BENOIT Cyril

Independent regulatory agency has become the standard institutional choice in Western Europe. Little is known, however, about the involvement of legislators in their design and in their monitoring. In this paper, we analyse ex-ante and ex-post legislative involvement for 48 regulatory agencies enacted in France. We show that legislators debate and design more substantially agencies for which the government bill has already granted them more powers to appoint members to their board, or to be appointed as board members themselves. Once enacted, agencies that allow greater participation by legislators in their decision-making are subject to greater scrutiny, and this even after controlling for routine oversight activities. Regulatory domains matter, though only for ex-post legislative oversight. These results suggest that legislative involvement is selective and driven by strategic considerations. More fundamentally, they imply that legislative involvement could be more important in regulatory agency activities than usually assumed.

Research has paid little attention to date on how European Union law and regulation affect both the public-private mix in healthcare and the organization of private health insurance as an industry. Filling this gap, this collective book provides insights on the political economy of EU insurance regulation, its impact on private health insurers and on its interactions with domestic healthcare policy-making in four countries. Assembling original contributions drafted by a multidisciplinary team, Private Health Insurance and the European Union offers a thorough examination of a largely unrecognized source of EU influence in healthcare – and sheds a new light on the role played by private actors in social policy.

Historically, private health insurance (PHI) in France (which covers the complementary share of health expenditures) has been dominated by non-profit entities, namely mutual benefit societies. The sector has experienced a manifold marketization process over the recent years, partly due to the application of EU law and regulation. Yet this chapter argues that it has been decisively reinforced and sometimes shaped by a series of policies adopted at the national level. Indeed, over the last 20 years, successive French governments have tried to increase health coverage without increasing the share already covered by the public purse. This strategy ostensibly involved private health insurers in achieving several governmental objectives, yet the prior effects of Europeanization on these entities were poorly acknowledged by policymakers. As such, the many consequences associated with the rise of a “European-driven” market now increasingly conflict with a “State-driven” market. This, in turn, has strong implications for the scope and the nature of health coverage.

We offer a series of reflective insights about the state and direction of studies related to the politics of regulation. Notably we argue that the field is characterized by persisting divisions between Americanists and Europeanists. Largely focused on the actions taken by political principals, the former regularly report a substantial politicization of regulatory behavior. Reflecting on recent developments in US politics however, we show that political influence could be overestimated in the United States. Symmetrically, this same influence could be underestimated by Europeanists, who for now have largely focused on regulators and agencies. This is notably suggested by a discussion of recent development in European politics, as revealed by contributions systematically measuring agency politicization in Western European democracies. On this basis, we identify some promising research questions and agendas for future studies on the politics of regulation.

La 4eme de couverture indique : "This comprehensive Handbook takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of parliaments, offering novel insights into the key aspects of legislatures, legislative institutions and legislative politics. Connecting rich and diverse fields of inquiry, it illuminates how the study of parliaments has shaped a wider understanding surrounding politics and society over the past decades. Through 26 thematic chapters, expert contributors analyse parliamentary institutions from various disciplinary perspectives (history, law, political science, political economy, sociology and anthropology). A wide range of approaches is covered, including the sociological study of members of parliaments, gender studies and the mathematical conceptualisation of legislatures. Exploring the history of parliament, the concepts and theories of parliamentarism, constitutional law, and the linkages between parliaments and the administrative state or with populism, this incisive Handbook provides a panoramic view of this institution. Chapters also map the main trends, patterns of developments and controversies related to parliaments, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of current research and identifying a range of promising avenues for further study. Drawing together international and comparative approaches, the Handbook of Parliamentary Studies will be a critical resource for academics and students of parliamentary politics, political science, political economy, public law and political history. It also provides a vital foundation for researchers of legislative and political institutions.".

This comprehensive Handbook takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of parliaments, offering novel insights into the key aspects of legislatures, legislative institutions and legislative politics. Connecting rich and diverse fields of inquiry, it illuminates how the study of parliaments has shaped a wider understanding surrounding politics and society over the past decades.

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This research note introduces two novel indexes designed to measure legislative activity (ParlAct) and use of digital devices to maintain legislative functions (ParlTech) during the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic. It will also present a novel comprehensive dataset on the functioning of legislatures during a critical period of the pandemic, providing scores for 152 domestic legislatures on both the ParlAct and ParlTech indexes. It will be argued that both indexes could also serve as templates for future research on legislative activity during other pandemics, crises and contingencies.

