Defacqz, Samuel
[UCL]
Dupuy, Claire
[UCL]
(eng)
The paper submits to advance the study of policy making through e-participation platforms by analyzing how legislators make use of online e-participation platforms in the process of designing policies. Our approach emphasizes their agency while also recognizing that they are embedded in institutional (parliament vs executive) and party political contexts (majority or minority parliamentary groups) that may constrain their action. We thereby provide an analysis that goes beyond the technical features of e-participation platforms to study how key actors of such platforms actually use them. To answer the research question, we investigate the case of a French e-participation platform. The French case is an extreme case (Lijphart, 1973) of citizens’ mistrust towards the (political) elites as evidenced by the Yellow Vests. In this respect, the French case magnifies the issues of elected politicians’ usages of participatory tools. The platform under study is called Parlement & Citoyens (P&C). It is a private initiative established as a non-profit organization. P&C is an online platform “enabling citizens and legislators to work together to find solutions to [France's] problems”. It has been running since 2013, and thus far 17 Senators and MPs have conducted 24 consultations. Legislators are invited to upload draft laws on the platform that are open to comments and votes of citizens and organizations.


Bibliographic reference |
Defacqz, Samuel ; Dupuy, Claire. Usages of an e-participation platform by French legislators: the resilience of representative democracy?.57ème Congrès annuel de la Société québécoise de science politique (Université de Montréal, Montréal, du 22/05/2019 au 24/07/2019). |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/217815 |