elections

How do citizens view the power of the President of the Republic? An analysis of letters sent to the Élysée Palace reveals the relationship between French citizens and their head of state, as well as the role played by an invisible service: the presidential post office.

The 2017 legislative election, which resulted in a landslide victory for La République en Marche, brought up the question of change in the political profession. Étienne Ollion shows that the National Assembly under Macron has done little to renew political practices, often sidelining newly elected members.

With taxpayer suffrage abolished and universal suffrage achieved, political participation in our democratic societies should no longer be conditioned on property ownership. However, as Timothy Kuhner shows, politics remain subservient to capital.

In France as in the United States, transparency has become a core democratic requirement, and is the cornerstone of all the laws that claim to regulate the funding of political life. But this art of disclosing information often coexists with the ability to conceal it.

What can we expect from elections? A. Przeworski urges us to be minimalist: elections provide only imperfect control over the actions of those in power and are not enough to counteract the political effects of inequalities, but they are still the best way to resolve conflicts without taking up arms.

The history of the vote reveals that election was not born with modern representative government, but that elections were held in the Middle Ages. It also reveals that designation by election is not the end of history in our democracies but that other methods may be considered.

The Front National has been an established player in French political life for thirty years now. Nevertheless, behind the figure of its historical leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the development of the party itself has had its fair share of vicissitudes.

Should politics be left to the people or to specialists? In 2010, Raison Publique, a French journal dedicated to the arts, politics and society published an issue devoted to the notion of collective wisdom, defending the competence of majorities and justifying democracy’s greater rationality. Confronting American political sociology to French political science, issue 12 of Raison Publique shows different approaches to democracy.

When Barack Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, most Americans saw him as a president committed to bringing significant change. But his progressive ambitions soon ran up against indifference and even hostility in the electorate and in some of the political class. How could such an intelligent president find it so hard to get his message across?

We promise a lot and we are promised a lot. Promises lie at the heart of our social life. They are also the foundation of electoral democracies, in which political programs take the form of commitments. Why do we keep our promises? To what do they commit us? And why is it that, every now and then, we keep them?

A world-famous legal scholar, Bruce Ackerman wants to reinvigorate citizenship in today’s democracies. Here, he reexamines the intellectual foundations of his work, and some of the pragmatic applications he designed with others. His principle is to always consider how the state intervenes in the autobiography of every man.

Lula had promised to be the president of the poor, and with the help of favourable economic conditions, he was able to reduce poverty by raising and broadening social minima. However, unable to get to grips with the roots of social imbalances, he left his successor a country still riven by inequality.

Hélène Landemore : Bernard Manin and Nadia Urbinati, you both have written books with apparently similar titles, respectively The principles of representative government (1997) and Representative Democracy: Principles and Genealogy (2006). I would like to organize the discussion around the question of whether representative democracy is an contradiction in terms or the true essence of democracy. I will break down the theme into more manageable questions.