The ”turning point” of austerity in France in 1982-1983 through the prism of social network analysis: Anatomy of an economic controversy

This communication presents the first results of an exploratory research concerning a group of persons composed of French Left government members and of members of their staff, who have contributed to the austerity policy debate in France in 1982-1983. Our aim was, first, to identify namely these people who have more or less actively participated to this controversy: they are around thirty five; second, to highlight their opinions on different economic policy subjects at several crucial moments; third, to reconstitute the networks they form when they cooperate and when they give advices on economic policy decisions. The "turning point" of austerity in France in 1982-1983 is an interesting case study of a regulation process of a State's economic policy. Indeed, beyond its historic importance, this episode has been very well explained and documented, from a lot of points of views, from journalists, biographers, researchers and actors themselves. Thus, the numerous debriefings and interviews make us available a rich ethnography, with indirectly collected data on this 'milieu'. To complete these information, we use on the one hand the Bottin Administratif, a book which, each year, makes the inventory all the people who compose the French State (executive and administrative staffs), and on the other hand, the Who's who which gives all the information on education and professional career of famous people in France: luckily, all the people identified in this study appear in these two sources. Our analyses are based on the multiple relations between these different kind of prosopographic, biographic, network and opinion data, and aim at understand the regulatory process of economic policy. In our study, we highlight on the way the actors share information and exchange points of views within an uncertainty context. We show the influence of social structures of the French education system ("Grandes Ecoles") and of the French State ("Grands Corps") on politics. We focus on individuals, and we analyze their changes of opinions when they face of other opinions. We insist on the importance of their relational interdependencies to understand their strategies. We thus aim at contribute to the understanding of the transformation of the social and economic relations within the French society by focusing, especially, on the "turning point" of austerity in France in 1982-1983, which prefigures the period of the financial markets reform in 1984-1986.