Do elected representatives (really) like democracy ?

Political staff facing citizen participation.

15-16 november 2018, Lille University

Organizing Committee : Rémi Lefebvre, Marion Paoletti, Guillaume Petit, Julien Talpin

Scientific Committee : Etienne Ballan, Loïc Blondiaux, Fabien Desage, Anne-Cecile Douillet, Guillaume Gourgues, Samuel Hayat, Vanessa Jérôme, Michel Koebel, Alice Mazeaud, Sandrine Rui, Julien O’Miel, Sébastien Vignon

Organized with the support of : GIS Démocratie et Participation, CERAPS (Université Lille 2), CED (Université de Bordeaux), CESSP (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne)

What is the relationship of elected officials with democracy and citizen participation? How do they perceive their roles as representatives, their status and their political room for maneuver? How do they understand the democratic role of citizens and their skills? How do these issues determine different profiles of elected officials and different political trajectories? What are the relationships of elected representatives and partisan organizations with democratic institutional reforms. How do they deal with the issue of democratizing democracy? These questions will be at the heart of this conference. Based on empirical work, original or reviewed, this symposium aims to show how elected representatives imagine what "good participation" should be, how they relate to the so-called "democratization" or "deprofessionalization" of political life, how they conceive the social demand for participation, how they construct policies of participation on this basis (often referred to as "supply policies") and potentially draw lessons about their own democratic experiences and their roles as representatives.

At the crossroads of the sociology of public action, political roles and political behaviors, this conference aims to sum up the current state of research about political staff facing citizen participation.