ProAcTA refines and implements the Programmatic Actor Framework to test the following hypothesis in the US, UK (England), Germany, and France (2008-2018): In the health policy sector of western democracies, budgetary austerity has had the counter-intuitive result of providing specialized sectoral elites favorable to maintaining or expanding the public role (policy custodians) with the means and the incentive to reaffirm their own authority and autonomy within the state in competition with other elites whose program instrumentalizes the rhetoric of austerity in support of programmatic retrenchment (austerians). Both custodians and austerians are examples of programmatic actors, whose characteristics were developed in our prior work and are defined in detail in this proposal. In this context, ProAcTA contributes to the testing of a broader hypothesis: Competition for authority among programmatic actors provides both an endogenous dynamic of policy change and a necessary explanation for policy content. Programmatic actors, custodians, and austerians are ideal types. The Programmatic Actor Framework contributes to specifying them. Through systematic biographical information, in-depth targeted interviews, and detailed policy content analysis we determine to what extent collective actors approaching these roles can be identified. We ask in particular: - What are the social and professional characteristics of individuals directly involved with reforming or defending health policy programs? Under what circumstances do they coalesce into relevant and influential collective actors? - To what extent have arguments centered on the defense of public authority and/or the sustainability of health systems been mobilized by custodians in response to the challenge of austerity, and how successful have they been in the ongoing competition with austerians? - What new or repurposed policy instruments have been mobilized by programmatic actors? An important area of investigation is the extent to which functional equivalents relating both to the composition of elites and to their strategies can be established across national systems that, while all face significant budgetary pressure, vary on significant dimensions. We distinguish two clusters of structural variables that are expected to channel and constrain the actions of elites. - Structure and history of health payment systems - Extent, timing and political salience of austerity policies In specifying these, we seek to go beyond both the received typology of social welfare systems and the dichotomy between liberal and statist programs. This allows us to re-examine the assumptions held both by supporters of social policy retrenchment and its detractors by submitting to empirical testing the premise, too often taken as self-evident, that the various strategies linked to austerity (budget cuts, privatization, outsourcing...) have necessarily weakened the scope and authority of the state.

On a daily basis, millions of people post their opinions on Web 2.0 and discuss about various topics such as the news, politics, the latest results of athletics, etc. These kinds of postings contribute to the production and dissemination of the image of different entities, such as that of politicians or companies. The image, as we specify it here, is a structured and dynamic representation which can be seen in at least two ways: the representation that an entity wishes to assign to itself, and the view that a person or a group of persons has of this entity. Thus, Internet seems to be privileged in its role as a contributor to disseminate, strengthen and impose representations and opinions, and as a place where the logic of influence is present. In this framework, the ImagiWeb project aims precisely at studying the image of entities of various kinds (companies, politicians, etc.) as this is diffused and viewed on the Internet. The study of these representations and their dynamics is considered today to be a real challenge which, if it is resolved (even partially), will not only allow to respond to specific needs, especially in the field of the veille, but it will also answer to important nowadays issues in the field of political sciences and sociology in general. The project proposes two major novelties. The first is to address together a set of issues treated so far separately (study of the opinions, taking context into account, the topic evolution, social network analysis, study of the topology of the Web) around a common object that is the image of entities (in the sense of the representation) that populate the Web. Emphasis is given to the fact that one entity can be associated with several different images (sometimes competing), and also to the underlying temporal aspect of the dynamics of the images. The second novelty concerns the involvement in the project of SHS researchers. This is still quite rare in such computer science projects. Thus, the case study about the EDF company will be carried out with the assistance of a semiologist who will be able to enlighten the automated analysis provided by computer tools produced during the project. In addition, the involvement of the social scientists of CEPEL will allow not only to conduct a relevant study on the image of the politicians, but also to provide answers relative to the issues of representing the data extracted from the Web and characterizing the panels of Internet users. The project ImagiWeb involves six partners (three academics and three companies, one being a PME). Previous bilateral cooperations between the partners will ensure a very good start for the project.

