Working time reduction is a long-term and conflicting process in France. This process involve opposite views about economic rules and laws. We propose to contribute to the history of these oppositions by making a comparative study of the arguments exchanged in parliamentary debates on two laws reducing working time: 40 hours week (1936) and 35 hours week (1998-2000). Our first study of these two debates revealed a strong permanence of the arguments exchanged despite the differences in political and social contexts. A major change appeared however: statistical data and economic expertise have been developed and are increasingly mobilized in debates. We focus here on how political actors refer to this expertise in parliamentary debates. We will analyse how the economic studies are received, appropriated or not by political and social actors and are used or even manipulated in the arena that is the parliamentary debate. The aim is to analyse whether this expertise contribute to the policy change. We will use the lexical analysis (with a software called “Alceste”) to distinguish different economic arguments in the debates and their links with the context of their enunciation. More generally, we will try to show how textual analysis can provide methodological tools for policy analysis.
