3 new PhDs in political science at the CEE

Pablo Cussac defended on November 26 his thesis “Governing by Standards. Teacher Evaluation and the Processes of Managerial State-Formation in Mexico and Chile (1990s-2020s)”, prepared at the Sciences Po's Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics and Centre for International Studies. His PhD jury consisted of Philippe Bezes (co-supervisor), Hélène Buisson-Fenet, Eve Chiapello, Hélène Combes (co-supervisor), Patrick Hassenteufel, Patricio Silva and Antoine Vauchez. 

As he recounted during his defence, his political socialisation in a family of civil servants in post-2008 crisis Spain had a lot to do with his choice of research subject. After beginning to study the reform of teachers' evaluation in Mexico, which was then in full swing, for his master's thesis supervised by Philippe Bezes and Hélène Combes, he continued this work in his doctoral thesis by adding the case of Chile.

Whereas in Mexico, this reform was carried out against the corporatism of teachers' unions, in Chile it was organised with the teaching profession, in reaction to neoliberalism. Despite these different contexts, Pablo Cussac's research, based on interviews, written sources, ethnographic observations and statistics, highlights similar consequences for bureaucracies (the strenghtening of capacities through the outsourcing of evaluation to private organisations, to the detriment of ministries) and for the teaching profession (the individualisation of evaluations increases competition within the profession, leading to demobilisation and remobilisation of unions).

The research also offers an opportunity to rethink international comparisons. Comparing the cases of Mexico and Chile was not self-evident, given their size, education system organisation and political history. In his thesis, Pablo Cussac therefore looked at comparable processes: the political coalitions behind the standards, the bureaucratic capacities (in terms of professionalisation, expertise and coordination of administrations) built up to implement them, and the effects of these instruments on the teaching profession and unions.

Pablo Cussac has now taken up a postdoctoral research position at the Université de Lille, as part of the UNERGY project, directed by Aude Lejeune.
 

On 6 December, Zoé Evrard defended her PhD thesis, “Redeploying Planning in Support of a New Neoliberal Consensus: On the Mediating Role of Economic Expertise in the Belgian Negotiated Neoliberalization Process”, prepared at AxPo and the CEE, before a jury comprising Cornel Ban, Vincent Gayon, Verena Halsmayer, Colin Hay, Dieter Plehwe and Matthias Thiemann (thesis supervisor). 

This dissertation examines the redeployment of state planning in Belgium as part of the distinctive neoliberalization trajectory of the country. It challenges the prevailing assumption that planning became obsolete under neoliberalism, showing instead that planning was both neoliberalized—repurposed to support market-oriented reforms—and neoliberalizing, actively shaping the Belgian neoliberalization process. Emphasizing the negotiated nature of this trajectory, the thesis asks: What role did expertise, including that originally developed for planning purposes, play in the negotiation of a new neoliberal consensus within the Belgian fragmented political regime? 

To answer this question, Zoé Evrard investigates the hypothesis that this expertise helped legitimize and negotiate a new neoliberal consensus in Belgium, but only after planning was transformed from its initial goal of economic democratization into a tool of market governance. Using extensive archival materials, official reports, oral history, and semi-structured interviews, she proposes a multi-level analysis situating the transformation of Belgian planning within the broader evolution of Belgian capitalism. 

The thesis provides three main contributions. First, conceiving planning as a politically flexible infrastructure enables empirical investigations, even after the decline of planning as a political ideology, and thus the study of its neoliberalization. Secondly, in a fragmented political regime, the political character of knowledge regimes is revealed when highlighting the mediating role of shared knowledge. Thirdly, by combining historical neo-institutionalism and the sociology of expertise, the study proposes a dynamic and relational approach to explain consensus formation in a fragmented regime.

Zoé Evrard is now a research fellow at the Centre de recherche et d’information socio-politiques (CRISP), in Belgium. 

On December 2, Émilien Houard-Vial defended his thesis "Expressing and Producing Party Ideology Today. The Case of the UMP/Les Républicains (2002-2024)", before a jury comprising Alexandre Dézé, Florence Haegel (thesis supervisor), Cécile Leconte, Thibault Rioufreyt, Frédéric Sawicki and Émilie Van Haute. 

This thesis focuses on the investment in ideological questions and their stakes within the French mainstream right, particularly within the UMP/Les Républicains, from 2002 to 2024. This work aims to contribute to the literatures on the decline of ideology, the organizational transformations of electoral-professional parties, and the electoral challenges faced by moderate right-wing parties, including those posed by the far right. It is primarily based on a qualitative and inductive methodology, combining the collection of written materials, observations, and interviews, but also incorporates quantitative data. 

Émilien Houard-Vial highlights the decline of the political-historical traditions of the right, the stabilization of the UMP/LR ideology around a liberal-conservative consensus and a rhetoric of "values" that allows for flexibility in ideological discourses, while maintaining a certain coherence over time and cohesion even on divisive issues. We explain the inefficiency of organizational ideological work in a weakly institutionalized party against the backdrop of an instrumental relationship to ideology, and the growing importance of personalized intraparty initiatives in the production of right-wing ideology. Finally, we show that in the face of increased partisan competition, the party primarily seeks to distinguish itself from its competitors on a meta-ideological dimension related to its identity as a governing party and its experience in power, in a context of permeability to radical right-wing discourse.

Émilien Houard-Vial holds a temporary teaching and research associate (ATER) position at the Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines.