A qualitative and network study of two key institutions linking economists and government in France, which aims to study the structural determinants of the intellectual divide that has grown in the field of Economics in France over the last 20 years. This study is envisaged as an immediate follow on from Stage I, which was devoted to building a database on the evolution of French Economics since 1950, and begins to utilize said database, tying it to qualitative material.

The qualitative research design will help understand the context in which controversies between economists were born within Economics in France and how institutions close to political and business structures managed the shape and evolution of said controversies. It will allow us to shed light on the (absence of) relationships between orthodox and heterodox economists and situate their positions within these debates, furthering our understanding of what structural conditions paved the way for the dominance of orthodox economists and their appropriation / monopolization of expert position and advice.

We propose a two-pronged approach: (1) semi-structured interviews with prominent heterodox Economists who emerged in the 1980s/1990s and, for the better part of a decade, cohabitated with mainstream Economists in French Higher Education; combined with (2) a case-study analysis of the Conseil d’Analyse Économique (CAE), or Council of Economic Advisors, an emblematic French institution that served as a vehicle for the strengthening of orthodox Economists’ ties to political structures, allowing them to settle their monopoly as the sole authority of economic expertise in the country, marginalizing and alienating heterodox points of view. In addition to the CAE, it would be useful to broaden the scope of the approach, and of the organizational analyses and interviews, to the Cercle des Economistes (CDE), another institution that serves as the anteroom of the CAE. Combining data on both institutions would provide a better understanding of the exclusion of heterodox economists since the creation of the CAE.

At this point in time, only schools of economic thought of neoclassical economics tradition, also labelled mainstream or orthodox, are represented in the Council of Economic Advisors, which wields serious influence over public policy decisions made by consecutive governments in France. A qualitative study of this institution, coupled with interviews of prominent Economists of the two main heterodox movements in France, regulation theory (théorie de la regulation) and economy of conventions (‘l’économie des conventions), would provide an important foundation to a larger inquiry (to be carried out as further research with the support of the database built in stage I) into the broader question of the survival of the heterodox approach, not just within French academia, but also in other institutions, rooted within the structures of political power.