The speeches of disenchantment and re-enchantment on local democracy : for what politics ?

Panel Chairs:

Alain Faure, Science Po Grenoble,

Guillaume Gourgues, Science Po grenoble

Abstract:

Some places echo immediately virtuous or disillusioned democratic stream - Porto Alegre and participation, San Francisco and social movements, Berlin and avant-garde, Naples or Moscow and corruption, Montreal and multiculturalism, Mexico and violence, the canton of Geneva and referendums. In the same time, we could observe much diversified ways of describing the democratic vitality of a city or a region, as soon as we use a micro focus analysis, and we listen attentively to the speeches which are produced there. Each time, this diversity is correlated to a specific cultural and institutional and linguistic history which could be perceived by the people of a specific territory. In France for instance, the local representatives and civil servants explicitly evoke in their speeches a democratic and territorialised "style" (consensus, conflict, balance, partnership, negotiation, deliberation...).

In this IPA panel, we want to open a collective discussion about the function and the impact of these localised and stereotyped speeches in the context of the concrete process of local governance, - in other words the constraints and opportunities - that these democratic beliefs give to the local political elites who want to involve in politics or to implement public policies. Our aim is notably to analysed the discursive mechanisms which define the democratic principles of the production of common good (and not the common good itself), in order to test the hypothesis that the democratic ideal is adapted and defined depending on the local political configuration (decision makers, voters, lobbies), without referring to a universal norm which could be described.

To know if the "enunciation" of politics is differently structured in each territorial configuration, the analyst must keep away from binary interpretations about domination (people/elite, State/society) and use a more historicised and anthropologic analysis of the local discursive productions. In order to understand if the local rhetorical speeches of disenchantment and re-enchantment take part in the agenda-setting (or politicization of problems), it is necessary to gather comparative empirical studies and to accept to open a theoretical arguing about the renewal of democratic beliefs (partly compared to the model of national representative governments). The panel will be specifically interested in the papers which study the way that the speeches spread the "savage" foundations of democracy (as the philosopher Claude Lefort would say), changing democracy into an experience which institutionalise the "social", all the while confronting to the State. In other words, an experience which settles a peculiar management of the political field and its relationship with the civil society.