BAILLY Jessy, « L’imaginaire démocratique des élu·es et des gouvernant·es à l’épreuve d’une citoyenneté politique augmentée », Participations, 2023/3 (N° 37), p. 153-182. URL : https://www.cairn.info/revue-participations-2023-3-page-153.htm
Introduction
The literature on the growing citizen dissatisfaction with democracy is extensive, but it leads to various interpretations. For example, the theory of "critical citizens" (Norris, 1999) or "assertive citizens" (Dalton, Welzel, 2014), which has been updated in recent texts (Bailly, 2022a; Font, Ganuza, 2018; Funes, Ganuza, Garcia, 2020), nuances the works on stealth democracy (Hibbing, Theiss-Morse, 2002). Furthermore, studies have been conducted on the democratic imaginaries of citizens: quantitative (see especially Gherghina, Geissel, 2017) or more qualitative (Bedock, Panel, 2017 for France; Talukder, Bedock, Rangoni, 2022 for Belgium). This research agenda aims to understand the democratic imaginary of citizens, that is, the ways in which they envision reforming and improving the current state of representative democracy.
In recent years, studies have sought to grasp the perception of participatory or non-participatory elected officials (Petit, 2020), parliamentarians (Close, 2020; Rangoni, Bedock, Talukder, 2021), or executive members (Hendriks, Lees-Marshment, 2019; Schiffino et al., 2019) on emerging citizen participation mechanisms. This literature on the modes of reception by elected officials or executives of the evolution of the representative regime shows that the issue divides holders of executive, legislative, or elective positions (Niessen et al., 2019).
Starting from an initial research focusing on activist groups in France, Spain, and Belgium, the citizen audit collectives of debt (Bailly, 2022a), we became interested in how their counterparts within local institutions reacted to attempts to impose increased political citizenship outside of existing legal frameworks (such as the possibility of citizen interrogation in municipal council meetings or in existing participatory mechanisms). Indeed, these collectives, born in the context of the public debt crisis in Europe in the early 2010s, mobilized in several European countries to criticize how public money had been spent in managing this crisis by public authorities. These activist groups also claimed citizen control over the actions of elected officials to ensure their adherence to the social mission attached to public authorities during the (co)production of local public action. They thus reveal forms of critique towards representative democracy that are less visible in the literature (Guasti, Rezende de Almeida, 2019; Sintomer, 2013). By starting from the democratic imaginaries of these activists, who advocate for intensifying interactions between governors and governed to enable citizens to hold them accountable (stimulating their responsiveness, Pitkin, 2013) outside of electoral moments (Mansbridge, 2009), we aim to show that it is not straightforward for holders of political and administrative positions to accept the extension of citizens' political prerogatives, whether in France, Spain, or Belgium. We will identify variations in judgments according to the positions (and political stances) of the respondents.
Compared to existing studies, the article does not focus on the relationships of decision-makers or elected officials with institutional participation mechanisms, but on forms of "bottom-up participation" (Petit, 2020). In other words, we question their reception of citizen practices that target them. We examine how they perceive political behaviors from their constituents that do not align with institutional forms of citizen participation.
Moreover, the originality of the article lies in the fact that it interrogates these decision-makers and elected officials about localized citizen enterprises they identify. In this regard, it is not only about gathering their perceptions based on exclusively abstract themes (Close, 2020; Hendriks, Lees-Marshment, 2019; Schiffino et al., 2019), but about understanding their perceptions based on concrete political configurations.
We will then inquire into the perception of decision-makers and elected officials, whose legitimacy lies in their technical competencies, suffrage, or affiliation with a partisan field, regarding attempts to challenge their political territories. To address these questions about the democratic imaginary of decision-makers and elected officials, we first present the approach of citizen groups and activists advocating for the broadening of citizens' political prerogatives. We then present the investigation and the analysis methods of decision-makers' and elected officials' statements regarding these citizens, before analyzing the main categories of judgment of the decision-makers from the survey, on one hand regarding ordinary citizens, and on the other hand regarding the studied activist groups. We aim to account for the differentiated but often stigmatizing judgments and positions of decision-makers and elected officials regarding the phenomenon of augmented political citizenship.