When Ordinary Citizens Talk about Politics.
The Virtue of Ethnography for Understanding Civic Competence
Julien Talpin
CNRS research fellow/Ceraps, Lille (France)
Section: The social roots of political processes
Panel: Looking Politics from Below. Local Ethnographic Approaches of Political Participation
Panel chairs: Alexandre Lambelet, Martina Avantza
ECPR General Conference – Reykjavik (Iceland), 25-27th August 2011
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Introduction
For years, Wallon neighbourhood council had known a small attendance, a lack of dynamism and
enthusiasm from the population, few subaltern people participating at all in this participatory
institution situated in a rather deprived area of this French suburban city. Considering this local
apathy, the elected official in charge of the organisation of the neighbourhood council was extremely
directive. She spoke the most over the meetings, defined the agenda and framed the discussions. In a
word, Wallon neighbourhood council had little autonomy from the municipality. Things started to
change in the fall of 2005, when a public servant, Marie, head of the ‗citizenry administration‘,
decided – in agreement with the Mayor – to give more autonomy to the city‘s neighbourhood
councils, and especially to institutionalize the existence of organizing committees, essentially
composed of citizens. The aim was to lower the influence of elected officials – considered
overwhelming – to empower participatory institutions and citizens in the meantime. Results were
mostly disappointing from the actors‘ standpoint, apart from a few cases, like in Wallon
neighbourhood. Encouraged by the citizenship administration boss, a few participants started
getting more involved in the organisation of participation. Preparation meetings were thus planned
before each neighbourhood council, and at least five regular participants attended, while the elected
representative did not. These citizens were therefore able to define the agenda of the neighbourhood
council meetings, to prepare small introductions on the issues to be discussed collectively, and in the
end to facilitate the meetings directly. The change in the power-relationship of the neighbourhood
council was embodied in the very scenography of the meeting. While the elected official and the
public functionary used to be at the centre, it was now this group of four or five citizens at the
centre, towards whom all the other participants were staring. The meetings were no longer
introduced by the elected representatives, but by one of the members of the organising committee1.
The evolution of the organisation of Wallon neighbourhood council is pretty telling on the type of
collective learning and empowerment processes that can take place with repeated participation. With
time, encouraged by the administration, some citizens got enough self-confidence to play a bigger
role in the neighbourhood council. When one looks at the backgrounds of these citizens however,
the empowerment thesis has to be nuanced, as most of them were already members of either a PTA
(FCPE), a trade union (CGT), or a resident association. Only Nicole had no previous civic
experience. It can nevertheless be stressed that this dispositional thesis is also unsatisfying, as these
actors, despite their previous political socialisation, were relatively passive in the neighbourhood
council for years. Their political background cannot explain alone why at some point they started
organising themselves in such a way as gaining autonomy from the municipality. The support from
the citizenry municipal administration (close to the Communist Party) – against a town councilor
member of the Socialist Party – created a situation that these actors, given their previous
competences, could exploit. They thus collectively gained new competences in the organisation of
meetings and public expression. A collective learning and empowerment process took place –
citizens gaining an increasing autonomy.
1
Observation notes, Wallon comité de quartier, Morsang-sur-Orge, 2005-2006.
2
Such details about ordinary people in civic practices could however appear insignificant or even
trivial. Why should social scientists pay attention to them? Why should people interested in the
functioning and the future of democracies care about the masses, while we all know that politics is
about power, domination and conflicts of interests among elites? In the end, representative
government‘s bottom line is all about the ballots people cast on Election Day. Political scientists
should therefore focus on the mass media, elites‘ discourses and eventually social mobilisation, not
on what lay citizens do when they talk about politics. What could be learnt indeed from people who
are so ignorant about the functioning and the stakes of complex modern polities? The dominant
approaches in the social sciences oscillate, therefore, between macro, often structuralist or
functionalist perspectives, and micro-designs based on the aggregation of individual answers through
large survey research.
I want to argue here on the contrary that the fine-grained analysis of what citizens do and learn
when they participate in local public bodies is relevant for political science, and that it can shed a
new light on the process of construction of civic competence, a classic question for the discipline.
The people I met over my fieldwork in participatory budgeting institutions in 2005-2006 were
committed to the fate of their community; they took participation seriously and felt they were
involved in something meaningful to them and others. Speaking regularly in public assemblies and,
for some of them, negotiating with local representatives, arguing with civil servants, mobilising their
neighbours and friends, arguing with municipal technical services and urban planning experts, going
around the district in search of all the small problems to be solved, they felt they had gone through
an enriching experience that did not leave them immune. Others, many of them, left the boat on the
way. Disappointed by the lack of tangible results, by the manipulation of the politicians or by the
narrowness of the power they were granted, tired of the conflicts regularly emerging in the public
assemblies, or of the arrogance of the technicians, or by the selfishness of their neighbours, they
merely stopped participating. Those were probably little affected by their participation, apart from a
growing cynicism resulting from such a dull experience. For many of the participants anyway,
participatory budgets (PB) offered a first channel of involvement in local government, a first contact
with the world of politics that was so remote from them so far. This does not mean they all
discovered a passion for politic. Some just discovered that they were part of a broader community;
that their pavement could not or should not necessarily be rehabilitated this year with regard to
more crucial needs of the city, that their arguments could make a difference in changing their daily
life, that the construction of a new parking lot could be detrimental to the environment or that
recycling was important. They also learned to speak in public, to listen as well, to make compromises
between different interests or to negotiate from a position of strength with powerful authorities.
It seems however that only ethnography and direct observation of civic interactions can allow
reaching such insight into citizens civic pratices. While the notion of political competence has
received significant scholarly attention in the last years2, especially in the French academic context3, I
Robert Luskin, ―Explaining Political Sophistication,‖ Politicial Behavior 12, no. 4 (1990): 331-361; G. Marcus, R. Hanson,
eds., Reconsidering the Democratic Public (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993; Verba S., Schlozman
K., Brady H., Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1995; Stephen Elkin and
Karol Soltan, eds., Citizen Competence and Democratic Institutions (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999.
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argue it should nevertheless be reexamined around three axes of reflection, central to the
development of a pragmatist approach based on ethnography. First and foremost, the concept of
political competence, necessarily linked to what is expected from citizens in a democratic context,
should be expanded in order to account for recent evolutions in contemporary democracies that are
no longer contained in the simple act of voting but rather require a more constant participation from
the population. Next, the concept of political competence should, contrary to prominent trends in
political science, focus more on the practices of actors than on their cognitive dispositions or
interior consciences. This article thus proposes a non-mentalist approach to political competence.
Finally, the notion of political competence should be de-essentialized and thus analyzed with a
process-based perspective. The idea is to reinsert political competence into the context of its
production, in order to focus on the trajectories and futures of actors, and thus evaluate the
―making‖ of citizenship through the institutional, political, and cultural framework in which it exists.
In so doing, this approach requires making of ethnography and observation of actors‘ political
behavior the core of the understanding of political competence.
The synthesis I propose is coined pragmatist as it is inspired by one of the most dynamic of recent
theoretical paradigms developed by American and French sociologies.4 These theoretical elements
will be articulated to methodological propositions, as only an ethnographic approach centered on
civic practices satisfies the challenge of a study on practical processes of mobilization and of
individuals‘ acquisition of knowledge and expertise. The study thus attempts to construct a wider
analysis of access to political competence and to propose an empirical illustration based on research
conducted on participants in Rome 11th district participatory budget.
Rethinking the notion of political competence
Expanding the notion of political competence linked to recent transformations of democracy
In a recent article, Loïc Blondiaux emphasized the indissoluble link between theories of democracy
and conceptualizations of political competence.5 The ideal of an informed citizen was both at the
See in particular the special volume of the Revue française de la science politique 57, no. 6 (December 2007); Lionel Arnaud
and Christine Guinnet, eds., Les Frontières du politique: Enquêtes sur les processus de politisation et de dépolitisation (Rennes:
Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2005); Jacques Lagroye, ed., La politisation (Paris: Seuil, 2003); the special volume on the
―Recognition of politics‖ in the journal Espaces Temps 76-77 (2001). The 9th Meeting of the Association française de science
politique, organized in Toulouse in September 2007, included three workshops on politicization and its common
relationship to politics.
4 See in particular the important article by Nina Eliasoph and Paul Lichterman, ―Culture in Interaction,‖ American Journal
of Sociology 108, no. 4 (2003): 735-794. There are also links to French pragmatist sociology, in particular Luc Boltanski and
Laurent Thévenot, De la justification: Les économies de la grandeur (Paris: Gallimard, 1992); Laurent Thévenot, L’action au
pluriel (Paris: La Découverte, 2006); Michel Callon, Pierre Lascoumes, and Yannick Barthe, Agir dans un monde incertain:
Essai sur la démocratie technique (Paris: Seuil, 2001); Isaac Joseph and Daniel Céfaï, eds., L’héritage du pragmatisme: Conflits
d’urbanité et épreuves de civisme (Paris: Éditions de l‘Aube, 2002).
5 Loïc Blondiaux, ―Faut-il se débarrasser de la notion de compétence politique? Retour critique sur un concept classique
de la science politique,‖ Revue française de science politique 57, no. 6 (December 2007): 759-774.
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heart of the French republican ideal and of classical theories of democracy.6 The central intellectual
and political stakes in France in the 19th century was thus the reconciliation of the Republic and of
the ―government of skills,‖7 resulting in the emphasis placed on public education, seen as the
keystone of democracy.
Early scientific research in political science, however, rapidly underscored ―the incompetence‖ and
the ―lack of interest‖ in public affairs of a large portion of citizens, which constituted a decisive
argument for the formulation of an elitist or minimalist theory of democracy.8 It appeared both
effective and desirable to minimize the influence of politically apathetic and incompetent citizens.
In this context, the conceptualization of political competence that predominated until today has
been very largely cognitive, centered around knowledge of the political field and the mastery of the
rules that prevail there. Political competence is defined, in the traditional way, as ―the greater or
weaker capacity to recognize a political question as political and to treat it as such by responding
politically, in other words according to principles that are truly political (and not ethical, for
example).‖9 In the English-speaking world, one refers more often to the concept of ―political
sophistication‖, measured by the responses given by individuals to political questions presented in
questionnaires.10 This definition appears, however, to be minimalist, as it reduces politics to the
political field and competence to knowledge of the rules of the game and of actors within this field.
Thus, to be politically competent essentially means having the knowledge necessary for the
expression of an enlightened choice and—specifically—a vote. By focusing the analysis of political
competence solely on the mastery of the rules of the political game, one runs the risk of
―legitimism".11 While weak knowledge of the political world, difficulty in situating candidates or
proposals on the right-left axis, and the instability and incoherence of preferences has been widely
noticed and constitute a recognized fact for the discipline,12 reducing political competence to these
variables undeniably represents the symbolic imposition of an ideal of expert knowledge on politics,
One of course thinks here of Lippman‘s critique of the concept of the ―omnicompetent citizen‖: Walter Lippman, The
Phantom Public (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1925). On the link between democratic theory and the conceptualization of
political competence, see also Georges Marcus and Russell Hanson, ―The Practice of Democratic Theory,‖ in G.
