Books & ideas

Two Centuries of Alternation, 1

Michel Offerlé — 2025-12-18T10:48:00Z

Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty's economic history of political conflict in France is a defense of bipartition: The Left-Right divide, which is the foundation of our democracy, has enabled social progress. We must therefore work to restore it.

Two Centuries of Alternation, 2

Michel Offerlé — 2025-12-18T10:47:00Z

In his academic reading of Julia Cagé and Thomas Piketty's book, Michel Offerlé provides a critical analysis of the selected indicators, followed by a comparison with works of electoral sociology and electoral history.

The Racist Motivations Behind the National Rally Vote in France

Nicolas Duvoux — 2025-07-03T09:09:00Z

This fascinating political sociology study looks at the lifestyles and subjective perceptions of average National Rally voters in the South of France. It sheds light on the racist motivations behind people's support for the party.

Why Social Democratic Parties no longer expropriate the Rich?

Charlotte Cavaillé — 2021-10-20T07:00:00Z

In a new edited volume, a group of economists map variations in the determinants of voting to better understand the political processes behind the rise in income inequality.

Deciding Together

Florent Gougou & Simon Persico — 2020-07-16T07:00:00Z

From October 2019 to May 2020, 150 French citizens have been involved in a participatory democracy experiment, defining measures to fight against climate change. But how, and through which legal process, can the citizens' proposals be implemented?

Inventing, Reinventing, Questioning Democracy

Mélanie Cournil — 2016-07-25T06:00:00Z

How can we define democracy today? What role does or should the people play in the democratic process ? Through its summer selection, Books&Ideas offers to rediscover a group of four interviews and reviews, published in 2015 and 2016, which have tackled these questions through the prism of history, philosophy and political sciences.

The Slow Triumph of the Majority

Olivier Christin — 2012-06-11T10:09:07Z

How do you renounce unanimity to embrace the majority principle? How do you ward off the dissastisfaction of a minority defeated by vote? Those problems haunted the Middle Ages, the system of orders and ranks of which made room for the majority principle in many of its central institutions. For historian Olivier Christin, we need to reassess this era's contribution to the origins of the kind of political decision-making that is associated with the democratic revolution.

The Opacity of Consensus

Stéphanie Novak — 2011-11-24T08:43:21Z

At the Council of the European Union, decisions are usually made by consensus. Does this mean that all the countries are of one mind? In fact, disagreements are often concealed, since it is not in the interest of most countries to publicize the fact that they have been defeated. Stéphanie Novak describes the various practices that consensus entails and gives an account of the opacity presiding over the exercise of joint sovereignty.