How do governments justify a volte-face from a responsive to a responsible policy-attitude? A comparison of the Hollande and Mitterrand governments

What happens when the demands for political responsiveness and governmental responsibility stand in direct contrast with one another? When governments choose one over the other, how do they justify their choices? Through a comparative content analysis of justification arguments, we not only gather information about what this shift of choices actually consists of, but also about policy-makers’ perception of what is expected from them. This study thereby aims to contribute both to debates about the compatibility between social and fiscal policies in a globalizing economy, as well as to debates about the changing nature of the relationship between governments, parliaments and voters. The cases we look at are the French Hollande and Mitterrand governments. The comparison is particularly interesting because of the two different time periods the two cases are embedded in: Mitterrand was governing at the dawn of the post-industrial era, whereas Hollande is governing in a time in which the service-sector has become a major source of employment and the economy is much more integrated with those of other European countries. Moreover, while Mitterrand could draft his budgets with a (relative) monetary sovereignty, Hollande is part of a common currency that forces him to stick to a whole set of rules. In light of these contextual differences, we ask the question of whether, overall, Hollande is more/less responsive/responsible than Mitterrand. On top of that, we also explore how the content of the justifications referring to both responsiveness and responsibility have changed. Following structural theories about the impact of globalization on national policy-making, we hypothesize that the justifications used by Hollande feature more responsible considerations than the justifications of Mitterrand. Our hypothesis does not find strong confirmation, but we do find some important patterns of variation within the content of the justifications. This variation, we argue, is indicative of a different way in which social-democratic governments justify their role as political and democratic actors. The selection of Mitterrand and Hollande offers the comparative advantage of looking at two governments that had a relatively similar policy-course. Both executives, in fact, entered office with an electoral mandate for generous expenditure policies, but spent most of their term trying to contain public expenditure. Both Mitterrand and Hollande, thus, entered office with the intention of being highly responsive, but had to face strong economic and financial restrictions. In light of such factors, our analysis documents the mutating policy-attitude during the office-term. For reasons of comparability, we analysed the speeches held by the respective economy ministers when presenting the public finance law towards the parliament. These presentations are yearly events in which the minister provides an explanation of the criteria behind the government’s economic, fiscal and social policies. These highly salient events have an audience that ranges not only from allies to opposition within the parliament, but- through media coverage- also from the local constituencies to international financial markets. With our analysis we thus explore how each government profiles itself in front of such a broad audience.