1st lines: Within the literature devoted to the analysis of the relations between political powers, administration and private interests, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has long constituted an important case study. For the reader familiar with this vast field of research, the mention of this agency in charge of environmental protection in the United States (intervening in numerous domains ranging from air pollution to the use of pesticides, including the regulation of toxic substances or drinking water) will undoubtedly recall the debate that opposed Dan Cook and Brian Wood in the American Political Science Review at the end of the 1980s : While the former saw the EPA as the prototype of a bureaucracy that was constantly buffeted between the influence of the presidency and that of Congress, the latter argued on the contrary that the agency's "resources" and the "zeal" of its members gave it an autonomy that allowed it to ignore, or even to thwart, the coalitions of interests defended by political actors.

The article sheds light on four modalities of integration of qualitative and quantitative results in political science. They are applied to different configurations, but each time the aim is to answer the same research question. These different approaches are illustrated using examples drawn from the political economy literature, dealing respectively with unionization in advanced capitalist democracies, economic voting, regulation of the pharmaceutical sector and financial regulation.

What is the distinctive contribution of political science to the study of legislative institutions? And what has the study of such entities brought to political research? This paper argues that the answer to these questions is twofold. First, students of legislatures have amply demonstrated that legislative institutions do matter for the daily lives of modern societies – a statement that, as established in a first section, was far from evident in classical studies of political regimes, systems or elites. Second, we argue that legislative studies have actively contributed to our understanding of institutional change and strategic behaviour, arguably two of the most crucial areas of inquiry in political science.

An analysis of the impact of Covid on the functioning of parliaments around the world and a reflection on the implication of a digitalization of their activities.

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A factor that may account for the largely unanticipated victory of Brexit in 2016 is the difference in engagement, mobilization, and, ultimately, turnout between those for whom the question of Brexit was a valence issue (a dry and almost technical question of determining the policies by which uncontroversial shared ends can be achieved) and those for whom it was a positional issue (a question of raw, almost visceral, political preference). The declining appeal of valence politics may reveal a phenomenon that goes beyond Brexit and Britain: a change in the nature and character of contemporary electoral competition that may help to explain the newly resurgent populism characteristic of Western liberal democracies.

This comprehensive Handbook takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of parliaments, offering novel insights into the key aspects of legislatures, legislative institutions and legislative politics. Connecting rich and diverse fields of inquiry, it illuminates how the study of parliaments has shaped a wider understanding surrounding politics and society over the past decades.

For Torben Iversen, capitalism is not responsible for the current crisis in democracies. Jenny Andersson and Cyril Benoît respond to him and underline the limits of this optimistic interpretation.

This comprehensive Handbook takes a multidisciplinary approach to the study of parliaments, offering novel insights into the key aspects of legislatures, legislative institutions and legislative politics. Connecting rich and diverse fields of inquiry, it illuminates how the study of parliaments has shaped a wider understanding surrounding politics and society over the past decades. Through 26 thematic chapters, expert contributors analyse parliamentary institutions from various disciplinary perspectives (history, law, political science, political economy, sociology and anthropology). A wide range of approaches is covered, including the sociological study of members of parliaments, gender studies and the mathematical conceptualisation of legislatures. Exploring the history of parliament, the concepts and theories of parliamentarism, constitutional law, and the linkages between parliaments and the administrative state or with populism, this incisive Handbook provides a panoramic view of this institution. Chapters also map the main trends, patterns of developments and controversies related to parliaments, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of current research and identifying a range of promising avenues for further study. Drawing together international and comparative approaches, the Handbook of Parliamentary Studies will be a critical resource for academics and students of parliamentary politics, political science, political economy, public law and political history. It also provides a vital foundation for researchers of legislative and political institutions.

Cyril Benoît was interviewed for the publication of his book "Regulating Access to Medicines. 1st lines: What do you call the social value of a drug? This is a notion that I use to describe an important political and regulatory evolution that has been observed in most Western countries over the last twenty years. Previously, the value of a drug was essentially understood from a therapeutic point of view, sanctioned by randomized double-blind clinical trials, with the establishment of a benefit-risk ratio, etc. This methodology was born in the 1960s and 1970s. This methodology was born in the 1960s and 1970s, when the pharmaceutical industry definitively left the pharmacy model. Large firms were formed, using increasingly rational processes to identify and produce drugs. In the 1980s and 1990s, another industrial transformation occurred, with the appearance of biotechnologies and the development of increasingly targeted and expensive drugs, no longer intended for a very large number of patients but for a few thousand, or even fewer, patients. The question then arose more or less explicitly as to whether it was worth devoting significant resources to small population groups, and perhaps in the future even to individuals, in a context of limited resources. Numerous agencies or bureaucratic organizations have been created to try to convert the therapeutic value of drugs into a market or social value: is the therapeutic efficacy of this molecule worth giving it a price? If so, which one? On what criteria? For which patients? etc.

For Torben Iversen, capitalism is not responsible for the crisis democracies are currently facing. Responding to this argument, Jenny Andersson underlines the limits of this optimistic interpretation.

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The study of legislative-administrative relations developed alongside the emergence of modern democratic institutions, as explored in a wide range of academic literature. This chapter offers an introduction to this literature. Contrasting American and European developments in the field, the first section provides an overview of the evolution of these debates, from both normative and positive angles. A second section discusses the key findings of the positive approach, first by taking a principal’s perspective: how and why legislatures try to influence administrative behaviour. It then take’s the agent’s perspective: how and why bureaucratic agents respond. The chapter concludes by drawing some implications for future research on legislative-administrative relations.

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This contribution introduces the Handbook of Parliamentary Studies. It first discusses the notion of ‘parliamentary studies’ before outlining the rationales for this editorial project and presenting its main findings, such as commonalities across a variety of disciplinary approaches, a recent renewed interest in legislatures’ rules and the resiliency of parliaments as institutions. After having presented the topic addressed by each contribution, the chapter emphasises the historical as well as conceptual affinities between parliamentarianism and encyclopaedism – an affinity that calls into question the current status of each apparatus.

In Belgium, the “public” side of health coverage is delegated and organized around non-profit private health insurers, namely mutual benefit societies, and as such, it is excluded from the perimeter of EU insurance law and regulation. Over the last two decades, and as a result of various governmental attempts to reduce health expenditure, mutual benefit societies nevertheless developed and managed on their own a variety of complementary coverage. This situation was challenged during the 2000s by for-profit insurance companies seeking to penetrate the market. In this context, they used both Insurance and Solvency II directives in their search for supranational support to challenge the position of mutual benefit societies. In turn, the latter responded by working politically to secure their position at the domestic level. As a result of these political struggles, a reform adopted in 2010 reinforced several features of the Belgian public-private mix by safeguarding the position of mutual benefit societies for complementary coverage. But this same reform also opened the supplementary side of health coverage to competition and aligned it with EU provisions, thus marketizing a share of the public-private mix in Belgium—with recent figures suggesting that this new pillar is now expanding.

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Preface by Patrick Hassenteufel. How is the value of drugs defined? On what criteria? And what are the political implications? Cyril Benoît proposes to answer these questions by studying the evolution of drug regulation in different countries. Over the recent period, this activity has become increasingly important, in a context where the pharmaceutical industry is turning towards the production of increasingly targeted and expensive drugs. It shows that the setting of drug prices is fraught with political issues, between pressure from industry and patients, the imperatives of health system sustainability, and controversies surrounding the "price of life" itself. Based on extensive statistical data and a vast survey of interviews with industry, government officials and experts, Regulating Access to Medicines reveals the political nature of an activity that is too often reduced to its technical dimensions. A reference work that will provide valuable information for the reflection of actors in the health sector as well as for the public debate.

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First lines: Students of public policy and administration should take a close look at The Policy State, authored by Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek. An original study of US political development, The Policy State is neither a piece about a particular set of public policies in a given sector, nor a contribution on policy‐makers or policy processes. More fundamentally, it argues in a challenging manner that in the United States public policy and policy‐making have been historically developed as an idiosyncratic art of governing. According to the authors, the massive expansion of public policies in many domains has gradually set up a specific mode of governance that has triumphed gradually since the early twentieth century and the progressive era, over earlier forms of governing. In an age when research on public administration and policy is increasingly fragmented and diversified, they make the case that the many features of modern‐day governance could be rooted in the same soil, namely that of the so‐called Policy State.

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Private health insurance (PHI) in France has been facing critical changes over the past 30 years. A complementary and voluntary scheme, it has been historically dominated by nonprofit entities. However, the share of for‐profit insurance companies in the sector has significantly increased. Nonprofit firms also changed their strategies and mimicked some for‐profit behaviors. The present paper argues that this process is a result of the conflict‐provoking coevolution of the insurance and health care sectors. Trying to improve the regulation of the insurance industry as whole, two European directives first jeopardized the business model of nonprofit entities. Then, two national reforms designed to improve health coverage significantly increased competition among insurers, notably in the area of corporate‐level contracts. Decoupling the insurance and health care sectors has become a major source of policy feedback and unexpected outcomes of reforms affecting the very organization of PHI.

