Which Level Is Reformed? Political Protection and the Politics of Territorial Restructuring in France
France’s 2014 territorial reform redrew regional boundaries while preserving departments, despite longstanding calls for their abolition. Summarising a recent article from Regional & Federal Studies, Patrick Le Lidec argues that this choice reflected the unequal political protection enjoyed by different levels of government. Institutions with stronger protection could both resist restructuring and help redirect reform towards a more exposed tier.
Territorial reforms are often presented as exercises in institutional design. Governments conclude, whether on their own initiative or under fiscal and European pressure, that existing structures are too fragmented, too costly or too small, and redraw boundaries in the hope of creating larger and more efficient units. Yet this leaves out a basic political question: why are some levels of government selected for restructuring while others are left untouched?
France offers a demanding test. In 2014, the government of President François Hollande reduced the number of metropolitan regions from twenty-two to thirteen, although departments had long been described as redundant in expert reports and reform debates. Why, then, was the regional map redrawn while departments remained in place?
Comparative research explains more readily why territorial reform reaches the political agenda than why a particular tier becomes its target. The argument developed here is that reform tends to fall on the least politically protected level, which need not be the one judged least efficient. This outcome reflects both the executive’s anticipation of political costs and the efforts of protected levels to redirect reform pressure towards others.
Political protection refers to the institutional, electoral and symbolic mechanisms that insulate a territorial level from coercive reform. It includes the veto positions available to its defenders, the importance of its offices in political careers and the capacity to mobilise a territorial identity. These resources do not operate mechanically: their effects are mediated by partisan competition and coalition dynamics.
The argument rests on process tracing of reform debates over more than a decade, drawing on official documents, parliamentary debates, press analysis and more than seventy interviews with politicians, ministerial advisers and senior civil servants, cross-checked against written records.
Departments were well protected on each of these dimensions. Their outright abolition would have required constitutional change and therefore Senate approval. The Senate is elected by a college dominated by local officials, with small municipalities and sparsely populated departments over-represented. Departments were also deeply embedded in political careers: in 2013, parliamentarians held 96 departmental executive functions against 30 regional ones, and the government, having lost its absolute majority, depended on coalition partners whose leadership was closely tied to departmental institutions.
Regions were comparatively exposed. They are elected by proportional lists, which offer limited scope for building a personal vote, regional offices played a weaker role in political careers, and in 2013 few regional presidents held parliamentary mandates while many were approaching retirement. Redrawing regional boundaries was therefore politically easier than abolishing departments, even though departments had been criticised for decades.
Protection also gives defenders of a territorial level the means to redirect reform pressure. Rather than rejecting reform outright, they can seek to redefine its target so that restructuring falls on a less protected tier.
The French sequence illustrates this process. In 2012–2013, the executive rejected territorial mergers and repealed Nicolas Sarkozy’s conseiller territorial, a device intended to weaken departments indirectly. European fiscal surveillance then raised the political cost of inaction, while international organisations urged France to simplify its territorial architecture. In late 2013, a Senate mission dominated by departmental actors proposed reducing the number of regions to seven or eight very large entities. A senior civil servant interviewed for the research recalled that this position helped open the door to regional amalgamation.
Departmental actors thus helped redefine the target of reform without contesting reform itself. Larger regions could also make departments appear newly useful as institutions of proximity. The executive then tested the available options before announcing anything: simulations within the Ministry of the Interior in autumn 2013 preceded President Hollande’s first public reference to regional mergers on 14 January 2014. Prime Minister Manuel Valls favoured abolishing departments, yet the lack of a parliamentary majority and the risk of coalition breakdown kept that option out of reach, and the President’s preference for stronger regions alongside preserved departments prevailed.
Protection also varied within the regional tier. Brittany kept its boundaries because a strong regional identity coincided with favourable coalition politics and dense representation within the governing majority. Corsica was shielded by insularity, nationalist mobilisation and the legacy of political violence, which made coercive restructuring especially costly. Alsace, by contrast, was merged despite sustained mobilisation and a well-established regional identity. Its weaker institutional protection and unfavourable partisan alignment meant that resistance from regional elites carried a limited electoral cost for the governing coalition.
Partisan alignment did not mechanically determine the map. Territorial identity, relative wealth, the availability of possible partners and the interdependence of pairings all mattered. But the reform shows that territorial claims are not heard equally: their political weight depends partly on the channels through which they reach national decision-makers.
The post-reform evidence reinforces this interpretation. The Ministry of the Interior found no reduction in regional operating expenditure, while the Court of Audit identified significant transition costs and no clear efficiency gains. This does not show that mergers can never generate efficiencies, but it is difficult to reconcile with the idea that the regional tier was selected because it offered demonstrably superior savings. The executive had also ruled out a redraw based on commuting zones or economic basins, giving speed precedence over territorial coherence.
The mechanism extends beyond France, although the article treats the French case as theoretically informative rather than representative and the comparative examples as suggestive. Under fiscal pressure, Portugal restructured freguesias while largely preserving municipalities; in Italy, provinces lost political support during the sovereign debt crisis but constitutional constraints prevented their abolition. The framework applies most directly to top-down reform in systems with several subnational tiers.
The French regional reform illustrates a broader point: governments do not reform territorial institutions on a blank slate. Before boundaries can be redrawn, reformers confront an existing distribution of political resources. Which level is reformed depends not only on what governments want to change, but also on which institutions are politically capable of protecting themselves.
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Patrick Le Lidec is a CNRS researcher at Sciences Po’s Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE) and LIEPP. His research focuses on territorial government, state–local relations, public sector reform and the politics of institutional restructuring in France.
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Note: this post represents the views of the author, and not those of Regional & Federal Studies, the University of Edinburgh, or the Centre on Constitutional Change. It summarises this article, originally published in RFS.
Cover Image shows the meeting place of the Corsican Assembly, the Grand Hôtel d'Ajaccio et Continental, Ajaccio. Credit: leecohen via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