Marcus, R. Hanson, eds., Reconsidering the Democratic Public (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993): 132; Bernard Berelson, ―Democratic Theory and Public Opinion,‖ Public Opinion Quarterly 16, no. 3 (1953): 313-330.
7 Cf. Pierre Rosanvallon, Le sacre du citoyen: Histoire du suffrage universel en France (Paris: Gallimard, 1992).
8 Studies by Bernard Berelson, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Victor McPhee—such as Voting (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1954)—underline the lack of interest of the public, just like hugely impactful studies appearing a bit later by
Philippe Converse—―The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics,‖ in David Apter, ed., Ideology and Discontent (New
York: The Free Press, 1964): 206-261—, will support elitist theories, including: Giovanni Sartori, Democratic Theory
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1962); Michel Crozier, Samuel Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of
Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (New York: New York University Press, 1975).
9 Pierre Bourdieu, La Distinction: Critique sociale du jugement (Paris: Minuit, 1979), 466.
10 Robert Luskin, ―Explaining Political Sophistication,‖ Politicial Behavior 12, no. 4 (1990): 331-361; Loïc Blondiaux,
―Mort et résurrection de l‘électeur rationnel: Les métamorphoses d‘une problématique incertaine,‖ Revue française de science
politique 46, no. 5 (October 1996): 753-791.
11 Cf. Camille Hamidi, ―Éléments pour une approche interactionniste de la politisation: engagement associatif et rapport
au politique dans des associations locales issues de l‘immigration,‖ Revue française de science politique 56, no. 1 (February
2006): 5-25.
12 Cf. Philippe Converse, ―Attitudes and Non-Attitudes: Continuation of a Dialogue,‖ in Edward R. Tufte, ed., The
Quantitative Analysis of Social Problems (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1970): 168-189; Daniel Gaxie, Le cens caché: Inégalités
culturelles et ségrégation politique (Paris: Seuil, 1978).
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unique to dominant actors of the political field, who are authorized by this position to define who
can or cannot speak competently in the field.
Taking these limits into account, research on political competence has recently been refocused
around a different debate, raising the following question: how can citizens construct relatively
coherent political reasoning out of a limited base of political knowledge? How do they make so
much out of so little, thus succeeding in attaining a minimal understanding of the political world?
These questions appeared in rather different research fields, stretching from linguistics to social
psychology and to political science.13 One of the proposed answers—arising principally from
cognitive psychology—is that citizens generally make use of cognitive shortcuts, which allow them
to make sense of a complex reality, and thus to formulate relatively sophisticated political judgments,
without knowing the entire causal chain leading from a cause to an effect, for example.14
While accounting for the practical competencies of citizens seems to be a meaningful advance for
the discipline, there is another reason why it has become necessary to expand research on political
competence: we do not ask the same things of citizens today as we did fifty years ago. While voting
is undeniably the dominant mode of participation in democracy, we cannot reduce conventional
political participation to this act, and even less political competence to just knowledge of the political
field.
Since the end of the 1980s there has been a profound transformation as much in democratic
theories—within the framework of what has been called the ―deliberative turn‖15—as in political
practices, with participation now being seen as ―the new spirit of public action‖ or of democracy.16
Contemporary democracies are not exclusively regulated by the actions of political professionals.
Each public decision is now—they certainly always were, but this tendency has been greatly
accentuated over the past few years17—the result of a negotiation, even of a deliberation among
diverse actors, political professionals, members of international organizations, representatives from
businesses, from associations, from unions, and even ordinary citizens. We thus now speak of the
governance of democratic societies,18 this term—that we will not attempt to discuss here despite the
difficulties it brings up—includes the diversity of implicated actors and of institutions interacting in
Cf. Marc Sadoun, ―Faut-il être compétent?,‖ Pouvoirs 120 (2006): 57-69.
Cf. Patricia Conover and Stanley Feldman, ―Candidate Perception in an Ambiguous World: Campaigns, Cues, and
Inference Processes,‖ American Journal of Political Science 33 (1989): 912-941; Victor Ottati and Robert S. Wyer, ―The
Cognitive Mediators of Political Choice: Toward a Comprehensive Model of Political Information Processing,‖ in John
Ferejohn and James Kuklinski, eds., Information and Democratic Processes (Urbana: University of Ullinois Press, 1990), 186216; Paul Sniderman, Richard Brody, and Philip Tetlock, Reasoning and Choice: Explorations in Political Psychology
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
15 Cf. John Dryzek, ―The Deliberative Turn in Democratic Theory,‖ in Deliberative Democracy and Beyond (Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 2002), 1-8.
16 Loïc Blondiaux and Yves Sintomer, ―L‘impératif délibératif,‖ Politix 57, no. 15 (2002): 17-35; Loïc Blondiaux, Le nouvel
esprit de la démocratie: Actualité de la démocratie participative (Paris: Seuil, 2008).
17 Regarding the origins of participatory practices, see Marie-Hélène Bacqué and Yves Sintomer, eds., La démocratie
participative: histoires et généalogies (Paris: La Découverte, 2011).
18 Cf. Patrick Le Galès, ―Du gouvernement des villes à la gouvernance urbaine,‖ Revue française de science politique 45, no. 1
(February 1995): 57-95; Jon Pierre and Guy Peters, Governance, Politics and the State (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); JeanPierre Gaudin, Pourquoi la gouvernance? (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2002).
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the production of public decisions. We can again expand the analysis by considering that the
growing weight of public opinion (especially as it is constructed and conveyed in the media by
surveys) on the governance of societies incites ordinary citizens to express themselves more directly,
via the recourse to non-conventional modes of participation such as protests, sit-ins, gatherings or
acts of civil disobedience. While the vote was acknowledged in the 20th century as ―the legitimate if
not exclusive form of citizen participation‖19—and since one of the justifications of universal
suffrage was precisely to channel the political activities of the masses 20- we are today seeing a turn,
marking another enlargement of democratic practices, embodied by a more direct link between the
public space and the political system.21 These different tendencies are seen in the multiplication of
spaces of participation, which constitute as many arenas of expression as there are political
opinions.22 While voting remains the principal mode of expression of political preferences in
contemporary democracies, it is clearly no longer the only one. It would seem that one of the major
characteristics of this ―new spirit‖ is a transformation of what is expected or required of citizens in a
democracy. A (good) citizen must now not only vote at each election but also participate in a certain
number of public arenas.23 The summons to participate to which individuals are subjected thus
demands a reconsideration of the notion of political competence. The vote is no longer the only
mode of expression of political preferences, so it is appropriate to pay attention to the competencies
required to express oneself appropriately in the public space. The other spaces for the expression of
opinions require competencies other than a simple knowledge of programs, of ideas, and of
candidates that voting would suggest. In the end we require much more and much less of citizens
today than before. More, because the range of knowledge and expertise required to competently
intervene in the public space today is wider than before: the ability to speak in public, make speeches
oriented toward general interest, lead a meeting, and manage a negotiation among divergent interests
all constitute democratic gestures that the majority of citizens do not master.24 But at the same time,
these newly required forms of knowledge and know-how can be drawn from the personal or
Yves Déloye and Olivier Ihl, L’acte de voter (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po, 2008), 361.
Cf. Albert O. Hirschman, Bonheur privé, action publique (Paris: Fayard, 1983), 192-203.
21 Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Droit et démocratie (Paris: Gallimard, 1997). It is obviously more a question of an evolution than
of rupture, as the link between the public space and the political system has taken the shape, in the second half of the
20th century, of the relationship between unions and political parties, as the theorists of neocorporatism have analyzed.
Cf. Philippe Schmitter and Gerhard Lehmbruch, eds., Trends towards Corporatist Intermediation (London: Sages, 1979).
Nevertheless, this mediation occurred through classic representative practices—such as the election of union
representatives—while it occurs in a much more direct way today. This evolution can be interpreted, in line with Bernard
Manin, as the transition from party to public democracy. Cf. Bernard Manin, Principes du gouvernement représentatif (Paris:
Flammarion, 1995).
22 As Pierre Rosanvallon emphasizes, ―The repertoires of political expression, the vectors of this expression, as well as
their targets, have simultaneously diversified. [...] Citizens thus have many other means than the vote to express their
grievances and complaints. [...] While election democracy has incontestably eroded, democracies of expression,
implication, and intervention have grown and strengthened.‖ (Pierre Rosanvallon, La contre-démocratie: La politique à l’âge de
la défiance (Paris, Seuil, 2006), 26-27).
23 This evolution lines up with the transition from a ―citizenship of obligation,‖ depending on respect of the law, consent
to taxes, and the vote, to a ―citizenship of engagement,‖ resting on a more active participation by the population to the
life of the city, to use the terms of Russell Dalton, The Good Citizen: How a Younger Generation is Reshaping American Politics
(Washington: CQ Press Americans, 2007).
24 On the potentially exclusive character of this widening of modes of public expressions, and particularly the necessity
to speak up, see Rémi Lefebvre and Frédéric Sawicki, La société des socialistes, le PS aujourd’hui (Bellecombe-en-Bauges:
Éditions du Croquant, 2006).
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professional experience of actors.25 In short, the divide is much less clear with ordinary experience
than with the specialized type of knowledge required to master the rules of the institutional political
game.26 While citizens can sometimes rely on their personal experience to understand complex
political reasoning,27 it would be possible to widen the analytic framework beyond the simple
mastery of the codes of the political field.
Contemporary transformations in democratic theories and practices thus call for an expansion of the
political competence paradigm, which can no longer be reduced to its simple cognitive dimension.
Political competence, in its minimalist definition, is just one aspect of civic competence, which is
necessarily wider and includes different types of knowledge and expertise that this article will
address.28 The term ‗civic competence‘ has been adopted here to denote the ability to master the
codes and the practices necessary for the expression of one‘s preferences in a democracy. This
article will indeed consider that each social space—and by extension each public arena—is regulated
by norms defining the correct way to act.29 The mastery of these rules is necessary to act successfully
in a given space. These norms, however, are neither arbitrary nor intangible; they arise from more or
less entrenched previous practices and are applied and defended by dominant actors in a given social
space. Within the framework of public meetings, citizens must master, as we will see, a certain way
of expressing their preferences if they want to be heard by leaders. The ability to express one‘s
preferences—through voting, public speaking or protesting—in the public space requires a certain
set of knowledge and expertise, which the citizen can access—based on his primary socialization—
but that he can also lack and acquire through his secondary socialization, in different social spaces
(in the private, professional, or civic sphere). It is therefore necessary adopting a process-based
approach to access to civic competence in order to determine how individuals succeed in widening
the scope of their knowledge and expertise. Civic competence is thus defined as the ensemble of
cognitive, technical, political, emotional and practical resources to which citizens have access in
order to intervene in the public space. In the end, it is nothing other than the result of the trajectory
of these individuals, which is itself situated in specific social and historical conditions, which make
up just as many conditions of possibilities of experiences and interactions. To scrutinize such
processes an ethnographic approach appears necessary.