This article examines the emergence of a supplementary health insurance market in France over the last twenty years. We develop the idea that, far from having followed a univocal trajectory, this evolution is the result of the encounter of several series of partially independent reforms: the European "insurance" and "Solvency" directives . the development of health care networks, encouraged by the public authorities . and more recently, the obligation for private sector companies to provide supplementary coverage to their employees. While each reform contributes to the strengthening of a health risk market, we emphasize that they respond to specific logics and mobilize specific actors. In this context, the article shows the tensions induced by this plurality of "marketings", which is accompanied by an increase in the complexity of the regulation of complementary health insurance in the French system.

Over the last 20 years, the study of economic regulation has attracted growing attention in political research. But what is so political about regulation? And what is “new”in the political analysis of this topic? We argue that the answer to both of these questions lies in the evolution of the conception of regulatory power in political research. To validate this claim, we first review the main developments that followed the introduction of agency-theoretic models in this field. While recognizing their insights, we argue that these contributions rest on a narrow, essentially directive conception of regulatory power. With regard to more recent developments, we then show how a focus on other facets of the politics of regulation has connected it to broader political science questions. This focus significantly improves our understanding of regulation’s influence on economic activities, public policy, and ultimately, on the politics of economic regulation in the broadest sense of the term.

First lines: In the Western world, it is widely acknowledged that the Welfare state has gradually eroded since the end of the 1970s due to a range of liberalization and deregulation policies, such as the privatization of social insurance schemes, the decentralization of Welfare services, or increases in competition between Welfare providers. Certainly, the pathways taken by such a large-scale transformation has varied from by country and by sector—overall, it has been more pronounced in Anglo-Saxon democracies than in Continental Europe, and more perceptible for pensions than for healthcare. It is also true that a number of post-war Welfare institutions have proven to be very resilient or particularly difficult to remove (think of America’s Medicare or the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom). Still, the creation of countrywide Welfare institutions is no longer seen as the sole nor the dominant way through which the nation-state envisions its intervention upon social and economic life. Indeed, recent events suggest that when present-day politicians try to promote large-scale program change, they face far greater opposition than their post-war predecessors—as recently exemplified by the conflictual adoption of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act in the US.

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Context: In France, private health insurance (PHI) has an exceptionally high level of coverage and accounts for 13.7% of health expenditures. A complementary and voluntary scheme, it has been historically dominated by nonprofit, mutual benefit societies. Over the past 20 years, however, the market share of for-profit insurance companies has increased by 47%. Financialization of the field developed, and competition based on new risk management strategies also increased. The broad aim of this paper is to characterize and to elucidate the causes of this trend. More specifically, we are interested in how and to what extent a series of supranational and national policies contributed to this situation. Method: Our data come from three sources. We first reviewed documents published by health insurers, government reports, and newspaper articles. We then conducted two semistructured interview campaigns between September 2017 and May 2018. The first mostly covered private and public actors and their involvement in European Union (EU) policymaking (n=21). The second series of interviews was conducted with another group of actors directly involved at the French level (n = 16). Findings: Our findings support preliminary observations. PHI in France, we argue, is indeed facing a development of competition and market-like instruments. Four major policies (two EU directives and two national reforms) played a significant role in this outcome. Surprisingly, however, it has never been the purpose of legislators and policymakers: while EU directives created a regulatory framework for insurance activities within the Single Market, policies adopted at the national level initially aimed at improving health coverage. We show that it is the interactions and the noncoordination among all of these policies that explain their unexpected outcome. Conclusions: The trend described in this paper is twofold. The first is Europeanization, as PHI in France is increasingly affected by EU legislation. Since this framework tends to favor larger firms and for-profit companies, a reduction in statutory coverage can no longer be considered a quasi-neutral transfer from (publicly owned) social security to nonprofit providers. At the same time, PHI is shifting toward collectivization: as competition increases, complementary health coverage is becoming gradually standardized and based at the corporate level. Together, these changes are likely to reduce freedom of choice and individual welfare, an assumption supported by studies published on the most recent period.

