Politics, Public Opinion, and Privatization in France: Assessing the Calculus of Consent for Market Reforms.

Despite the normative, political, and instrumental importance of privatizing state-owned enterprises worldwide, practitioners and researchers know little empirically about how different types of citizens feel about these efforts, how they arrive at these judgments, and how enduring these attitudes are likely to be. Using citizen attitudes toward privatization culled from the 1995 French National Election Study, this article offers practitioners and researchers an analytical framework for assessing these attitudes, for anticipating and dealing strategically with the perceived consequences of denationalization efforts, and for refining their understanding of the calculus of consent for market reforms in future survey research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]