As Loïc Blondiaux underscores, ―This renewed theory of democracy makes individual knowledge of political
phenomena a secondary element‖ (L. Blondiaux, ―Faut-il se débarraser de la notion...‖ 769).
26 Cf. Dominique Cardon, Jean-Philippe Heurtin, and Cyril Lemieux, ―Parler en public,‖ Politix 31 (1995): 5-19; Jacques
Ion and Michel Peroni, eds., Engagement public et exposition de la personne (La Tour d‘Aigues: Éditions de l‘Aube, 1997).
27 Cf. Alfredo Joignant, ―Pour une sociologie cognitive de la compétence politique,‖ Politix 65 (2004): 150-173; Samuel
Popkin and Michael Dimock, ―Political Knowledge and Citizen Competence,‖ in Stephen Elkin and Karol Soltan, eds.,
Citizen Competence and Democratic Institutions (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1999), 117-146.
28 To the extent that this argument rests first and foremost on a critical analysis of the concept of political competence,
this term has been used up to now. But the expansion of the notion that has been proposed now inspires the choice to
use the term civic competence, except when referencing the classic accepted meaning of political competence.
29 Cf. L. Thévenot, L’action au pluriel.
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Centering the analysis on the politicization of practices rather than of opinions
This widening of perspective also necessitates a change in the epistemological prism through which
political competence is studied. Traditionally conceptualized as an individual property or even as a
disposition internalized by actors, it could be studied outside all practices via the responses given on
individual questionnaires. Three factors require the reevaluation of this cognitivist paradigm, which
will lead to focus on actors‘ practices rather than on artificial forms of knowledge.30
First, political competence, in its traditional meaning, requires much more than the mastery of
certain forms of knowledge unique to the political field. The competence of political professionals is
not limited to their knowledge of political history, of rudimentary economic principles, of the rules
of public law, nor of the positioning of political forces. It is also, and possibly above all, the result of
a ―clandestine pedagogy,‖31 or at least an implicit one, allowing for the acquisition of both a bodily
and oratorical hexis, incarnated by certain discursive practices—the rhetoric of a great orator—
mastered by political and activist professionals and, to a lesser degree, by all those who are generally
considered to be politically competent. While such forms of knowledge stem in part from primary
socialization, we could not understand the emphasis placed on the practice of the oral presentation
or on the rite of passage of the ―grand oral‖ at Sciences Po or, in elite British universities, the
valorization of belonging to debating societies promoting the perfection of verbal sparring, if the
mastery of such skills did not also come from repeated practice in secondary socialization
institutions. In this sense, the study of political competence must go beyond just the cognitive level
in order to concentrate on the practices of actors.
Next, John Zaller‘s works have masterfully demonstrated the importance that context can assume in
the expression of individual opinions, thus rehabilitating the role of situational factors in the analysis
of political competence.32 While individuals are sometimes incapable of providing anything other
than non-informed and top of the head opinions on subjects that they had never truly thought about
before, it suffices to put them—or to observe them—in favorable circumstances for them to
formulate relatively sophisticated political reasoning. It seems focus groups are particularly favorable
arenas for the development of political discussions among individuals who are sometimes very
weakly politically competent in the traditional sense of the term. 33 While certain individuals seem
incapable of speaking politically in public, they can manage to formulate directly political reasoning
in more intimate or more private settings.34 The political incompetence of the masses is thus not set
It is not a matter of rejecting the question of cognition outside the field of political competence, but rather of
proposing an analysis of cognitive practices, moreso than a description of the forms of knowledge of actors.
31 Pierre Bourdieu, Le sens pratique (Paris: Minuit, 1977), 117.
32 Cf. John Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
33 Cf. William Gamson, Talking Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Sophie Duchesne and Florence
Haegel, ―Avoiding or Accepting Conflict in Public Talk,‖ British Journal of Political Science 37, no. 1 (2007): 1-22; Sophie
Duchesne and Florence Haegel, ―La politisation des discussions,‖ Revue française de science politique 54, no. 6, (December
2004): 877-909.
34 Cf. Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in their Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).
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in stone: in contexts where politics are less formalized, the most deprived individuals are capable of
expressing political judgments. If these people do not directly refer to the political field, they can
nevertheless produce arguments about what must be done, increasing in generality in this way,
which can be considered a minimal form of politicization.35 Such conclusions, by underlining the
plasticity of political competence, encourage the centering of the analysis around the contexts of
interactions and around the civic practices of individuals, more than around their responses to
questionnaires or their cognitive dispositions.
Finally, while there of course exists a link between what actors think and what they say and do, it is
not clear whether political sociology – or any social science – masters the tools necessary to
scrutinize the internal reasoning of individuals. The desire to look for actors‘ ―true opinions‖ leads a
certain number of political scientists to turn toward experimental methods – especially among the
new discipline of political psychology – that could allow them to discard any need for context.36
Such methods create artificial constraints on the expression of opinions, as if they could exist in a
raw form. Behind an opinion or a motive, there can only be another motive in an infinite regression
toward an inherency that is not accessible outside of the presentation given by the actor through the
expression of his motives.37 An interview, a questionnaire, a vote, or a discussion within the context
of a focus group or of a public meeting are all modes of expression for political preferences wrapped
up in a certain context. No material is more ―pure‖ than another, although some appear more
artificial. Political competence is perceived, in its traditionally accepted meaning, as a disposition of
actors, as Bernard Lahire emphasizes, ―Dispositions are never directly observed by the researcher.
They are unobservable in and of themselves but are assumed to be ―at the origin‖ of observed
practices.‖38 Dispositions are thus necessarily intuited from the observation of practices, from the
description of situations in which these practices are deployed, and from the reconstruction of the
trajectory of actors. To the extent that social sciences can only reach an external knowledge of reality
and that the role of context in the expression of opinions has been shown, it seems more judicious
from a sociological point of view to concentrate on public expression and on the justifications of
actors in context than on their internal consciences, which requires observing them directly in
interaction. Additionally, considering public justifications as pretexts or as expressions of hypocrisy 39
puts aside their social efficacy in the given context.
Cf. C. Hamidi, ―Éléments pour une approche interactionniste de la politisation.‖
Cf. Cass Sunstein, ―The Law of Group Polarization,‖ The Journal of Political Philosophy 10, no. 2 (2003): 175-195; James
Kuklinski, ed., Citizens and Politics: Perspectives from Political Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
37 On this important epistemological question, see C. Wright Mills, ―Situated Actions and Vocabularies of Motive,‖
American Sociological Review 5 (1941): 904-913; for a contemporary interpretation, see Danny Trom, ―Grammaires de la
mobilisation et vocabulaires de motifs,‖ in Daniel Céfaï and Danny Trom, eds., Les formes de l’action collective: Mobilisations
dans des arènes publiques (Paris: Éditions de l‘EHESS, 2001), 99-134. See also Danny Trom, ―De la réfutation de l‘effet
NIMBY considérée comme une pratique militante: Notes pour une approche pragmatique de l‘activité revendicative,‖
Revue française de science politique 49, no. 1 (February 1999): 31-50.
38 Bernard Lahire, L’homme pluriel (Paris: Pluriel, 1995), 92.
39 One is reminded of the concept of ―the civilizing force of hypocrisy,‖ so important for Jon Elster, ―Argumenter et
négocier dans deux assemblées constituantes,‖ Revue française de science politique 44, no. 2 (April 1994): 187-257.
35
36
10
To this end it seems necessary in the study of civic competence to move away from an ―internalist‖
and psychologically-focused perspective centered around the cognitive dispositions of actors, toward
a non-mentalist and praxeological approach focused on the ―in between,‖ more precisely toward
what a citizen must do in order to appear competent in the public space. To adopt a pragmatist
perspective is to consider that individuals have access to a stock of knowledge and expertise—
arising from their past experiences—that they can activate in context in order to respond
competently to the problems they face. The question that subsequently arises is that of access to
civic competence, or in other words, of the acquisition of the practical repertoire possessed by each
individual.
Choosing a process-based analysis of the access to civic competence
This third point follows from the previous one. Once the role of context in individuals‘ access to
civic competence has been reevaluated, leading to focus on political practices, its static character
comes into question. It then takes the form of a process-based approach, centered around both the
past trajectory of actors (allowing for their stabilized civic practices to be taken into account) and
around the transformations of individual knowledge and expertise arising from the situations in
which actors find themselves involved. Adopting a process-based approach allows taking into
account the temporality and context of production of civic competence, in order to avoid both the
pitfalls of a subjectivist perspective, which makes the individual an actor free of all determinism
shaping his choices, and the inverse, strictly mechanist position, where the actor is nothing more
than the vector of structural forces overwhelming him and over which his own understanding would
not have influence. The process-based approach thus aims to de-essentialize the notion of political
competence. This competence, when perceived as an essential attribute of the individual or of the
social group, appears as a concrete and unchangeable disposition, which does not allow an
opportunity to consider conversion phenomena,40 the variability of practices according to the
contexts of interaction, nor the contexts of politicization, which itself implies the idea of a gradual,
although not linear, phenomenon.
Certain studies of political socialization, having relativized the importance of family for the majority
of actors, have tried to resituate the question of politicization within the broader life-cycles of actors,
and have thus presented the roles of other influences in the acquisition of political competence.41 By
resituating the question of civic competence within the life cycles of individuals, we can, at the same
time, measure the structuring power of the past on political practices while still leaving open the
possibility that new experiences can arise, constituting just as many occasions for socialization or
even the bifurcation of the trajectory of actors.
See Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (London:
Penguin, 1966).
41 Cf. Alfredo Joignant, ―La socialisation politique: stratégies d‘analyse, enjeux théoriques et nouveaux agendas de
recherche,‖ Revue française de science politique 47, no. 5 (October 1997): 535-559.
