Democratizing France

The Socialists' decentralization reforms of 1982 to 1986 significantly altered the traditional institutional framework of centralization. By formalizing the informal, decentralized rules followed by local administrators and elected officials in the periphery, the new laws have produced great changes in the processes and institutions of local government. They have introduced a new kind of transparency into local officials' practices and opened up local politics and administration to new patterns of development, to new forms of administrative activity, and to increased political activity.

Many scholars, however, disappointed that the reforms did not go as far as the Socialists had anticipated, have tended to be quite conservative in their assessments of the impact of decentralization on local institutions and processes. For obvious reasons, only those focused on administrative law saw radical change in the Socialist reform – and this followed years of describing a pattern of continuing centralization attenuated at best by minor modifications in the law. Administrative law scholars produced countless new texts outlining the new laws and they carefully revised all the old primers. In addition, whereas many experts published tomes examining the impact of the new laws on local administration in general, others edited volumes that detailed the effects of decentralization on all aspects of local government, and still others wrote books and articles concentrating on the impact of decentralization on one or another level of local government.