Are political parties spaces for the production of a form of policy analysis? This query arises especially given the ‘programmatic function’ typically attributed to parties, a fact that raises two questions: To what extent are the political alternatives proposed by parties and the critiques they direct to those in power formulated in terms of public intervention? And are such plans developed using party-based policy expertise?

The literature on political parties provides few answers to these questions, least of all the second. This is first of all related to the way parties are understood in the main theoretical models. A number of analyses hold that political platforms are of only secondary importance to parties. The notion of the ‘catch-all party’ (Kirchheimer, 1966) thus leads one to think that voters more often choose a party according to its leader than its platform and, with electoral success in mind, that it is better for parties to stay vague and ambiguous. But other analyses, interpreting proposals for public intervention as ‘resources and subjects of party competition’ (Coman and Persico, 2014), are not particularly attentive to the way in which these proposals are produced. This is notably the case in approaches holding that policy issues pre-exist parties, that they use them strategically (Downs, 1957), or that they position themselves according to the ‘cleavage’ they represent (Lipset and Rokkan, 1967). The same also holds for approaches placing the choice of issues at the heart of competition between parties (Stokes, 1963), to the extent that the construction of issues receives less attention than differences of ‘salience’, and possibly framing, depending on the party. The ‘cartel party’ model (Katz and Mair, 1995) not only highlights the reduced competition between parties and the growing similarity between party options, but also emphasises the value given to management abilities in parties that manage the state more than they represent society. Little is said, however, about how these abilities are constituted and used.

Recent French studies of French political parties have been attentive to field research and frequently demonstrated a critical distance from the preceding analytical models, but they provide few answers to the question of party-specific policy analysis. This is partly explained by the predominance of approaches focused on the entrepreneurial and organisational dimensions of parties that follow a paradigm ‘of Webero-Schumpeterian inspiration’ (Sawicki, 2001).