40
11
This approach has already received significant attention from social movements‘ scholarship,
through the study of activist careers, or of the biographical consequences of activism. 42 The concept
of career allows in particular for the adoption of a dynamic analysis of the processes of identity
construction. The mobilization and the acquisition of new competencies can only be understood
when they are placed within the global trajectory of a particular actor, by comparing him to his past
experiences, allowing to understand how new experiments are assimilated, rejected, or
incorporated.43
Building civic competence in a participatory budgeting institution
Now that this theoretical and epistemological framework has been sketched, it can be put in motion
to see whether it truly accounts for the relationship between citizens and politics I observed in
Rome. The goal here is to evaluate the consequences of a particular type of experience on the civic
competence of actors: engagement in a participatory democracy institution. The observation of the
construction of civic competence within participatory democracy institutions should deepen the
study of ordinary relationships to politics – which has until now principally focused on the
recognition of politics –, particularly through non-political means44 by analyzing how practices that
are initially not thought as political by actors can lead to a durable politicization.45 This would allow
for a shift from the analysis of dispositions to that of civic practices in the understanding of civic
competence. How and where does this conversion to politics46 take place, within institutions of
participatory democracy? What types of capacities do ordinary citizens posses initially, and what can
they acquire through their participation? How can weakly politicized individuals, in such an
institutional context, develop a durable politicization?
The vitues of poltical ethnography
In order to answer these questions, this article is based on an ethnographic study undertaken over
two years, from December 2004 through September 2006, within the framework of a municipal
participatory budgeting (PB) organization in the 11th district of Rome in Italy. This case had been
See in particular Doug McAdam, ―The Biographical Consequences of Activism,‖ American Sociological Review 54 (1989):
744-760.
43 On the use of the concept of ―career‖ in the sociology of social movements, see Olivier Filleule, ―Pour une analyse
processuelle de l‘engagement individuel,‖ Revue française de science politique 51, no. 1-2 (February-April 2001): 199-217.
44 For the most recent development of this approach underscoring the roles of cultural or esthetic resources in the
recognition of politics, see Alfredo Joignant, ―Compétence politique et bricolage: Les formes profanes du rapport au
politique,‖ Revue française de science politique 57, no. 6 (December 2007): 799-817.
45 Institutions of participatory democracy are political institutions in the sense that they are created from above, by
elected political officials. Nevertheless, it should be underlined that interactions taking place within them are not initially
political, in the sense that concrete and practical problems are addressed there, and that direct references to partisan
politics are rejected. One of the stakes of the interactions occurring there is precisely the transition from small to ―big
politics,‖ to paraphrase Dewey‘s terms.
46 Here we reference the notion of ―conversion‖ used by Jacques Lagroye to describe processes of politicization of
diverse practices into political activities (J. Lagroye, La politisation).
42
12
chosen as it devolves high degree of decision-making power to citizens and makes the question of
the politicization of participants and of the education of citizenship a central objective of the
institution.47 In order to understand the effect that repeated participation in a PB can have on
individuals, the goal was to observe and to follow the actors in context – in order to evaluate
whether or not their interactions in public evolved over time – which was carried out by observing
54 public meetings of the PB48. More informal interactions were observed too: organization
meetings, demonstrations, private conversations, etc. It appears indeed that direct observation is
more useful than using focus groups or questionnaires to evaluate the ordinary relationship between
citizens and politics. While works focusing on ―ordinary civism‖ or the politicization of discussions
appear extremely stimulating,49 the transferability of results stemming from quasi-experimental
methods in real political situations is always questionable. If such protocols foster the expression of
actors‘ (potential) capacities, they do not allow for the analysis of the social and contextual
conditions of access to political speech. While ethnography should not be seen as a means to access
objective facts as such, it nevertheless appears as the only methodology allowing for serious and
non-artefactual consideration of the importance of the context of interaction on the expression of
political opinions.50
The aim was then to resituate these experiences within actors‘ individual biographies, in order to
evaluate the novelty of the observed capacities and the meaning that this competence had for
participants. Hence the use of ―life history‖ interviews, with twelve participants that I followed
closely over two years. I hereby differ from Eliasoph and Lichterman method, the latter rejecting the
use of interviews in ethnographic research, preferring to focus on discourse in situation. While their
focus on less-artificial contexts of interaction is valuable, I believe that interviews (especially loosely
structured ones) allow gaining knowledge about the previous experiences of actors‘, which makes
the understanding and interpretation of interactions more accurate afterwards.
The conditions for mobilization and participation in a PB are firstly tackled, before moving to the
analysis of the effects of engagement in such institutions. I will then describe the process by which
individuals engaged in this institution can acquire certain skills, knowledge, know-how and practical
capacities through their participation, which might thereafter affect more deeply their political
trajectories.
This research takes place within the framework of a broader study, comparing the Roman experiment to that of
Morsang-sur-Orge outside Paris and of Sevilla in Spain. Here we have nevertheless chosen to center the analysis around
one single case in order to focus more on the mechanisms of politicization than on the differences linked to the
embeddedness of institutions in distinct political and cultural contexts. Cf. Julien Talpin, Schools of democracy. How ordinary
citizens (sometimes) become competent in participatory budgeting institutions, Colchester, ECPR Press, 2011.
48 I took detailed notes of the meetings, both of the discursive interactions and of the way the setting was spatially
organized.
49 Cf. A. Joignant, ―Compétence politique et bricolage‖; S. Duchesne and F. Haegel, ―Avoiding or Accepting Conflict in
Public Discourse.‖
50 For a defense of the ethnographic approach to analyze politicization, see N. Eliasoph and P. Lichterman, ―Culture in
Interaction.‖
47
13
Participatory budgeting in Rome 11th district: a formally inclusive institution
There are now approximately two hundred participatory budgeting institutions in Europe and nearly
a thousand in the world.51 Invented in Brazil, in the city of Porto Alegre near the end of the 1980s,
participatory budgeting has since met with large success, mostly due to the impact on the economic
and social development of the Brazilian city.52 A PB is defined as an institution allowing for the
inclusion of ordinary citizens in the budget cycle of a public administration. A PB generally takes the
form of the creation of neighborhood, district, or citywide assemblies that are open to all residents,
in which citizens participate in the elaboration of projects that are then integrated into the municipal
or regional budget. Thus a portion (from 1 to 20% in European cases) of the annual investment
budget of the public administration is decided upon more or less directly by citizens—allowing for a
co-decision process between elected officials and citizens.
The inception of participatory budgeting in 2003 in the 11th district of Rome was part of a radical
political project, embodying the will of a recently elected communist mayor close to the far-left antiglobalization movement, ―to deepen democracy.‖53 Procedurally, the Roman PB is based on a cycle
of annual meetings based on the budget calendar. The district is divided into seven neighborhoods
that are the central spaces of participation. At the start of the year, an assembly is organized in each
neighborhood, during which delegates are elected. PB delegates do not have a representative
function but are regular participants, pillars of the participatory body. Next, and here is the heart of
the process, thematic working-groups regularly meet over the following months in order to set-up
projects relating to the five principal municipal competencies, in particular urbanism, the network of
roads, rails, and waterways, green spaces, cultural policies, youth activities, and sports. The meetings
of the working-groups are open to the delegates as well as to all inhabitants of the neighborhood.
Finally, at the end of the process, a neighborhood assembly is organized – where participation is
more important than in the working-groups – during which the participants vote for one project per
theme, with the one receiving the most votes per category being integrated into the district budget.
The allocation of 5 million euros—20% of the municipal investment budget—is thus directly
decided upon by the residents of the district. Beyond the desire to deepen democracy, the Roman
experiment expressly promotes the desire to create an active and critical citizenship. The first article
of the PB constitution thus clarify that ―the PB aims for the promotion of an active citizenship
through the inclusion of citizens in the decisions of the district.‖54 The facilitators of the meetings
see in the PB a true school of citizenship, the goal of the experience being to ―offer an opportunity
for personal development to citizens by making individual knowledge a common resource for all
Cf. Yves Sintomer, Carsten Herzbery, and Anja Röcke, Démocratie participative et modernisation des services publics: des affinités
éléctives? Enquête sur les expériences de budget participatif en Europe (Paris: La Découverte, 2008).
52 Marion Gret and Yves Sintomer, Porto Alegre, L’espoir d’une autre démocratie (Paris: La Découverte, 2002).
53 Interview with L. Ummarino, city official in charge of participatory budgeting, Rome, December 16, 2004.
54
See
the
site
of
the
Roman
participatory
budgeting
program:
http://www.municipiopartecipato.it/pages/index/tab/regolamento
51
14
citizens.‖55 To what extent, engagement in this type of institution affects the trajectories of actors
and is able, as it claims, of creating a more competent citizenship, ready to participate more actively
in the public sphere?
The public of participatory democracy: socio-demographic diversity, and varied initial capacities
Lay citizens are not blank slates. They participate mobilizing their own competencies, resulting from
their previous experiences, which they are able to use in the public space.56 The richness and the
creativity of the PB directly stem from repeatedly bringing together actors with varied initial
knowledge and competencies. While the rate of participation is weak, since only 1,498 people
participated in 2004, which represents approximately 1% of the population of the district, the public
in the PB is relatively heterogeneous, although certain categories are over-represented.57 First and
foremost there was real gender diversity, since in 2004, 53% of the participants of the Roman PB
were women.58 In terms of generations, while we can observe an over-representation of those over
50 years of age (36% of participants were older than 51), all age brackets were represented, with 12%
of participants being students, for example. In regard to socio-professional categories, there was an
over-representation of white-collar employees (25% of participants) and an under-representation of
the unemployed (only 5% of the total). The participants of the Roman PB have, in general, a higher
than average level of education, with 24% having a university diploma, and 41% with at least a high
school diploma. Finally, there was a marked over-representation of activists: 63% of the participants
were members of an association, a political party, or a union.59 This last point seems particularly
important to the extent that it is precisely the interaction between activists and non-politicized actors
that forms the basis for the acquisition of most new capacities.
Despite the clear over-representation of certain fractions of the population, which only confirms the
weight of social origins and of cultural resources in political participation phenomena that has
already been largely documented60 it is possible to underline the strong diversity of the participating
public, in particular with regard to other, more conventional, political arenas. These actors with
heterogeneous profiles bring up different types of knowledge and of expertise during public
discussions in order to give weight to their reasoning and to convince the audience of the logic of
Associazione Progetto Laboratorio Onius, ―Il progetto Sensibilizzando,‖ in Massimilano Smeriglio, Gianluca Peciola,
and Luciano Ummarino, eds., Pillola rossa o pillola blu? Pratiche di Democrazia Partecipativa nel Municipio Roma XI (Rome: Intra
Moenia Edition, 2005), 160. Translated into French by the author, into English by the translator.
56 For a critique of the concept of the ―ordinary citizen,‖ see the introduction by Loïc Blondiaux in Thoman Fromentin
and Stéphanie Wojcik, eds., Le profane en politique: Compétences et engagement du citoyen (Paris: L‘Harmattan, 2008), 37-51.
57 We will not seek here to debate the topic, although fundamental, of the legitimacy of decisions made in institutions
with such a limited public.
58 Lucianno Ummarino, ―Bilancia Participativo,‖ in M. Msperiglio et al., Pillola rossa o pillola blu? 178.
59 Ernesto d‘Albergo, ed., Pratiche partecipative a Roma: Le osservazioni al plano regolatore e il bilancio partecipativo (Rome:
Università La Sapienza, 2005), 75-76. These numbers are certainly inflated by the fact that activists are more likely to
respond to questionnaires than others.