By studying a series of mobilizations initiated by French mutuals against the European Union's "insurance" directives between the 1990s and 2010, the article seeks to uncover the interaction of different factors that can explain the failure to promote economic interests at the European level. The lack of strategic resources explains the difficulty of the actors studied to get their demands on the agenda. But once these resource deficits are overcome, their inability to have the legitimacy of the values that underlie their demands recognized by the Commission's agents ultimately explains the failure of their mobilization.

The book coordinated by Hubert Heinelt and Sybille Münch aims to offer as broad a panorama as possible of "interpretative" approaches to European public action. While these approaches have developed significantly since the mid-1990s, their capacity to account for this subject remains, according to Heinelt and Münch, insufficiently recognized in the literature.

The term "economic approaches" is used to designate work that seeks to analyze public action using the concepts and methods developed by economics. The term should not, therefore, be confused with political economy as understood by much of political science, which generally takes the opposite approach-understanding "the economic" through "the political" (Hay and Smith, 2018). While state action has been at the heart of many debates and concerns in economics since its origins, the ways in which it is understood have varied considerably over time. Since the second half of the 20th century, two main axes have emerged. The first concerns the study of the justifications and effects of public intervention on economic activity. This very broad theme, which is also old, still occupies a central place in the discipline's agenda. A second line of research that has emerged more recently concerns the analysis of the design and implementation of public programs. Essentially developed in the wake of public choice and the Chicago School (of law and economics), it has long given rise to the production of works that maintain a strong mistrust of the virtue of state action, even if a certain complexity of this research can be observed over the recent period.

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The article questions the propensity of national regulatory schemes to shape the behavior and representations of "globalized" companies. To this end, we study the deployment of medico-economic evaluation agencies and their effects in the pharmaceutical sector. Within the industry, the adoption of expectations and evaluation methods specific to a single national agency located in England is observed. Two explanations for this situation are put forward. Firstly, the political work of the experts from the agency in question is revealed. Their presence in many international forums has enabled a significant enhancement of the regulatory standards used. Secondly, these initiatives provoked emulation within the industry. Convinced that the approaches of the British regulator were likely to become widespread, the industry gradually adopted their principles. The legitimacy they have been granted has in turn had an impact on drug development strategies and on the relationship between industry and other national regulatory agencies.

Definition of post-neoliberalism.

Presentation of the Public Choice approach and its implications for the analysis of politics.

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First lines: Over the last twenty years, many studies have reported the growing use of market-based instruments for the delivery of health services in Europe. Though still largely funded by the public purse, the general narrative that emerges is that European healthcare systems face a creeping tendency towards the integration of competition, price mechanisms, exit options, agencification or more specific tools (see for examples Paton, 1998, Neby, 2015). Scholars have devoted a great deal of attention to distinguishing this process of marketization from privatization (Hansen and Lindholst, 2016). Put simply, the former does not necessarily equate to, nor does it entail, the later. While marketization can occur without significant shifts in terms of the overall share of public spending, privatization designates an increased level of provision led by private providers — conversely, these providers may resemble former public actors more closely than market operators. Stated differently, there can be marketization without privatization, and vice versa. However, research also suggests that marketization in health policy has often been paralleled by privatization, even though contrasting paths have been followed from one country to another (Maarse, 2006).

1st line: In their book entitled Relic, William Howell and Terry Moe continue their work on the conceptualization of the presidential institution in the United States, begun in the early 2000s for the former1 and in the 1980s for the latter2. Although based on an assessment of the authors' previous work, the general thesis developed in the book is above all a position in the American public debate.

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Definition of the notion of regulation in political science.

This article examines the evolution of government pricing of drugs in France since 1948. While the objectives of this policy have remained the same for 70 years (to ensure patient access to quality treatments without burdening the accounts of the Health Insurance or compromising the development of the industry), the concrete modalities of this policy have evolved considerably, moving from unilateral administration of prices by the State to co-regulation of the drug market. This transformation has led the representatives of the State and the Health Insurance (the Economic Committee for Health Products) to deal with a growing number of actors (manufacturers, independent experts, health professionals, but also policies practiced in other countries). On the contrary, the scope of regulation has been extended to all the players and systems that determine expenditure on reimbursed drugs.

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Review of the literature on legislative studies in political science.

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The article sheds light on the phenomena of regulatory capture by examining an empirical configuration where quantitative results are available for a large sample, and where we seek to identify causal combinations by examining a small number of cases qualitatively. A Bayesian interpretation of process tracing is then proposed and applied to the study of the genesis of drug regulatory agencies in France and England. The approach allows the identification of institutional dependencies that are difficult to capture by the initial statistical analysis. They explain, more favorably than the capture thesis, the orientation of the regulatory schemes studied.

This article examines the emergence of a supplementary health insurance market in France over the last twenty years. We develop the idea that, far from having followed a univocal trajectory, this evolution is the result of the encounter of several series of partially independent reforms: the European "insurance" and "Solvency 2" directives . the development of health care networks, encouraged by the public authorities . and more recently, the obligation for private sector companies to provide supplementary coverage to their employees. While each reform contributes to the strengthening of a health risk market, we emphasize that they respond to specific logics and mobilize specific actors. In this context, the article shows the tensions induced by this plurality of "marketings", which is accompanied by an increase in the complexity of the regulation of complementary health insurance in the French system.

1st lines: For the past twenty years, numerous works have been devoted to "mixed methods" in political science. Despite the diversity of the procedures developed, their promoters are generally motivated by the same observation: qualitative approaches, applied "in depth" to a small number of trajectories, could usefully serve to complete, qualify, or even challenge theories demonstrated by quantitative methods on larger populations of "cases.

Change in economic regulation has traditionally been analyzed through the prism of agency theory, which opposes the rigidity of traditional bureaucratic schemes to the fluidity attributed to organizations that respond to the principles of new public management. Based on a comparison of changes in the regulation of the pharmaceutical market in France and in England, the article rejects this opposition, insisting on the temporalities of the reforms and on the power relations within the sectors to explain the pace and direction of change. During the 1990s and 2000s, the two countries took symmetrically divergent paths. First, a decentralized agency was created in England, while an interministerial administration was founded in France. These two entities are then affected by reforms that limit their capacity to intervene. We then show how past choices and the positioning of actors explain the requalification of these projects in the two cases studied, more than the dominant organizational traits in one country or the other.

This article examines the pricing of reimbursed prescription drugs in France from shortly after World War II to the mid-2010s. We analyze the consecutive forms this policy has taken, from unilateral pricing by the state (1948-1980s) to price negotiations between an inter-ministerial committee and pharmaceutical companies, which went into effect in the mid-1990s. On this basis, we show that state price control in France implies two ways of governing markets: government of values, where the idea is to assess medications on criteria of social justice ("la justice sociale")-that is, public health, keeping the national health insurance budget balanced, promoting research and development and supporting industrial employment-and government of behaviors, where the idea is to assess medications in accordance with market accuracy ("la justesse marchande")-that is, ensuring that prices will incline pharmaceutical companies and market actors to behave in ways that will serve state pharmaceutical policy. The aim of determining a just and accurate price through negotiation has regularly given rise to confrontation both within France's inter-ministerial negotiating committee, called the Economic Committee on Pharmaceuticals (Comité Économique des Produits de Santé or CEPS), and between that committee and pharmaceutical companies-in sum, between actors concerned to promote the distinct and antagonistic notions of social justice and market accuracy.

Since the early 2000’s, the European Union (EU) is implementing a policy agenda in favour of rare diseases (RD). A key milestone legislation was the adoption of the Orphan regulation in 1999, in order to encourage the development of “orphan drugs” (OD, i.e. drugs to treat RD and which qualifies as viable from a scientifically aspect but that would not be economically viable in the absence of policy intervention). Mainly operating through the European Medicines Agency (EMA) regulatory framework, this project is aiming at fostering RD drug research and development while ensuring fair access for the patients. In this respect, several incentives are provided to the manufacturer who successfully applied for an orphan drug status, such as a ten-year marketing exclusivity and tax reductions. However, the number of orphan drug designations (as well as orphan drug market approvals) application approvals in Europe is still significantly lower than in it is the US. The goal of this paper is to explain this discrepancy, by providing empirical, quantitative materials on the basis of an analysis of all of the decisions delivered by the EMA for this category of products. More precisely, the validity of three explanations will be further explored and discussed: 1 – Effects of bureaucratic politics at the EMA (avoiding “salami-slicing” behaviours). 2 – Smaller engagement from academics and biotechnology companies (and rent-seekers Big Pharmas). 3 – The consequences of the structure of tax-credits (US vs. EU).

