Scandal as norm entrepreneurship strategy: Corruption and the French investigating magistrates

The sociological and legal scholarship on norm entrepreneurship focuses almost exclusively on the creation and promotion of new norms. Much of norm entrepreneurship is, however, oriented towards the solidification of existing yet under-enforced norms. Such entrepreneurship, which legal officials as well as social and political actors can undertake, often involves creating scandals: publicizing the real or alleged transgressions of high status actors. Scandals entail the exercise of popular justice and their logic is collectivistic. These two characteristics underlie the strategic recourse to scandal that often combines norm entrepreneurship and status-enhancement. This article discusses the use of scandal by the French investigating magistrates in the 1990s. Exploiting the declining prestige of the political elite, the low status French investigating magistrates targeted high status political actors and publicized their corruption investigations. The use of scandal circumvented the political pressures in the judicial process and the niceties of criminal procedure, discredited the political elite as a whole, and forced the latter to adopt various anti-corruption measures. Traditionally subordinate to the executive, the French judiciary mobilized around the corruption scandals against the political elite and, for the first time since the Revolution, acquired relative independence and enhanced status.