60 D. Gaxie, Le cens caché; Sydney Verba, Kenneth Lehman Schlozman, and Henry Brady, Voice and Equality: Civic
Voluntarism in American Politics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995).
55
15
their propositions. Three types of initial competencies have thus been observed: local knowledge,
technical know-how, and political competence.61
Local knowledge appears fundamental in the justification of all local participatory endeavors, to the
extent that it rests on the idea that citizens know the most about the realities of their daily lives and,
in this vein, their implication in the production of public policies can only improve their rationality
and justice. The idea is ancient, as it was conceptualized by Aristotle, for whom those who must
respect the law are better judges than those who make it. This notion has recently reappeared within
certain theories of deliberation.62 It is thus the practice and the use that form the quality of the
judgment. The character of the user-citizen (of public transportation and public services) has thus
made its appearance in the contemporary political vocabulary.63 Within the framework of the case
studied here, it is even more the face of the resident or of the neighbor that nevertheless dominates.
Local knowledge, discursively mobilized during public meetings, generally takes two distinct
rhetorical forms: rootedness and testimony. Local rootedness, a sign of repeated practice and
observation of the territory, appears as a necessary condition for the attribution of a sufficient
legitimacy to speak, and acquire a magnitude greater than that of a simple individual. Tied to a
personal experience, it is related in the form to storytelling. While actors—given their cultural,
political, and thus discursive resources—are not all capable of immediately developing a general, or
even political, discourse, the use of personal narrative and of testimonies allows for the enlargement
of legitimate speach.64 The PB thus allows for a non-political competence, linked to the daily life of
actors, to access the public sphere. The enlargement of modes of expression of claims beyond
simple rational argumentation embodied in the use of local knowledge makes possible the
participation of non-politicized actors,65 which can sometimes translate in the long term, as will be
seen, following repeated interactions with activists in particular, to a process of politicization.
As for technical knowledge, it generally arises from a specific professional practice. Considering the
topics discussed within the PB—principally touching upon urban renewal, the network of roads,
rails, waterways, mass transit, and the environment—architects or urban planners occupy a special
place among the participants. It is in fact not rare to meet architects at the meetings of the PB, using
This classification is inspired in part by Yves Sintomer, ―Du savoir d‘usage au métier de citoyen,‖ Raisons politiques 31
(2008): 115-133.
62 Cf. Tali Mendelberg, ―The Deliberative Citizen: Theory and Evidence,‖ in Mickaël Delli Carpini et al., eds., Research on
Micro-Politics: Political Decision-Making, Deliberation and Participation, 6 (San Diego: Elsevier Science, 2002), 151-193.
63 Luc Rouban, ―Le client, l‘usager et le fonctionnaire: quelle politique de modernisation pour l‘administration
française?,‖ Revue française d’administration publique 59 (1991): 435-444; Catherin Neveu, Citoyenneté et espace public: habitants,
jeunes et citoyens dans une ville du Nord (Villeneuve-d‘Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2003).
64 Cf. Iris M. Young, ―Communication and the Other: Beyond Deliberative Democracy,‖ in Seyla Benhabib, ed.,
Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 120-135; Lynn
Sanders, ―Against Deliberation,‖ Political Theory 25, no. 3 (1997): 347-376; Francesca Polletta, It Was Like a Fever:
Storytelling in Protest and Politics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005).
65 Cf. Marion Carrel, ―Susciter un public local: Habitants et professionnels du transport en confrontation dans un
quartier d‘habitat social,‖ in Claudia Barril, Marion Carrel, at al., eds., Le public en action: Usages et limites de la notion d’espace
public en sciences sociales (Paris: L‘Harmattan, 2003), 219-240.
61
16
their professional knowledge, sharing their expertise, in order to qualify or disqualify certain
proposals. Technical knowledge is not reserved for experts, however, and certain activists mobilize
competencies acquired in other public arenas: ecological activists can cite precise statistics relative to
pollution, activists for housing rights or for undocumented immigrants appear perfectly aware of the
legal texts relating to these questions. These different actors are thus able to cognitively enrich the
discussions of the PB, and they thus exert a non-negligible influence over the final decisions and
over other participants.
Finally, it is worth emphasizing the political competencies of a certain number of participants, with
members of political parties or of associations being over-represented within the PB. The specificity
of their political knowledge and the know-how will not be discussed at length here, as it goes back to
the classic definition of political competence, well documented elsewhere.66
Each form of knowledge and expertise is not mastered by all of the participants. Some possess many
forms (activists, architects, etc.), while others appear relatively weak. Lacking access to systematic
socio-demographic data on this matter, it appears nevertheless evident that technical knowledge—
considering the professional competencies it requires—is reserved for individuals from certain
socio-professional categories, and that political competence is directly correlated to cultural capital.
Inversely, local knowledge is the weapon of the weak, the resource for those who do not have any
other. Such as workers who could only count on the strength of their workforce in production
relationships, the weakest residents can only count on their personal experience of the territory to
draw upon in participatory budgeting meetings.
Learning to speak in public: a process of domestication
Assembling actors with such heterogeneous profiles could be a rich source of information and
experiences for them. Interactions among these different actors can therefore sometimes turn out to
be decisive, profoundly affecting their civic trajectory. My ethnographic study allowed identifying a
pattern of bifurcation of individual trajectories following participatory engagement, which
nevertheless only reached a minority of participants.67 This process is composed of several phases,
each step appearing as potentially exclusive for the participants.
A crucial condition for socialization through participation is the repetition of social interactions over
time, the intensity of interactions being a condition for the bifurcation of trajectories68. Not all
Cf. Frédérique Matonti and Franck Poupeau, ―Le capital militant: Essai de définition,‖ Actes de la recherche en sciences
sociales 155, no. 5 (2004): 4-11.
67 By bifurcation, we mean a substantial modification of individuals‘ civic or political practices. This is a gradual process,
without rupture, although one can distinguish a ―before‖ and an ―after.‖ See D. McAdam, ―The Biographical
Consequences of Activism,‖ 745-746.
68 For a similar defense of repetition in empowerment processes, see N. Eliasoph, Making Volunteers, Princeton,
Princeton University Press, 2011.
66
17
citizens participate in the PB with the same degree of intensity. The PB is structured by circles of
participation, which reflect the regularity of participation and the degree of integration within the
institution. Three concentric circles can be distinguished. To exist and be stable, participatory
institutions need to create a group of regular participants, which I called the ―group of good
citizens.‖ It is generally composed of 10 to 15 volunteers, who form the first circle of participants. A
―group of good citizens‖ therefore existed in each neighborhood assembly of the Roman PB—but
also in the other cases studied. Well integrated into the institution, they knew the rules of the game
and regularly speak in front of the assembly, so well that they have an important influence on the
behavior of others and on final decisions. The second circle is comprised of intermittent
participants, who only attend a few meetings each year. Finally, the third circle is comprised of the
population as a whole and thus represents the 95% of the population that never participates in the
PB.
Integration in the ―group of good citizens‖ is a condition to be affected by participation. To
integrate this group, individual must first be present regularly, participation being seen as a minimal
form of engagement and of support for the process. They then have to be able to speak in public.
The participatory bodies studied rely in fact on public deliberation for making their decisions69.
Participants must therefore possess or acquire the confidence necessary for public speaking in order
to promote their needs or projects. The necessity of public speaking embodies a first filter, as
indicated by the weakest participation in discussion meetings – the working groups – as compared to
decision meetings (limited to a vote and featuring only a few speakers). While, in 2004, 1,498 people
participated in the Roman PB, only approximately one hundred regularly participated in the working
groups.70 Although the exit mechanisms cannot be reduced only to the fear of speaking: factors such
as the amount of time required for such a participation, level of interest in meetings that aren‘t
directly decision-oriented (even though they play a role in the selection of propositions to be voted
on), and the implicit delegation to ―delegates‖ who, without being representatives, are there precisely
to ensure the construction of propositions. These factors cannot be pushed aside—they also
embody a first filter.
Next, within the working groups, not everyone speaks up. 21% of participants in working groups
thus never spoke in the observed meetings.71 This data does not reflect however inequalities among
participants‘ interventions – some actors speaking up many times and for lengthy comments, others
only speaking briefly and once. It also shows the importance of the procedural device for access to
public speaking. Working groups meetings were divided, as a general rule, into three or four small
discussion groups, each one comprised of 5 to 10 members. This allowed the majority of
Sometimes, however, for matters of time, discussions were settled by vote. Vote was always preceded by a collective
discussion allowing for the definition, clarification, and evaluation of propositions and arguments.
70 More precisely, 278 people participated in the working groups in 2004. This number, however, includes repeated
counts of individuals who participated in many meetings, to the extent that we can estimate that about one hundred
participated regularly in the working groups.
71 We accounted essentially for speakers in the working groups, since the other meetings—elections of delegates or
voting—were not set up to have a collective discussion. Thus, 340 of the 430 participants in the working groups that we
observed spoke up at least one time.
69
18
participants to speak, unlike other studied cases where the groups were larger (at least twenty or
thirty people) and the rate of speaking lower (68% in Morsang-sur-Orge, 40% in Sevilla). Those who
remain silent are condemned to remain at the margins of the institution. Participating intermittently,
they can pick up some information, but they will not be significantly affected in their civic practices.
I thus never met a regular participant, truly integrated in the PB, who never spoke in public
assemblies.
Not only must the participants speak, they must also speak appropriately, according to the requisite
discursive norms regulating interactions in these institutions. A necessary condition for the
integration within the institution is the respect of the grammatical rules defining the correct way to
speak in public. Individuals simply cannot say anything and everything in public;72 if they do they are
heavily symbolically sanctioned, as indicated by an example that occurred in the Tormarencia
neighborhood.
