In May 1988, Francois Mitterrand was reelected as president of France, and he immediately exercised his right to dissolve the National Assembly and call for a new legislative election. As Table 11.1 shows, after the election, Mitterrand's Socialist Party held 275 of the 577 seats in the National Assembly. Two conservative parties, the Gaullists (RPR, 130 seats) and the Union pour la Démocratic Franchise (UDF) (90 seats), together held 220 seats. The Communists held twenty-five seats, and for the first time since the 1973 election, forty-one deputies formed a Center group (the Union du Centre, UDC) independent of the UDF. Since the election failed to return a majority for either the Socialist Party or the coalition on the right, the Socialists formed the first minority government in the history of the Fifth Republic, with Michel Rocard as prime minister.

The formation of the Rocard minority government raised speculation about the role that the French National Assembly might begin to play in French legislative politics. Until 1988, the French government had been able to use the numerous constitutional procedures to limit sharply the legislative role of parliament (see, e.g., Andrews 1982, Frears 1981, and Keeler 1993; in French see Masclet 1982 and Parodi 1972). However, given its minority status, it was not clear whether the Rocard government could use the wide range of institutional procedures at its disposal to limit the opposition's role in policymaking, or if the government would find it necessary to make policy concessions to the opposition in order to pass legislation.