Institutionalising Participation from Below: From the Shack to Municipal Elections in Commercy, France

Van Outryve d'Ydewalle, Sixtine
(2023) Reclaiming Participatory Governance. Social Movements and the Reinvention of Democratic Innovation — ISBN: [978-1-032-11121-6], pp. 259-274., published

Files

Institutionalisingparticipationfrombelow-Sixtine-Sept2022FINAL.pdf
  • Open Access
  • Adobe PDF
  • 283.16 KB
Download

Details

Authors
Abstract
Democratic innovations seeking to enable lay participation in politics tend to be designed by experts and policymakers. This chapter aims to show that this task can also be undertaken by a social movement and that this can yield results that are better suited to the unfolding of the democratic innovation. Contributing to the literature on social movements, democratic innovations and communalism, this chapter explores the process of grassroots institutional design in the French town of Commercy, from the beginning of the 2018 Yellow Vests movement until the municipal elections of March 2020. More specifically, it analyses how the movement tackled the issue of attendance to the citizens’ assembly it was creating. Reflecting on the data from fieldwork that combined participant observation, semi-structured interviews and textual analysis, this chapter shows the extent to which the grassroots nature of the movement impacted the answers it brought to institutional design issues.
Affiliations

Citations

  • APA
  • Chicago
  • FWB

Van Outryve d’Ydewalle, S. (2023). Institutionalising Participation from Below: From the Shack to Municipal Elections in Commercy, France. In Adrian Bua and Sonia Bussu (ed.), Reclaiming Participatory Governance. Social Movements and the Reinvention of Democratic Innovation (Routledge, p. pp. 259-274.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003218517