___________
Mazia was coming for the first time to a PB meeting, and was apparently motivated by a personal trouble: the
trees in her street had not been cut down for a long time and their branches created a danger for cars and
pedestrians. She wanted to make a proposal to the PB on this issue, but was apparently frustrated when she
learnt that it was impossible as this was the last PB session of the year, impeding any new proposal to be
made. The other participants – regular ones – invited her to participate anyway, as she would be allowed to
vote for the proposals concerning the neighbourhood. She answered: ‗I cannot vote on the proposal related
to street X, as I don‘t know it. And this street does not concern me‘. She therefore decided to leave the
meeting: ‗At this point, as there are no problems related to my street, I‘m going; because personally I don‘t
know anything about those [other] problems‘. A man nevertheless greeted her and encouraged her to come
back the following year: ‗At least you did […] not your duty, because it’s not a duty, but something good’. Mazia,
obviously upset as she was speaking faster and faster in a rather aggressive tone, made clear she would not
come back as her problem was not taken into account. She was therefore sanctioned for her parochialism by
the other participants: ‗Enlarge your horizons. You focus too much on your own street here we‘re not
working for our own streets egoistically, but for everybody.‘ Mazia, feeling attacked answered: ‗I will enlarge
my horizons when I‘ll see my problems solved‘. Roberta explained to her afterwards that the delegates of the
PB were not like delegates of their street or their zone, but of the whole neighbourhood. Mazia never came
back to the assembly.73
__________
As often, tensed interactions reveal the rules of the game implicitly followed by the actors. Usually,
participants know they should not voice self-interested proposals; so they do not. In this case
however, this newcomer, participating for the first time, did not know the grammatical rules of the
institution. As they had been infringed, the rules had to be recalled and defined explicitly: ‗here we‘re
not working for our own streets egoistically, but for everybody‘. Overly personalized interventions,
This idea is central in all literature about deliberative democracy—of Kantian inspiration—with the strength of
publicity being attributed by Habermas to the nature of communication, by Elster to the strategic quest for convincing
the undecided, or by Fearon to the submission to certain social norms. See Jürgen Habermas, Théorie de l’agir
communicationnel (Paris: Fayard, vol. 1, 1987); J. D. Elster, ―Argumenter et négocier...‖; James Fearon, ―Deliberation as
Discussion,‖ in Jon Elster, ed., Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 44-68.
73 Observation notes, Tormarencia, Working Group no. 4, Rome, March 28, 2005.
72
19
centered on the private interests of speakers, are severely sanctioned within PB assemblies, through
the attribution of disparaging reputations – ―bigmouth,‖ ―consumer,‖ ―egotistical,‖ ―lobbyist‖ – and
a symbolic form of exclusion. This question is all the more complex in that the PB allows for an
opening of public action to traditionally excluded forms of knowledge, and especially local
knowledge. The latter being necessarily linked to a form of individual, personal, and relatively
idiosyncratic practice, speakers must frame it in such a way that it can appear compatible with the
grammar of the institution. Local knowledge is thus never an end in and of itself. It must lead to a
more general discussion of what must be done. While the participants may start with a personal
narrative to illustrate their complaints, they must nevertheless move toward a generalization arising
from it. In the image of the figure of the good voter from the manuals of civic instruction of the
French Third Republic (required to distance themselves from particular interests as well as from
their impulses and emotions),74 to be heard in a participatory arena, one must adopt the point of
view of the community and aim for the general interest.
But, departing from civic republican morals, while an orientation toward the common good is
required, this must not take the form of overtly political or partisan discourse, which is often
considered ―blabber‖ or ―politicking,‖ appearing both ineffective and not useful for carrying out the
projects of the PB. When the participants get carried away in general or political discussions, they are
interrupted and brought back to order by a ―but what is your proposal, in the end?‖, such as Giorgio
in one meeting, that was bashed publicly by another participant for not being specific enough in his
street rehabilitation proposal: ―You‘re doing philosophy here. We have to point out some specific
streets‖.75 Speakers must therefore promote the general interest, while still connecting it to a
concrete project that does not appear to be motivated by a private interest. It is in this sense that
discussions within these institutions are at first not directly political, to the extent that the subjects
brought up must first be approached from a practical angle—a problem is raised to the members of
the community—before being generalized, that is to say presented as collectively treatable.
Thus, the first thing that participants learn in a PB – and which is a condition for their integration
within the institution – is to speak according to requisite grammatical forms. 76 Mastery of the
specific grammar of the institution, through mechanisms of sanction and gratification, can thus
appear, as voting did when it was introduced, as a process of the domestication of citizens, who
must conform to the correct ways of acting in the public sphere. Scrutinizing the norms of civic life
would have been impossible without spending months of the field, observing patters of interactions
and regularities, and sometimes seeing a breach in the normal course of the situation.
Yves Déloye, École et citoyenneté: L’individualism republican de Jules Ferry à Vichy: controverses (Paris: Presses de Sciences Po,
1994).
75 Observation notes, Montagnola working group n.1, Rome, 18th January 2006).
76 For more empirical materials illustrating the learning of the role of ―good citizen,‖ see Julien Talpin, ―Jouer les bons
citoyens: Les effets contrastés de l‘engagement au sein de dispositifs participatifs,‖ Politix 19, no. 75 (2006): 13-31.
74
20
Civic competence in interaction
Speaking the language of the institution, actors can progressively integrate the ―group of good
citizens‖ and thus attain a regular participation that, most of the time, will significantly affect them.
It should however be stressed that a majority of participants never pass this first step.77 Remaining
discursively incompetent, they are doomed to remain on the margins of the institution. While this
learning process is intensive, it only involved around a hundred people in the Roman case. Among
the hundred regular participants, only 21% were not initially engaged actors78 and they were the ones
who could be the most affected by their participation. Let‘s scrutinize the type of capacities they can
learn.
Learning to deliberate: a collective competence
What is generally qualified as deliberation, understood as a reasoned exchange of arguments aiming
to take a collective decision, can be broken down into a series of gestures and practices, requiring of
each participant specific competencies: learning to listen to others, respecting them by speaking
politely in turn and without aggression, to ask questions for clarification, and to make ―concrete‖
and ―constructive‖ proposals. The practice of deliberation, far from being spontaneous, requires
both a procedural organization and a collective learning process. We can in this vein evoke the
experience of the neighborhood assembly of Montagnola, where a real learning process took shape
over time, by imitation and trial and error.
____________
The first two meetings of the year had been chaotic. The approximately thirty participants had refused to
divide into working groups—against the advice of the organizers. This refusal led to a disorganized debate,
some speaking over others, not listening to each other, jumping from one subject to another. At the third
meeting, a month later, the participants decided to divide into working groups, which were then only
comprised of 6 to 8 members. The dynamic of the discussion changed drastically. Within the group that I
observed, the discussion was calm and constructive, the moderator occasionally clarifying, ―not all at the same
time,‖ and ―each one in turn.‖ A speaking list was organized, proposals written down, and those who cut off
speakers were systematically sanctioned. A real deliberation was thus able to arise, resting on the collective
evaluation of arguments for and against a given proposal. In a short time, by the imitation of rules of good
behavior defined by the organizers, citizens had learned to debate; the improved organization of the
discussion allowed them to move from an agonistic and sometimes aggressive debate to more cooperative
and constructive exchanges.79
__________
It was thus through trial and error, as a result of failures discovered in the process (observations
shared by the participants about the ineffective nature of discursive messiness), thanks to the
enlightened influence of moderators who never ceased underlining the importance of simple
A sign of difficulties in integrating into the participatory budgeting institution is the very high degree of turnover, since
approximately 50% of participants in 2003 did not come back in 2004.
78 E. d‘Albergo, ed., Pratiche partecipative a Roma... 76.
79 Observation notes, Montagnola, Roma, January-May 2005.
77
21
procedures of discussion management, so that a collective apprenticeship could occur. The learning
of the role of the (good) citizen occurs in this way, first through the acquisition of relatively
standardized and conventional ways of doing, which can only come up in interaction. Participation
in PB assemblies thus allows individuals to learn to express their opinions, to speak in public, to
manage a meeting, to distribute speaking turns and to allow less competent actors to speak.
Collective action training
For the least politicized actors, participation in the PB constitutes real training in collective action,
which rests on practical forms of know-how and on rarely clarified competencies that are
indispensable for engagement. Beyond the mastery of deliberation, the most invested participants
learn to organize a political agenda, to manage different sensibilities, and even to handle a
negotiation among irreducible positions. Participation in the PB can also take the form of organizing
collective actions aiming to mobilize larger circles of the local population. Participants thus learn to
organize a protest, to lead a petition campaign or to construct events aiming to bring awareness of a
cause to the population. We will see how such collective action training can be invested in other
associations, and thus contribute boosting local civil society. This combination of expertise, while
extremely practical, was often a foreign concept to the majority of initial participants.
Acquiring technical expertise
Participation in the PB also allowed for the actors to acquire a certain number of technical
competencies, allowing them to discuss on an equal level with municipal experts. The PB deals,
most of the time, with urban questions (rails, roads, and waterways, urban organization, local
development, etc.) relating to municipal competencies. Discussions in the assemblies were
consequently often technical, requiring the use of maps, schemas, or precise statistics, in order to
determine where or how to construct a gymnasium, a bicycle path, a parking lot, a green space, or
how to enlarge the neighborhood school. The PB thus brought together some participants without
any special technical competence, others who, through their professional activities, possessed
important knowledge on certain specific questions, and municipal engineers whose rare
interventions came off as real lessons in urbanism. This technical apprenticeship was made up
primarily of discursive interactions between citizens and experts in the case of the Roman PB. The
participants could thus acquire a certain technical competence on urban questions. They now know
what the legal constraints are to the realization of one type or another of urban planning, the cost of
certain projects, and the technical advantages and disadvantages of different types of development
of rails, roads, or waterways. From this point of view, participation in institutions of participatory
democracy seems able to reduce the gap between experts and lay citizens in the construction of
public policies.
Regular participants also learn to manage a budget, with its income and expenses, the necessity to
balance it, etc. As stresses Mohammad, PB delegate in 2005: ―You learn a lot, it‘s really important …
i didn‘t know anything about the budget … but slowly, one learns.80‖ The PB thus allows for the
improvement of transparency in the attribution of public funds; with budgetary complexity no
80
Interview, Mohammad, Rome, 04.03.2005.
22
longer serving as an impediment to the understanding of political choices. This ―budgetary
pedagogy‖ is also viewed by elected officials as a way to make citizens understand the difficulties of
their jobs and to quiet reclamations.
Spreading political knowledge
Despite the exclusion of properly political discussions in these participatory arenas, they are not cut
off from the local political field, to the extent that participation is a way to expand the political
knowledge of the public and can even constitute a space of individual politicization. Although the
spread of political knowledge does not occur directly in public meetings, the ―groups of good
citizens‖ of the PB also appear to be spaces of sociability. It is thus most often in the halls, in
interpersonal discussions after meetings, in parties, at the bar or in the street that a relationship to
politics and a collective interpretation of the commonly lived existence is constructed. The position
adopted by a given actor during a meeting was explained through his/her partisan affiliation, and
recent municipal decisions were commented upon, as were the advances or barriers of certain
dossiers; sometimes members even went as far as to speak of the president of the Council at the
time, Silvio Berlusconi, usually to make fun of him.
Participants thus discover the local political field and the different organizations that make it up.
Their engagement allows them to meet, sometimes personally, certain actors in the political field and
the first level of elected officials. They can also more easily identify their political colors (which was
far from being the case for all at the beginning) and situate words and actions according to partisan
orientations. They learn to negotiate with elected officials, to play with rivalries and power relations
among parties to promote their interests. Finally, participants discover the functioning of the
administrative machine, the division of competencies, and the conflicts within the institution.
