The electoral strategy of communalism: imperative and recallable mandates revisited
(2025) Recerca : revista de pensament i analisi — p. 0 (2025)
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- Abstract
- This article focuses on one of the outcomes of the 2010 assembly movements: the electoral strategy of running for municipal elections as a way to channel town council power to a popular assembly of the town’s residents. This strategy, which was initially theorised by the American thinker Murray Bookchin in order to bring about a commu-nalist society — that is, a society in which popular assemblies exercise public power at the local level — has been put into practise in recent years. The movements that adopt it are, however, facing a legal and political void. Based on extensive fieldwork in the French town of Commercy, the article aims to fill this void by looking at the institutional design that arose out of the Yellow Vests movement, when part of the group adopted the electoral strategy of libertarian municipalism. More specifically, it shows how the movement reinvented the relationship of representation between town council and the citizens’ assembly through imperative mandates. The actors filled that void by creating an original tool to ensure that those elected would be morally and politically obliged to execute the assembly’s will. However, the lack of a legal framework providing for recall or rotation prevented them from integrating these devices to realise their political project and, instead, they relied on social control to ensure elected delegates would respect the will of the assembly.
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Van Outryve d’Ydewalle, S. (2025). The electoral strategy of communalism: imperative and recallable mandates revisited. Recerca : revista de pensament i analisi, 0. https://doi.org/10.6035/recerca.8035 (Original work published 2025)