Contenu du sommaire : Vivre de la politique : rémunération des élus et indemnisation des mandats

We shall examine the Weberian concept of “living from politics“ by analysing compensation for elected mandates as well as the salaries of elected representatives. Starting from a discussion of the existing “paying politicians litterature“, we shall argue that studies have largely focused on the most visible offices and that they are overwhelmingly influenced by rational choice theory ; ultimately, existing studies are also hampered by a lack of empirical data and longitudinal analysis. We therefore propose a process-based approach to political compensation, which contextualises elected officials' salaries within their career trajectories. Our hypothesis is that “living from“ is in fact a situation with fragile, porous boundaries, with variations that can be shaped by the various negotiations elected representatives must undertake to balance their different commitments, activities, and income sources. This research agenda is reflected in the various contributions to this special issue.

This article shall explore an overlooked dimension of the growing professionalisation of political activity : its economic underpinnings and more specifically, politicians' salaries. The main question asked is the following : how have elected officials come to live off of their political office(s), and how has this situation managed to persist over time ? We shall base our discussion on research interviews conducted on elected representatives in mid-level positions, which were later supplemented by a questionnaire survey. Our analysis shall highlight the notion of economic dependence on political office in order to understand the tension between, on the one hand, commitments stemming from one's mandate, growing investment in one's role as an elected official and one's possibilities for career advancement, and on the other, the uncertainties of public office, including re-election or reappointment and the monetary compensation that may or may not stem from the former. In order to describe these gradual and changeable processes, our analysis examines a number of case studies and highlights four sequences that provide the outline to a procedural model of compensation trajectories.

This article looks at mid-level political professionalisation and a specific category of elected officials – deputy mayors – and their relationship to financial compensation. It draws on a corpus of 56 interviews. How do deputy mayors manage to reconcile the duties of their office – which are often hugely time-consuming – with their professional occupations, given that they cannot live off of their political salaries alone ? What conditions make this balancing act possible, and to what economic realities do they correspond ? Are deputies able to modulate their professional and political activities in order to adjust their income sources ? Financial compensation is course the result of value-based calculations, but the transactions that it corresponds to are socially situated and resemble forms of self-negotiation. Although the situation of elected officials often causes financial and interpersonal tensions between their political engagement, their professional activity and their “non-working“ life, this survey demonstrates that elected representatives are constantly looking to balance these different elements. Three sets of variables are analysed : personal investment in one's office and the kind of compensation received ; the type of professional occupation exercised ; and engagement in the family sphere.

Aimed squarely at dealing with the “vocational crisis“ in rural areas, two legislative measures were adopted in 1991 and 2019 with a view to first making compensation mandatory for elected office holders in municipalities with fewer than 3 500 inhabitants, and then scaling up this compensation, respectively. But it seemed as though improving the material conditions of rural office holders – a decision taken from the top down – met with resistance on the part of “low-level“ elected representatives, leading to tense negotiations. This article tests out the “more to less“ theory, according to which elected officials tend to increase their salaries whenever they can. In fact, the relationship of political officials to compensation is much more complex and involves the intertwined issues of existing moral codes, current legislation, the shape of political arenas, and the monitoring of peers or constituents via intermunicipal structures.

This article examines what happens to members of parliament after the end of their time at the Palais Bourbon. Overwhelmingly, these individuals attempt to remain in the political sphere, in particular by running for local offices which have, over time, become more lucrative, sometimes even rivalling parliamentary compensation. As a result, traditional political trajectories have been altered. When former parliamentarians definitively leave politics, the vast majority of them simply retire. However, more than a third of these ex-elected officials pivot professionally, usually returning to the occupation that they exercised before running for office. Those who had professions that were politics-adjacent (for instance, parliamentary assistants, cabinet members, political staff, and high-ranking civil servants) are more likely to succeed with a “lucrative pivot“ than their counterparts who came from a sector entirely divorced from politics and who then seek either to return to their original occupations (if there was not a significant difference in income), or to remain in the political sphere (when entering politics meant a substantial income boost).