During the public meetings themselves, speeches by certain established actors can sometimes lead to
veritable courses on local political power relationships or municipal institutional functions, on the
condition of not taking an overly partisan tone. Party members evoke the latest municipal decisions,
housing rights advocates tackle the homeless situation in the city, and environmentalists share their
knowledge on global warming or urban planning. At a Roman working group meeting, Maurizio, an
activist from Legambiente, the main Italian environmental organisation, made a very didactic
intervention on the implications of the Kyoto protocol for the public transportation policies of
Italian municipalities: ―You know that anyway, the Kyoto protocol has come into force in Italy since
yesterday [15.02.2005] and Italy has to decrease its CO2 emissions drastically in the following years
[…] 30 per cent of the use of cars in this city regard trips of less than 3 km i.e., distances easily
reachable by bike. It means we could decrease CO2 emissions by 30 per cent just thanks to bikes!
Anyway, [...] soon all the metro stations will be equipped with bike parking […] it‘s a global trend‘81.
Through their engagement in PBs, participants are constantly acquiring new knowledge on the
political system and on a variety of salient public issues. Given the exclusion of political discussions
from public meetings, politicization happens more often backstage than frontstage however. It is
easy to see that while the mobilization of the ensemble of this information has a persuasive goal, it
also constitutes a substantial cognitive contribution for the actors. In this vein, participatory
81
Observation notes, Garbatella, mobility working group, Rome, 16th February 2005
23
budgeting institutions can represent spaces of politicization, such as for this participant who
declared having ―discovered a passion for politics.82‖
Politicization through acculturation
The observed process of politicization observed in the PBs can arise from the ―politicization
through impregnation‖ articulated by Maurice Agulhon. In the image of petty provincial notables
who played the role of cultural intermediaries between national politics and French peasants in the
19th century—in particular within chambers and clubs that allowed for repeated contacts, inter-social
connections, and through these, a mutual impregnation that politicized the village social structure,
going from one person to the next into all social categories83—the politicized actors in the PB, with
activists at the forefront, play a decisive role in the politicization of citizens initially the furthest
removed from politics. Directly transmitted forms of knowledge affect them in a lasting way, as
much as the know-how acquired through imitation, sanction, and gratification, and more widely
through the space of sociability created within and around the PB, which allows for interactions
between politicized and non-politicized actors, for as much as they are sufficiently engaged.
This vision of a unilateral politicization from above, from activists to lay citizens, must nevertheless
be nuanced, to the extent that the influence is mutual, the processes of apprenticeship working in
both directions. Activists in fact acknowledge that participating in the PB allows them to ―rediscover
the territory‖ and to acquire a local knowledge they lacked in the first place, as they were mostly
engaged in more global politics, as stresses Alessandra, 33-year-old activist, member of the
International Civil Service and PB participant in San Paolo neighbourhood:
―The nicest thing is to rediscover the territory itself. […] When I am in my car driving around the
neighbourhood, now I look at the trees there, the building over there, etc. It‘s beautiful! You don‘t feel alone
any more. And that‘s really an incredible added value. [...] All that there is behind the famous Urban Planning
Project [that was discussed in PB assemblies], the parking over there, this thing here, [...] this gives you […] It
opens your mind with all the sensations [...] According to me, beyond money, beyond everything, this is it
[the added value of the PB] […] Rediscovering that you are part of something that belongs to you, that you‘re
part of […] that you could also be part of it in a different way. When we speak about active citizenship […] it
[PB] makes you feel alive, it gives you a will to speak with people in the street, with your neighbours […] We
speak of ‗contacts‘ as if they were something cold and dead […] But no, I‘m not alone any more, I know with
whom I can communicate, with whom I can share this thing in this territory‘.84
PB allows activists going around the neighbourhood to check all the potential problems it faces, to
look at maps and pictures, and above all to talk with people. Activists discovered the basic and
almost daily needs of some part of the local population: the need to get better schools, better access
to public transportation, better housing conditions, better recreational activities for the young, a
Interview, Floriana, Rome, March 28, 2006.
Maurice Agulhon, La république au village (Paris: Plon, 1970). For a good review of this literature, see Gilles Pécout, ―La
politisation des paysans au 19e siècle: Réflexions sur l‘histoire politique des campagnes françaises,‖ Histoire et sociétés rurales
2 (1994), 91-125.
84 Interview Alessandra, Rome, 29th March 2006.
82
83
24
more sustainable traffic management. From this perspective, the learning processes observed in
participatory budgeting institutions are not unidirectional, from activists to lay citizens only, as the
former also learn, thanks to their local engagement.
In the same way, the initially non-politicized actors do not come across as passive receptacles of
politics, to the extent that they interpret in their own right the messages of which they are the
objects, appropriating them, hybridizing them, and sometimes even rejecting them. In this sense, the
processes observed here perhaps correspond more to what Yves Déloye has termed politicization
through ―acculturation‖:
―Without challenging the unequal quality of this exchange that can take the form of a real confrontation, the
suggested notion of ―political acculturation‖ aims to insist upon the complexity, and even more on the nonunivocal but rather diversified character (in its forms and in its places of implementation) of this contact
between (at least) two cultures acting and reacting to each other, one over the other. Nothing would be more
erroneous than to consider that one of the cultures squashes the other and models it, like a wax mold, in its
image.‖85
By emphasizing the heterogeneity of cultures at work as much as the processes of mutual
impregnation, cultural and political mixing, of hybridization and of resistance, the notion of
―political acculturation‖ seems to add complexity to Aghulon‘s approach, and in this sense to better
correspond to what has been observed in PBs. If, taking into account the heterogeneity of the
actors, politicized and non-politicized, within the PB and the possible fragile and evanescent
character of the observed politicization, it is preferable to speak of style—in the sense of Eliasoph
and Lichterman86 –rather than of culture. Processes of politicization through acculturation have
indeed been observed. The style of the group of good citizens impregnates the actors who want to
integrate it, and is also partially modified, or negotiated, by the integration of these new members.87
In this sense, the process of integration into the group of good citizens, which requires being
permeated by its style in interaction, can be qualified as a process of acculturation.
Yves Déloye, ―Pour une sociologie historique de la compétence à opiner ‗politiquement.‘ Quelques hypothèses de
travail à partir de l‘histoire électorale française,‖ Revue française de science politique 57, no. 6 (December 2007): 795.
86 N. Eliasoph and P. Lichterman, ―Culture in Interaction.‖ Group style arises from a recurrent structure of interactions
resting on shared discursive practices, practices of commonly shared sociability, and more or less porous symbolic
boundaries that all define the appropriate attitude within the group and construct the image of the good member of the
group. The concept of ―group style‖ itself arises from a discussion of certain notions from the second Chicago school,
and particularly that of ―subculture‖ according to Gary Alan Fine. See Gary A. Fine and Sherryl Kleinman, ―Rethinking
Subculture: An Interactionist Analysis,‖ The American Journal of Sociology 85, no. 1 (1979): 1-20. We thus see the extent to
which the boundary holds between style and subculture, which tends to support the use of the concept of acculturation.
In the case of participatory budgeting institutions, as we have seen, the good citizen must participate regularly, speak up,
promote general interest, avoid partisan and ideological discourses, propose concrete projects, and listen to others. It is
to this type of style that the least initially politicized actors were acculturated after their regular participation in the
institution.
87 Thus, the rejection of partisan speeches within participatory budgeting institutions (even if it is inscribed in a deeper
cultural matrix) is principally the work of non-politicized actors who, although they can be seen as dominated within the
institution, are capable of defining certain rules of the game and of keeping the activists in line. The style, while it is not
produced by the situation—it has its own historicity—is created through interactions.
85
25
When participation shapes individual and collective trajectories
Approximately one hundred participants, provided that they were sufficiently invested in the
process, became more competent following their participation experience, acquiring technical,
political, and practical knowledge and know-how that they did not possess previously. But to what
extent can these new civic capacities translate into a bifurcation in actors‘ trajectories? Here I tackle
the question of the long-term consequences of political participation.
Participation in the PB can, first of all, take the form of a negative, critical, or cynical politicization.
Hundreds of participants in fact exit the institution in the middle of the year, as indicated by the
high rate of turnover.88 The PB might only offer a trivial amount of power to citizens they say, as
illustrated by the slowness and sometimes the absence of the realization of projects approved in PB
assemblies, and it might be a way for political powers to manipulate citizens and to stifle
contestation. Although their exit is generally silent, with actors preferring to vote with their feet,
cynicism and disappointment is sometimes openly expressed in the assembly:
__________
The participants had been talking for some time about the difficulty for the municipal council not to respect
the decisions of the zone assemblies, when Giovanna raised the tone and got literally outraged about the PB
process, crying out for five minutes against the insufficiencies of the concrete achievements: ―The PB has not
done anything yet since its creation! It‘s a shame! I feel I am a fool. Every time you [the facilitator] tell me not
to say this or that, that it is not possible, that it‘s not in the competence of the Municipio, that it has already
been accepted, etc. What is this all for, then? I really feel I am a fool! I made proposals ten times and they
haven‘t changed anything!‖ People tried to calm her down, which worked after a few minutes. Most of them,
explained to her that some projects had been achieved, even if they mostly told her to be patient. Their
arguments did not seem to convince her however. Giovanna never came back. 89
__________
Disappointed by the model, some participants became more cynical after their participation, as
much about participatory democracy in particular as about politics in general. For some, this
frustrating experience of participation led them from apolitical to anti-political beliefs. When more
actors come out disappointed than satisfied, one can wonder if, in the end, experiments in
participatory democracy, when they do not offer sufficient power to citizens or when the
participation is not well enough organized, might have a more negative than positive effect in terms
of politicization. Far from regenerating democracy, these experiments, if they are not conclusive
enough, risk reinforcing a casual suspicion of public life. While this is not true for all participatory
experiences, it is nevertheless appropriate to underline that, in order to have a significant civic
impact, experiences must be positively evaluated by citizens, which remains the exception in Europe.
Out of the 978 participants in 2003, a just over 500 did not take part in the process in 2004, for example. We can
observe that just as many activists as non-engaged participants dropped out from one year to the next.
89 Observation notes, Roma 70, Working Group no. 3, April 12, 2005.
88
26
Although many citizens were disappointed by their participatory experience, others continued to
participate despite initial difficulties, and sometimes saw their civic trajectory radically transformed.
