ABSTRACT
In the Preface we stated that this book was born out of both passion and frustration. We hope that our passion for French politics has come to the fore. We also hope that we have worked out some of our frustration. In particular, we hope that the models we have presented constitute a significant value-added to the student of French politics – undergraduate, postgraduate and academic alike. In the past, we have been stimulated by the debates that we have encountered. At the same time, we have also been frustrated in the cases where scholars have taken assumptions as given and where these assumptions have been treated as if they were uncontestable. We hope that we have brought some of these hidden assumptions out into the open so perhaps allowing for more direct and clear-cut debates to occur in the future.
