Contenu du sommaire

Does discussion create votes?
This article considers the impact of political conversations on electoral choices, a highly important topic today, in the contextual approach to voting. This paper is based on a questionnaire-based survey and in-depth interviews conducted during the 2017 French elections (presidential and legislative). It shows that the hypothesis that conversation plays a deciding role during election periods is unrealistic, especially when focusing solely on conversations' “political” content. While conversations have effects, they can be understood only by studying the social anchors that determine the possibility of having political conversations, as well as the meaning voters give to such talks. Ultimately, this article demonstrates that what circulates in pre-election conversations is less political information helping voters to make decisions, than norms and partisan identifications that give the act of voting a decisive collective dimension.

The National Front as a space of struggle. Cross-dynamics of political professionalization
The article proposes an analysis of crises in the Front national, the French extreme right party. From the perspective of political sociology and a historical study of all members of parliament elected under the party's label, the article investigates and offers explanations for the divisions in the party, which are not restricted to ideological differences. Divisions also depend on the articulation between the state of political competition and the system of positions it creates. The Front national is a product of the acceleration of political professionalization mechanisms since the 1970s. This process is based on the principle of differentiated trajectories among its ruling elites. Two dimensions are particularly influential on the party's internal competitions and conflicts: the time spent in politics and the structure of political capital.

Politicization: From the term to the conceptual maze
Based on the evidence that the notion of politicization is being more frequently deployed in the French political science and that this success generates significant conceptual elasticity, this paper aims to clarify these uses and to comprehensively map how the social sciences deal with the term “politicization.” Firstly, I address the controversial issue of the politicization of French rural peoples and areas, often discussed in political history. Then, it draws attention to the various uses of the notion in political science, bringing out the major controversies that structure debates about individual politicization or the politicization of social issues and activities. The authors make a combinatorial proposal in order to identify and define the ways in which the term is used.

Good vagrants for the state
In France, vagrancy and begging were still considered crimes until 1994, according to the Napoleonic Code of 1810. However, from 1959, social housing assistance was available to vagrants thought to be able to reintegrate into society. Those concerned could be housed on a 6-month renewable basis in shelters managed by associations and certified by the state and by local communities. Despite the development of the welfare state by way of social assistance, this legislative revision is noteworthy since it occurred at the same time as a drastic and continuous fall in the number of convicted vagrants and beggars. This article, supported by archives, focuses on the way vagrancy was defined as a public problem from the mid-1950s. This definition was built up by many social spheres (political, administrative, associative, and judicial) and was finally legally related to social assistance on January 7, 1959. It shows that the major change from a penal to a social conception of vagrancy could only be achieved with the inclusion of a discretionary dimension to social welfare. Thus, this article highlights the mechanisms used by the state in order to reconceive the secular distinction between good and bad poor people in contemporary social policy.

Defending a lost cause?
This article explores a great project of urban renewal that combines the goals of “metropolitan attractiveness” promotion and place-based social development: the Union project in the north-eastern part of the metropolitan area of Lille. Based on ethnographic interviews and on the observation of the work of the professionals in charge of its implementation, the analysis is concerned with the contradictions that structure the Union project and the way the public developers manage them and give them sense. Being aware of their incapacity to actually influence the location decisions of firms that come from outside the urban area, the project managers have a changeable relationship—sometimes disillusioned, sometimes re-enchanted—with the mission they inherit, which is partly impossible to achieve.

Water shortages and political crisis
Since the 1990s, water has been a main area of conflict within the neoliberal policy paradigm. Indeed, the neoliberal era has been marked by a substantial number of struggles over the municipalization of the service across the Global South. However, the development of the public enterprises that have emerged from this process has been less studied. This article focuses on the case of the water service in La Paz, Bolivia, where a contract with a French consortium expired in 2007, and where the water shortages that affected the city in 2016–2017 are inscribed in the specific context of state reform. Indeed, Bolivia was the backdrop for the “Water Wars” that led to deep political changes in the country, with the electoral victory of Evo Morales in 2005, whose political program was based on the re-appropriation of natural resources and the introduction of various reform policies. The water crisis revealed tensions between a centralizing approach and the autonomous social organizations that brought the current president to power, as well as between different levels of government, for example national and municipal bodies, residential committees, and international NGOs. Thus, the objective of the analysis presented in this paper is to understand the transition from a water crisis to a political crisis. As such, the paper contributes to the sociology of public policies based on an examination of the “division of state labor” and struggles for state power. The paper finds that the main actors of the crisis reveal a renewed focus on the technical aspects of state engineering, which tend to present an obstacle to the implementation of ecological alternatives.