A dozen individuals engaged in the PB thus reinvested their newly acquired competencies in other
organizations. One of the paradigmatic examples of Municipio XI PB‘s impact on local civil society
is the creation of Roma 70 (one of the neighbourhoods of the district) youth social centre. In the
first year of the PB experience, young people – teenagers between 16 and 22 – started participating
in the PB and rapidly cooperated to push forward a proposal to create a youth social centre in the
neighbourhood, as they were lacking a place to gather for social, political, cultural and leisure
activities. The proposal was largely voted in at the end of the process, and, more interestingly, it
translated rapidly into public policy and public works. A year and a half later, the youth social centre
opened its doors, this rapid realisation being linked to the direct support of the administration and
especially the PB councillor. The latter appeared indeed extremely satisfied with the project, directly
fomenting active citizenship according to him: ―There is also the case of the young people of Roma
70. They were initiated to public life through their participation to the participatory budget in Roma
70, formulating ideas and proposals that became more and more interesting with time. These
teenagers of the neighbourhood constituted themselves, autonomously, in a cultural association [that
manages the centre]. Now, they are organising projects on the territory and give autonomous
vocational training classes. I think this is a typical example of how other processes of selforganisation, self-training and self-management, which are really important for me, can be created
from the participatory budget. They build a competent citizenship.90‖ I had the chance to visit the
centre, and saw how active it was locally, organizing political debates (rather oriented on the left,
most of its members being young leftist activists), local actions, concerts, private lessons, etc. The
managing team – composed of the young students who had presented the project in the PB
assembly – lived, therefore, its first associative experience. These teenagers were able to re-invest the
competences they had learn while participating in the PB, in the framework of this newly created
association. The realisation of a PB proposal therefore resulted in the creation of an association, and
in the acquisition of new skills and competences for actors. On the other hand, it also translated in
the exit from the PB process of these newly engaged association members. Roman PB therefore
directly encourages (even financially) the bifurcation of individual trajectories in the sense of
revitalisation of local civil society.
Local associations also look to the PB for potential recruits. Modes of engagement—and of
expression—in fact seem largely comparable between the PB and certain neighborhood associations,
so much so that the transfer from one to the other can happen easily. I regularly observed leaders
from neighborhood associations invite—more or less publicly—active members of the PB to join
their organization. In this sense, participatory democracy can appear as a way to enrich local civil
society, by producing new civic actors who strengthen the ranks of existing organizations and
encourage the creation of new associations.
90
Interview with L. Ummarino, PB councilor, Rome, 9th January 2005.
27
The growing engagement of certain actors with political professionals has also been observed.
Regular participants of the PB, who were not official members of a party, were contacted and coopted by elected officials and political parties in order to be added to municipal electoral lists for the
next elections. The paradigm case of Floriana can be noted, as she experienced a process of practical
politicization, marked by an increased engagement following her participation in the PB.
________
Her local engagement first allowed her to discover a neighborhood reality she had not known about: ―I
remember, at the first assembly I participated in, they were talking about gardens, lights, etc. and a man whom
I did not know got up timidly and said, with a clearly foreign accent: ‗I understand that you are busy with
public gardens. But you must know that for us, during the winter, there are elderly people who die in the
gypsy camp.‘ He was a delegate from the neighboring gypsy camp. And that was like a punch in the stomach.
These two realities...‖ The direct meeting of a social reality distant from the heart of the PB allowed her to
―become aware of certain crucial social problems in the neighborhood. Often, ―moral shocks‖ are the origin
of a more direct engagement, a first step in a process of politicization.91 She thus became active in the PB and
this experience allowed her to acquire both practical skills and a network of acquaintances of local officials,
which she was then able to use in the political field. Having always voted, but without being an activist for a
political party or association, she underwent a process of practical politicization. She was indeed contacted—
after three years of participation—by the municipal majority to be on the electoral list of the Rifondazione
Comunista in the local elections: ―I liked this experience in the PB so much that I wanted to continue at a
higher level [...]. It‘s new for me, I always voted, but I had never really been active in anything. So when the
mayor suggested I be on the electoral lists, I was very flattered, and I said yes, of course.‖92
_________
The newly acquired civic capacities as well as the progressively constituted network are resources
political parties try to catch in their quest for legitimacy and local establishment. Floriana was not the
only participant of the PB who was offered to be on the electoral lists for the 2006 local elections,
but the others refused. The participatory budget can thus appear as an alternative channel for the
recruitment of local political elites, alongside the political parties that traditionally play this role.93
Cf. James Jaspers, The Art of Moral Protest: Culture, Biography, and Creativity in Social Movements (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 2001).
92 Interview with Floriana, Rome, March 28, 2006.
93 We emphasize that recruitment outside the party is a reasonably classic practice at the municipal level, but that it
generally occurs for local association leaders, who have a different profile from the most professionalized members of
the participatory budgeting institution who are on municipal councils. On this subject, see Christian Le Bart, Les Maires:
Sociologie d’un rôle (Villeneuve-d‘Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2003).
91
28
Table. Civic trajectories of participants in the PB (2004) 94
Participants
Participants who backed out*
Regular participants
New activists
Activists
Lay citizens Total
943
250
79
0
555
250
21
10
Lay citizens (%)
1498
500
100
10
37%
50%
21%
100%
* This is an estimate of participants from 2003 who no longer participate in 2004.
These new political paths, and more globally the process of politicization, cannot be uniquely
attributed to PB participation. The biographical availability of actors, like their political and cultural
dispositions, also plays a decisive role. One essential condition for politicization through
participation is that the engagement be repeated over time in a relatively intensive fashion. The
intensity of engagement is itself dependent upon the biographical availability of individuals—
students and retired people, as well as idle activists seeking new engagements, are particularly
invested in the PB.95 In the case of Floriana, her trajectory of politicization cannot be understood if
not linked to the time freed up by her retirement and the sentiment of ―idleness‖ that followed. Her
engagement thus allowed her to ―feel alive again.‖ The repetition of participation does not depend
uniquely on biographical availability, however, but also on the social and political dispositions of
individuals. Floriana was thus able to mobilize, in the public space, her previous stock of experiences
linked to her professional activity; she is an expert accountant linked to the Ministry of Finances.
Furthermore, in order to participate intensively in the PB, one must believe that such an engagement
can be worth it, that it can have an impact, and that it can be worthwhile to spend time on it—many
considerations that are far from shared by a vast majority of citizens in contemporary democracies.96
Thus, in order to participate, and to do so regularly, actors must have a minimum level of
politicization—in the sense that they do not reject all institutions perceived as political—but the less
they are initially politicized, the more they will be affected by their participation. Even more because
the overrepresentation of the most culturally equipped individuals indicates that the least equipped
have the least chance of being affected.
Despite the evident weight of social dispositions, this study aims to insist on the role of the context
of interaction, capable of compensating in part for the unequal resources hold by individuals, and
which thus creates a favorable environment to individual politicization. Although the weight of
social structures and of mechanisms of political relegation make such trajectories improbable, their
simple existence indicates that what social factors create, they can also undo, and from this point of
Sources: E. d‘Albergo, ed., Practiche partecipative a Roma...
On the concept of ―biographical availability,‖ see Doug McAdam, ―Recruitment of High-Risk Activism: The Case of
Freedom Summer,‖ American Journal of Sociology 92 (1986): 64-90.
96 On this point, see in particular Céline Braconnier and Jean-Yves Dormagen, La démocratie de l’abstention: Aux origines de
la démobilisation électorale en milieu populaire (Paris: Gallimard, 2007).
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view, the institutional and procedural conditions of interaction can represent meaningful
counterweights to the force of reproduction mechanisms.
A democratization of the access to civic competence?
The empirical elements presented here, although fragmentary, emphasize the extent to which the
three characteristics unique to a pragmatist approach to civic competence work together in practice.
The study of participatory budgets indicates that participants must mobilize other resources than
those included in the traditional definition of political competence. The direct reference to the
political field seems even (actively) excluded from interactions within these public arenas. How, in
these conditions, is a paradoxical process of individual politicization possible? The pattern that has
been observed is the following. Participatory budgets serve as formally open public arenas, allowing
for the mobilization and expression of forms of knowledge and of expertise that are generally
excluded or marginalized in the political game, principally stemming from the personal experience of
actors. The mutual presence within the PB of such actors with varied initial competencies, and
especially the interactions between engaged and non-engaged participants, creates conditions
allowing for the latter to connect their personal experiences to political stakes. Ordinary citizens thus
learn to broaden their views. The repetition over time of this type of interaction also allows for the
acquisition of more durable competencies, which can be technical, political, or practical. While many
actors jump ship mid-way, considering the high cost of such participation and its often exclusive
character for the least culturally equipped, those who stay can reach a more formalized politicization,
by joining a political party, an association, or even an electoral list for local elections.97 It is thus
indeed the enlargement of expectations towards citizens that drives to focus on the diversity of their
competencies, and at the end of a process-based analysis, allows observing significant bifurcations in
their civic trajectories.
The traditional approach to political competence—centered on knowledge of the political field and
on the dispositions of actors—would simply not have allowed taking into account the plasticity of
individual practices, and would thus have set aside any analysis of processes of politicization that
could appear decisive for contemporary democracies. With the decline of traditional forms of
mediation and political organizing, participatory democracy institutions could contribute to the
political socialization of individuals. Although, paradoxically, we are simultaneously seeing the rise of
a participatory imperative and the development of a real ―hatred of democracy‖98 stemming from a
belief in the ontological incompetence of ordinary citizens, the stakes of this article were, by
emphasizing the plasticity of actors‘ civic competence, to demonstrate that the most marginalized
actors could get interested in politics. Providing the appropriate institutional, procedural, and
We can also bring up the example of the 20th arrondissement of Paris, which has been the subject of recent research,
where 3 of the 29 neighborhood delegates who are also members of the municipal majority came from neighborhood
councils, proof that this phenomenon of politicization, and even of professionalization, goes beyond the case of
participatory budgeting and touches the majority of local democratic institutions.
98 Jacques Rancière, La haine de la démocratie (Paris: La Fabrique, 2005).
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political conditions—in other words, the frameworks of interaction—allowing for the least equipped
actors to be able to reflect collectively about their interests and to become sufficiently competent to
promote their arguments in the public sphere. While participatory democracy most often remains
very far from this ambition and even runs the risk of delegitimizing it, it seems that the emphasis
placed on institutional and procedural devices as a condition of interaction and apprenticeship
allows raising the fundamental political question: who can speak, and therefore, govern.
Julien Talpin
Julien Talpin is research fellow at the CNRS/Ceraps (Centre d‘Etudes et Recherches
Administratives, Politiques et Sociales – Ceraps/UMR 8026). He recently published Schools of
democracy. How ordinary citizens (sometimes) become competent in participatory budgeting institutions, Colchester,
ECPR Press, 2011. He also edited, with Yves Sintomer, ―Démocratie délibérative‖, special issue of
Raisons Politiques, 42/2, 2011; La démocratie participative au-delà de la proximité. Poitou-Charentes et l’échelle
régionale, Rennes, Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2011. His research focuses on the politicization
processes of the subaltern urban classes, and on the individual effects of political participation
([email protected]). He is also director of the editorial board of the journal Participations.
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