the 1960 s and in the 1970 s. Britain and France have maintained a persistent stream
of publications. In the 1990 s the institutional expansion of the EU has oVered a new
knowledge frontier and has attracted an impressive volume of literature.
The USA had made massive contributions in the 1960 sand 1970 s. The irony is that
American scholars carried out more in-depthWeld research on European countries
than on their own. During the 1970 s political scientists like Douglas Ashford and
Sidney Tarrow made pioneering contributions on France, the UK, Italy, and Sweden
(Tarrow 1977 ; Ashford 1982 ). In more recent years they have experienced a decline in
academic attention to the relationships between federal, state, and local levels.
Comprehensive textbooks, that remain today references, had already been published
in the 1980 s(Anton 1989 ). North American research has developed a far greater
interest for policy studies dealing mainly with policy performances and who gets
what, when, and how from governments. In parallel they have kept much interest for
an established tradition like community power studies.
In the late 1960 s French territorial politics was studied using extensiveWeld
observation and identifying in a systematic way the informal links and practices
that bind local elected oYcials and central government bureaucrats and represen-
tatives (Thoenig 1975 ;Gre ́mion 1976 ). Its apparently normative neutral and
empirically rooted perspective, as well as the rather counterintuitive observations
it collected, were a source of inspiration for many scholars in Europe and abroad.
In the UK a publicly-funded initiative was launched at the end of the 1970 sonthe
speciWc topic of center–local government relationships. British political science has
become a leading contributor to the advancement of agnostic knowledge in the domain
(Rhodes 1981 ;Goldsmith 1986 ; Page and Goldsmith 1987 ;Jones 1988 ; Sharpe 1989 ).
Academic debates are still alive. Territorial politics as a domain has attracted
research approaches and interpretations that may lead to opposite conclusions.
The lack of consensus among scholars is reinforced by ideological competition and
partisan conXicts inside civil society about the model of good government to adopt
for the coming years. Several classiWcations of approaches have been suggested
(Rhodes 1991 ; Stoker 1995 ; Pierre and Peters 2000 ). They can be subdivided into
four main classes: political dynamics; state theories; interorganizational theory;
and negotiated governance.
7 Political Dynamics: Polities Matter
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
Territorial politics as a domain has marginalized traditional public administration.
It postulates that a rather speciWc world called a polity exists with its own processes
and rationalities. Institutions are a research problem, not a given. Field research
286 jean-claude thoenig