In education policy, as in many other policy fields, well-designed policy reforms may fail to get enacted because policymakers may suddenly become confronted with a public backlash against their reform agenda. Thus, understanding the dynamics of public opinion is important in order to be able to assess the chances of successful reform. There is a…

An outline of the French electoral system covers the voters and their voting rights, assembly seats and candidates, political campaigning, allocation of assembly seats, balloting system, and recent coalitions. Election results for a bibliography are appended. (MSE)

France's three major trade union federations, which do not encompass all organized French workers, espouse quite different styles of relations with political parties. The author relates these to the three main traditions of French trade-unionism: the communist-leninist, the social democratic, and the syndicalist models, but finds them changing.…

The relative importance of government as measured in a sample of French secondary students is examined. Drawn from four different schools, 481 Parisian pupils served as the sample for the study. The students responded to a questionnaire ranking the importance of their relationships with the government and the police with seven other specific…

This article attempts an analysis of the present-day French university system and an assessment of the advantages and disadvantages of the educational reforms which have been instituted since the upheaval of May 1968. Educational legislation relevant to the new directions in the French universities is discussed, as well as the organization of the…