The outburst of the Yellow vests surprised by its scope, shape and evolution. Based on a comprehensive set of quantitative and qualitative data collected since November 2018, GILETSJAUNES, brings together the various research team working on Yellow vests over the past year. First, it aims at documenting the socio-demographic, political and spatial characteristics of the participants. Then it scrutinizes the processes of politicization and the transformations of the repertoire of action, deepening the question of the relationship to environmental issues. Finally, questioning its scope and effects, the project measures the media, political and social reception of the movement. Based on mix-methods it combines a synchronic and longitudinal approach of this unique social movement. Our project will draw on a very rich body of quantitative and qualitative data collected since November 2018. These data will be enriched and put into perspective with new data that will allow, in particular, to deepen the effects of politicization of the movement, its forms and logics of mediatization, as well as its consequences on political supply and demand. Our research design is based on a mix-methods for analysing materials of varied nature and origin, constituted in a corpus whose richness (diversity of modes and scales of collection, anchored in different sites of mobilization, diachronic dimension) and complementarity contribute to the heuristic scope of the project. The comparative and multidisciplinary approach that we are mobilizing is thus aimed at giving an account of the GJ movement in its different dimensions and at shedding light on its configurational complexity, while allowing generalizations by comparing the different materials and sites. Common training courses (BaseX, GIS, digital) will allow us to put this approach to the test. Three research questions guide our work: first, what are the sociospatial and sociological characteristics of Yellow Vests? To answer these questions, the ESO team explores the "configurations and spatiality of the movement of YGs" (WP2), while the CERIES team reconstructs the "professional careers, working conditions and wage claims" (WP3) in order to explain the displacement of conflictuality into new spaces. The second issue concerns the relationship to the Yellow Vests policy. Political values and behaviours are dealt with by one of the Pacte teams (WP4) and related to the "processes of politicisation of the movement and by the movement" (WP5) studied longitudinally by the CED team. More specifically, the project shows how the "Yellow jackets and environmental problems" are articulated through the study of their "ecologies, repertoires of action, configurations of mobilizations" (WP6) made by the AMURE team. The third research question concerns the media, political and social reception of the Yellow Vests movement. The LASSP team is interested in "the media production of the Yellow Vests" (WP7), in relation to the "agenda effects, transformations of the political offer and recompositions of the partisan system" produced by the movement seized by the Pacte team 2 (WP8). More specifically, the Pact team 3 is looking at the "reception of Yellow Vests by the inhabitants of working-class neighbourhoods". In the end, with this resolutely multidisciplinary project, which is at the heart of axis 4.4 "Inequalities, discrimination, migrations", we aim to explain both who the YGs are, what they do to politics and in turn what politics does to them.

Agroecology, or, more accurately, several of its currents, has gain in recent years an important recognition, transforming from an “anti-establishment” model against the Green Revolution to an appropriate (or befitted) model to meet the challenges of global change. The success of agroecology is undeniable: of all currents critiquing the green revolution, this is the only one that has succeeded in being recognized as a viable agricultural model. This transformative process is accompanied by strong debates about what is or should be defined by the term agroecology, revealing thus the importance of speaking about agroecology in the plural form. The growing recognition of agroecologies is indeed marked by an increasing variety of forms of agriculture claiming themselves as forms of agroecology. If agroecology was an already very diverse field, its public recognition exacerbates this variability. In the last few years agroecology grew from a set of discreet alternative forms of agriculture that challenged the conventional agricultural model to a wide variety of forms having in common to be presented as more sustainable forms of agriculture. The IDAE project aims at understanding the processes at stake, which we will approach as various and differentiated institutionalization processes. We will carefully investigate how the different agroecologies have stabilized through various institutional supports, how they interact among themselves and transform each other, and which effects these institutionalization processes have on agroecological practices on the ground. We will identify and characterize the forms of institutionalization of agro-ecologies at the local, national and transnational scale. We will study the institutionalization of agroecologies at the inter/transnational scale in order to understand the overall context in which this process unfolds and to better contextualize the national case studies. Three large agricultural countries, where the debates on agroecology are both important and different, will be particularly studied: France, Brazil and Argentina. In each country, particular case studies will be analyzed at a fairly local level. Scientific dynamics of the project we will base on two approaches: an approach through the study of the various domains where the institutionalization takes place: i.e. economic, political and scientific; an approach through case studies, allowing to observe and report on the institutionalization processes at stake. The work will be structured around six work packages (WP). In the first (WP 1) the analysis of the institutionalization of agro-ecologies in France, Brazil and Argentina will be contextualized in view of global scale processes, by looking at how different agro-ecologies circulate. We will analyze in each country the policy (WP 2) and market dimensions (WP 3) of the institutionalization processes of agroecologies. Then we will be looking at how those processes result in a rearrangement of knowledge (WP 4). Finally, based on research conducted in the previous work packages, the last one (WP 5) will be devoted to the analysis of hybridization, coexistence and confrontations between conventional agriculture and agroecologies (WP 5). A coordination work package (WP 0) will be responsible for connecting the different work packages and partners to produce integrative studies.