When attempting to account for voting behavior in parliamentary bodies, researchers are often forced to collect incomplete data, as the practice of recording and publishing individual voting results is far from widespread across and even within institutions. While the actors present and the final decision are known, the distribution of votes and, consequently, the motivations, behaviors, and attitudes of individual voters are generally unknown. The aim of this article is to propose a range of solutions to this type of difficulty, adapting them specifically to the case of parliamentary activity. To do so, a multivariate probit model developed by Moritz Marbach (2015, 2017) is used. Placing himself in a Bayesian framework, he proposes to derive the distributions of voting choices from the exact stochastic distribution of decision data. In this first version of a paper in progress, we revisit solutions in the literature to the problem of the absence of individual voting data in parliaments. The properties of the model are then introduced. A concluding section reviews its limitations and application prospects.

Objectives: The aim of this work was to provide a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the health technology assessment (HTA) concept in the scientific literature through a scientometric approach. Methods: A literature search was conducted, by selecting publications, as well as news from the media, containing “health technology assessment” in their title, abstracts, or keywords. We then undertook a bibliometric and network analysis on the corpus of 2,865 publications thus obtained. Results: Since a first publication in 1978, interest in HTA remained marginal until a turning point in the late 1980s, when growth of the number of publications took off alongside the creation of the U.K.’s NICE agency. Since then, publications have spread across several journals. The ranking of the organizations that publish such articles does not reflect any hegemonic position. However, HTA-related scientific production is strongly concentrated in Commonwealth and Nordic countries. Despite its transnational aspects, research on HTA has been framed within a small number of scientific networks and by a few opinion leaders. Conclusions: The “career” of the HTA concept may be seen as a scientific-knowledge based institutionalization of a public policy. To succeed in a country, HTA first needs scientific prerequisites, such as an organized scientific community working on the health sector and health services. Then, it appears that the recognition of this research by decision makers plays a key role in the development of the field.

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Objectives: The aim of this work was to provide a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the health technology assessment (HTA) concept in the scientific literature through a scientometric approach. Methods: A literature search was conducted, by selecting publications, as well as news from the media, containing “health technology assessment” in their title, abstracts, or keywords. We then undertook a bibliometric and network analysis on the corpus of 2,865 publications thus obtained. Results: Since a first publication in 1978, interest in HTA remained marginal until a turning point in the late 1980s, when growth of the number of publications took off alongside the creation of the U.K.’s NICE agency. Since then, publications have spread across several journals. The ranking of the organizations that publish such articles does not reflect any hegemonic position. However, HTA-related scientific production is strongly concentrated in Commonwealth and Nordic countries. Despite its transnational aspects, research on HTA has been framed within a small number of scientific networks and by a few opinion leaders. Conclusions: The “career” of the HTA concept may be seen as a scientific-knowledge based institutionalization of a public policy. To succeed in a country, HTA first needs scientific prerequisites, such as an organized scientific community working on the health sector and health services. Then, it appears that the recognition of this research by decision makers plays a key role in the development of the field.

This article examines the setting of prices for drugs reimbursed by the State in France, from its origins after the Second World War to the mid-2010s. We analyze the successive forms taken by this policy, from the unilateral administration of prices implemented from 1948 to the 1980s to their negotiation within the framework of agreements between an interministerial committee and manufacturers from the mid-1990s. We defend the thesis that this state control of prices articulates two types of market government: a government of values, aiming to assess drugs on the basis of principles of social justice (promoting public health, respecting the balance of health insurance expenditure, favouring research and development and industrial employment); and a government of conduct, aiming to assess drugs on the basis of considerations of market fairness (ensuring that the prices established guide the conduct of industrialists and market players in the direction of the general interest). Far from being self-evident, the determination of "fair prices" gives rise to confrontations, within the Economic Committee for Health Products and in negotiations between the Committee and manufacturers, between actors with plural and antagonistic conceptions of social justice and market fairness.

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1st line: For the past twenty years, numerous works have been devoted to "mixed methods" in political science. Despite the diversity of the procedures developed, their promoters are generally motivated by the same observation: qualitative approaches, applied "in depth" to a small number of trajectories, could usefully serve to complete, qualify, or even challenge theories demonstrated by quantitative methods on larger populations of "cases. Thus, although they allow for the simultaneous examination of many units, they would overlook factors that are potentially decisive for the situations under consideration, but that do not lend themselves well to modeling - such as institutional inertia, the role of representations or the legitimacy conferred on certain groups.

