Not all parliamentary activities call for policy analysis. Some, such as oral questions, require less expertise and a good share of bad faith. Others are based on log-rolls and on strategic or signalling games. To some extent, however, Members of Parliament (MPs) in modern legislatures are expected to care about the content of public policies. Despite a shared trend toward de-parliamentarisation (Rosanvallon, 2015), most legislation still has to be formally approved by parliament in most democracies. Beyond passing laws, parliaments can also oversee government activities and public policies. The electoral and institutional stakes of such oversight activities are high since, all over Europe, including in France, legislatures can decide to dismiss governments not only for legal reasons but also for political reasons.

Any legislature actually finds itself in a twofold situation vis-à-vis policy analysis. First, it relies on policy analysis produced beyond its walls to perform its main tasks: legislating, overseeing the government and participating in public debates. In order to do so, legislatures in Europe crucially depend on external expertise because their human resources are limited. The topics they are supposed to cover are potentially unlimited. Moreover, in most cases, MPs have to act in emergency situations. Parliaments, however, are also loci where policy analysis is produced through a variety of procedures: inquiry committees, reports of all kinds, answers obtained from the administration in response to oral or written questions for example, therefore producing reliable information about public policies can be either a by-product of parliamentary activities (as is the case for committee reports published during the legislative process) or an end in itself (as for inquiry committees’ reports).

This chapter assesses the role of the French parliament which comprises two assemblies, the National Assembly (NA) and the Senate, based on this twofold dimension (using and producing expertise). Should the shared and well-known diagnosis of the weakness of the French parliament under the Fifth Republic (Huber, 1996; Hayward, 2004; Francois, 2007) be extended to the policy analysis dimension? This may seem logical. Indeed, given that the process of expertise is a key dimension of actual legislative games (Krehbiel, 1991), one might expect the French government to strictly bind the houses’ capacity to use and produce information. Yet, the alternative hypothesis can also be formulated: the French parliament might have sought to offset its constitutional boundaries by relying and investing in expertise.