French Cohabitation and the Nature of Policy Outputs

The impact of cohabitation on policy outputs has been the object of recent research. There is a general agreement that cohabitation either reduces (Lazardeux 2015) or blocks (Leuffen 2009) policy-making activity. Leuffen particularly uses the domain of European policy-making to show that cohabitation increases the number of veto players in the decision-making process and reduces the possibility of changing the status quo. In this paper, I extend the level of analysis by questioning whether cohabitation leads to different- rather than reduced - policy outputs. I use data from the Comparative Agendas Project on the production of legislation in France from 1974 to 2013 to examine whether the fields of legislative activity vary between periods of cohabitation and unified government. More precisely, I look at whether the government under cohabitation is less likely to enact legislation on foreign policy, defense, or constitutional revisions (domains in which the president has traditionally been preeminent) during cohabitation periods.