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Change in economic regulation has traditionally been analyzed through the prism of agency theory, which opposes the rigidity of traditional bureaucratic schemes to the fluidity attributed to organizations that respond to the principles of new public management. Based on a comparison of changes in the regulation of the pharmaceutical market in France and in England, the article rejects this opposition, insisting on the temporalities of the reforms and on the power relations within the sectors to explain the pace and direction of change. During the 1990s and 2000s, the two countries took symmetrically divergent paths. First, a decentralized agency was created in England, while an interministerial administration was founded in France. These two entities are then affected by reforms that limit their capacity to intervene. We then show how past choices and the positioning of actors explain the requalification of these projects in the two cases studied, more than the dominant organizational traits in one country or the other.

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The thesis examines the configurations of actors and organizations involved in the regulation of access to the drug market in France and England, in charge of the scientific and administrative control of the pricing and reimbursement of these products. This activity became autonomous from the clinical assessment of their quality, efficacy and safety (dominating the regulation of their approval on the market) during the 1980s.

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The thesis examines the configurations of actors and organizations involved in the regulation of access to the drug market in France and England, in charge of the scientific and administrative control of the pricing and reimbursement of these products. This activity became autonomous from the clinical assessment of their quality, efficacy and safety (dominating the regulation of their approval on the market) during the 1980s.

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Compte rendu de lecture de : Ostrom (Elinor & Vincent) – Choice, Rules and Collective Action.

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1st paragraph: Far from being a simple review, this imposing volume edited by Charlotte Halpern, Pierre Lascoumes and Patrick Le Galès is more like an extension of the debates opened ten years earlier in Gouverner par les instruments.1 It should be noted from the outset that it is "instrumentation" and not just the notion of "instrument" that is highlighted in the title of this opus. This semantic shift underlines the authors' renewed attention to "the set of problems posed by the choice and use of tools [...] that make it possible to materialize and operationalize government action" (introduction, p. 17). It is also part of a desire to reinforce its anchorage in the more general debates that animate political sociology, thus responding to certain criticisms formulated against its postulates. This collective collection is composed of more than fifteen chapters, the most salient aspects of which are discussed in an exhaustive introduction, both through its synthesis of the theoretical issues raised and through its exposition of the main themes discussed.

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According to Banta [2003], Health Technology Assessment (HTA) requires special social factors in order to influence public health policy in a given country. If we agree that a positive relationship between policy makers, insurers and health practitioners must be present, we also claim that HTA first and foremost requires scientific expertise to emerge and become institutionalized. To address this socio-political phenomenon, we have undertaken a diachronic and synchronic analysis of the scientific literature on public health research. Such approach have already been choose by Macia-Chapulas [2012] to conduct a scientometric comparative analysis of health public policy among Mexico Chili and Argentina. Therefore, we undertook a worldwide literature search of large scientific database (Scopus, Web of Science & Medline) using text-mining techniques, and then by deepening them using bibliometrical, geographical and network analysis on a sample including more than 2000 scientific publications. Consequently, with the help of data mining visualization tools, we have been able to draw a landscape of the HTA field, gain an understanding of its history (between 1975 and 2012), examine its trends, rank the actors concerned and determine patterns of scientific collaboration in order to gain an understanding of the diffusion of ideas and, ultimately, the institutionalization of scientific knowledge expertise in this field. In particular, by comparing the trajectory of the HTA concept in different academic fields, we reveal that its fertility is closely correlated with certain types of development of the disciplines of Health Economics and Epidemiology in different regions or countries. The so-called Scientific aspects of HTA have thereby been reinforced by disciplinary developments whose own success is strongly related to academic and political factors. Banta D., (2003), The development of health technology assessment, Health Policy, 63, 121-132. Macias-Chapula, (2012) Comparative analysis of health public policy research results among Mexico, Chile and Argentina, Scientometrics, 1-14.

The use of reactions between polycarbonate (PC) and polystyrene-block-poly(ethylene-butylene)-block-polystyrene-grafted-maleic anhydride (SEBS-g-MAH) is a convenient way to create SEBS-g-PC. Grafting was realized by reactive extrusion at three temperatures using SnOct(2) or TBD catalysts. SEC analyses showed the apparition of a double distribution when the TBD was used. The mean residence time widely increased when this catalyst was used, and the rheological curves depicted a percolation effect of the SEBS nodules in the PC matrix. No explicit evolution was found with the use of SnOct(2). The thermal analyses showed the disappearance of the PC phase transition temperature. The Van Gurp-Palmen plots confirmed the efficiency of the TBD catalyst and that 260 degrees C was the optimal reactive extrusion temperature.

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