Making the French Socio-cultural Approach Matter

The European academic literature on Western European political parties has always been comparative. Morever, it has favored general approaches that have led to the dissemination of global typologies. This chapter addresses the question of the place of the French case within this extensive literature on political parties: Does the French case count for the development of research on European political parties? To what extent does it fit into this comparative approach? Or does it challenge these global typologies? Furthermore, this chapter addresses the issue of the potential specificity of French research on political parties. How did French research on political parties develop? What are its major fields of interest? Is this research connected to English-language literature or isolated from it? In sum, the first group of questions considers French parties "from the outside", assessing how the comparative literature addresses French political parties. The second group reverses the logic and focuses on the French case "from the inside", asking how French scholars support or challenge the international frameworks of analysis. [First paragraph