The links between parties and policies are key to democracy. Yet, since decades, representatives seem and claim to be increasingly constrained by other actors, international competition, European integration, aging populations, limited energy resources, and path dependence. How much room is there left for policy representation? Are policies (increasingly) made beyond politics? Are political jousts only about “acting out” antagonisms? PARTIPOL will scrutinize this apparent gap between normative theories and discourses of the legitimation of democracy, and practices of representation, in the case of France. The question of parties’ imprint on public policy is an old one, but, despite numerous publications, it continues to be difficult to answer empirically. The project departs from the observation that the long- and short-term political context in France, marked by regular and recent political alternations, offers an intriguing case of study to overcome the mitigated conclusions of the Anglo-Saxon “Do Parties Matter” debate. For this sake, we will draw on four innovative strategies: 1) A consideration of representatives’ and party elites’ conception of parties in democracy – against the background of their conception of the role of citizens, experts or interest groups – in order to put their practices into a normative perspective. 2) A refinement of the research question, with a focus on the conditions under which the partisan composition of government and parliament matters. 3) The adoption of a “soft” conception of causality, which implies devoting considerable attention both to the process of interest aggregation in party organizations, and to how parties’ involvement in office possibly feeds back on this process. Do policies matter? 4) The implementation of a fine-grained operationalization of both party preferences and public policies. This enrichment and refinement of the “Do Parties Matter” research requires an ambitious empirical study. In order to account for how parties’ imprint on policies varies depending on the issue, we will focus on distributive, regulatory and redistributive issues with differing degrees of media visibility (nuclear energy; illegal immigration; generalized social contribution; wealth taxation; industrial patents; genetically modified organisms). For the sake of feasibility, the policymaking and the generated policies will be approached through the lens of the process of legislation. The four strategies listed above have guided the definition of a comparative, mixed-methods design, combining an analysis, issue by issue, of partisan discourses, adopted laws and of the media coverage, and interviews with members of parliaments and parties regarding the process of legislation, the role of parties, party preferences and identities, as well as how the involvement of party elites in the legislation process feeds back into parties. This comprehensive study, anchored in the growing but under-explored research agenda at the juncture between studies of parties and policies, should provide valuable input into the current structuration of legislative studies in France. PARTIPOL seeks to shed light on ideal representations and practices of policy representation, “constraints” as a parameter and as a resource in the legislative process, parties’ and policymakers’ use of the media. We will also question the common diagnosis of a crisis of political representation with respect to low electoral turnout, the rise of anti-system parties and the fading trust in political elites, much of which is attributed to a lack of responsiveness on the part of government parties.