all the 17 addresses of
Prime Ministers with a data text mining technology in order to construct a
dependant hierarchical variable. Thus we use budget series, economic, and
political data as independent variables to estimate the shift of annual budget
according to both the governmental priority and the time distance between
the date of the Prime Minister’s inauguration address and observed annual
budget law.
From a political economy perspective, this chapter tackles the ambiguous
relationship between political address of French Prime Ministers and the bud-
geting response of their government. Using an original statistical database
(47 years), we plan to better understand the relevance of public policy as it is
implemented and not necessarily as the public address should target it