While ‘government’ evokes the sense of the regular exercise of hierarchical power across the whole range of areas of public policy, ‘governance’ describes a more mediated, context-specific process. The dynamics of public policy vary according to the nature of the policy problem, the characteristics of the policy sector, key historical junctures and path-dependent decisions and the configurations of the actors in play. For those analysts imbued with the concept, policy dynamics can best be understood by fine-grained comparisons of contrasting policy sectors. From this perspective, the dynamics in economic development, welfare or education are contingent upon the structural qualities of the sectors concerned, or, in a weaker definition, upon the structural context within which games are played or prevailing ideas or discursive registers diffused. Thus framed, policy sectors can be compared in terms of their ideational structures and discursive coalitions; their institutions, actors and networks; the exogenous or endogenous provenance of change therein; and their capacity for legitimising or resisting change.

Reasoning in terms of policy sectors, the approach adopted here for the sake of comparison, emphasises the contingent nature of power and process. Generalities, whether about power or the nature of the state, require fine-grained, meso-level analysis to be undertaken to provide support for or to falsify general propositions. Comparing distinct areas of public policy is a robust means of testing propositions about governance, as well as revisiting representations of France as a state-centric polity.