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The Implementation of Participatory Democracy in French Communes Christophe Premat

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The Implementation of Participatory Democracy in French Communes Christophe Premat The Implementation of Participatory Democracy in French Communes Christophe Premat To cite this version: Christophe Premat. The Implementation of Participatory Democracy in French Communes. French Politics, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009, 7 (1), pp.1-18. 10.1057/fp.2009.5. halshs-00389314 HAL Id: halshs-00389314 https://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00389314 Submitted on 28 May 2009 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. The implementation of participatory democracy in French communes Abstract: the purpose of the article is to analyze how participatory democracy has been implemented in French communes. The question of neighbourhood democracy is a norm of political speech as local representatives need to legitimize their role in public space by getting closer to their electors. Does the implementation of participatory tools depend on the ideology and the socialization of the mayors or on the structure of the commune (size, territorial configuration)? The paper will mainly use a quantitative investigation made on communes above 5 000 inhabitants as well as interviews conducted in specific communes which were known for their participatory culture. Keywords: participatory democracy, socialization, territorial configuration, size of the commune, local consultations The topic of participatory democracy was dealt with in the last campaign for presidential elections in France in 2007. The socialist candidate Ségolène Royal adopted it as a strategy for running the election (Sintomer, 2007). She developed the idea of citizen juries in the second TV debate on 24 October 2006 when she was engaged in the primaries of Socialist Party in order to be chosen as the candidate for the election of 2007 (Premat, 2006). This is the first time that participatory democracy was mentioned in the national electoral debate: this fact illustrates the way some representatives see it as a potential resource to renew the image of representative system and strengthen the voter turnout (Kersting, 2005: 33). Participatory democracy includes all tools that allow citizens to interfere with the political process outside elections (Almond, Verba, 1963: 8). Jörgen Westerståhl distinguished four types of political participation: the electoral participation, the direct participation to decisions thanks to referenda, district councils and local assemblies, the indirect participation through political organizations and potential participation due to the knowledge and interest in political matters (Westerståhl, 1981: 438). The field of participatory democracy fits the second type of political participation. Whereas representative democracy defines all the regular occasions to take part in the choice of representatives, 1 direct democracy includes all the mechanisms which interfere with the decisions (referenda, popular initiatives, face-to-face relations) and participatory democracy highlights the deliberative aspect (Fishkin, 1995: 4). In other words, participatory democracy is the name given to all political systems between pure direct democracy (citizens take directly part in main political decisions) and pure representative system (citizens just choose people in charge of public duties). These two extremes work as ideal-types because participatory elements and representative system are mixed in the reality (Budge, 1996: 44). In fact, participatory democracy is composed of a multitude of tools which affect the political process at different stages. For instance, the consensus conferences aim at selecting a panel of citizens who become well-informed of scientific problems (Boy, Donnet-Kamel, Roqueplo, 2000) whereas the district councils focused on the micro-level deliberative aspect. All tools cannot be simply compared as the question of scale is crucial: who is eligible to take part in the process (Weale, 1999: 146)? What for? When and how long? (Falise, 2003: 52-53). Participatory democracy involves specific citizens who help politicians to take a decision on a particular topic (Bourg, Boy 2005: 5). The topic of participatory democracy has been more and more popular among citizens and representatives in France who regard it as a way of strengthening and legitimizing political decisions thanks to organized discussions. The local level seems to be appropriate to the experimentation of participatory processes. We would like to analyze how participatory democracy has been implemented at local level that means how French communes created specific participatory instruments which involve inhabitants in local affairs. First, we will use macro-level aggregate data on political attitudes of French citizens thanks to the questionnaires of World Values Survey . How do French citizens perceive their relation to political participation? We will compare the attitude of citizens with the series of laws concerning participatory democracy from the nineties on: did the representatives try to adapt 2 to the shift of values of the citizens? Second, we will use a database made on participatory tools in French communes above 5 000 inhabitants in 2006 in order to appreciate the influence of political context and the territorial configuration in the implementation of participatory tools. Is there a correlation between the size of the commune, the territorial configuration, the socialization of local representatives and the implementation of participatory democracy? These data will be completed by half-directive interviews made with local representatives of communes that developed a specific participatory culture. The research design is inspired by the configurative comparative approach developed by Charles C. Ragin (Ragin, 2004) which combines quantitative and qualitative studies. The quantitative overview is important in order to define a general trend and find out specific cases. We extracted the cases of communes which developed a participatory culture by promoting a panel of instruments and proceeded different interviews with political actors involved in participatory democracy. The final goal is to study the way local politicians implement participatory instruments (Unger, 1998). Political attitudes and values in France The political attitude of citizens can be measured through specific data extracted from World Values Survey. We are interested in analyzing non-conventional participation that means specific mobilizations outside traditional organizations such as political parties or trade-unions. Conventional participation can be expressed through different political acts such as signing up petitions, taking part in demonstrations and boycotts, occupying factories’ buildings, organizing strikes. These specific acts reveal citizen mistrust towards political institutions: this is why we deal with values of participation when we consider this specific repertoire. Pippa Norris noticed that the non-conventional participation has become a norm in most of the western societies (Norris, 1999: 263). Based on an analysis of World Values 3 Surveys (WVS) data in 44 countries, she noticed that the more citizens got involved in political matters, the less they claimed any political belonging and the less they had trust in institutions. In the data concerning France in the fourth wave of WVS 1, 34% of the answerers declared that they took part in a peaceful demonstrations, 13% said that they had boycotted a product in the past; 11.2% took part in an unofficial strike and 8.3% organized a sit-in in a factory to support a protest. These answers show that the non-conventional participation has been more and more important in France. If we compare these data with other countries such as Germany 2, then we see the difference in the modalities of participation as only 2% of them took part in unofficial strikes and 1.3% occupied factories´ buildings. The repertoire of protest is stronger in France as there is a prevailing mistrust in political institutions. The importance of non-conventional participation (Taniguchi, 2006: 416) illustrates the shift of values among French citizens. In the WVS, a special indicator was created to study the post-materialistic trend (care for environment and quality of life, mistrust in political authority, promotion of other ways of engagement in politics). The emphasis on new ways of taking part in politics is a characteristic of post-materialistic values. When we look at the results presented in table 1, we observe that around 20% of the respondents share post- materialistic values and 27% of them materialistic values. The majority of them shares mixed values, which means that materialistic and post-materialistic attitudes coexist and vary with the topic (Inglehart, Baker 2000). Some respondents wish to have more participation in the political process while they support a clear authority in the political system. Those attitudes can reflect conflict of values: as a matter of fact, they show that the shift of values is an ongoing process in France and that the citizens are critical about the political institutions. The 1 European Values Study Group and World Values Survey
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