The steep and slippery slope of politics: Civic spirit, empowerment, and politicisation in citizen committees

ABSTRACT

In this paper we seek to explain why even the most activist of citizens, working in openly democratic settings, may fail to politicise issues close to their hearts, whereas others succeed, even while facing clientelism and other political constraints. In so doing, we take a meso-sociological approach to argue that group styles, which are recurring interaction patterns arising from a group’s everyday understandings of what it takes to be a good member, link social groups to national democratic models and are therefore responsible for being more or less conducive to politicisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Politicisation
• group styles
• citizen committees
• empowerment
• France
• Quebec
• republicanism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. As Silber (2003, p. 431) notes, the notion of cultural repertoires, at least in its first iteration (Swidler, 1986), does not address the transition between macro and micro levels. More particularly, it ignores the question of access to specific cultural repertoires and of how people make choices within their cultural repertoires.

2. As Ricca Edmondson (2003, pp. 61, 62) has underlined, many survey-based approaches in effect treat cultural causes and effects as conceptually and empirically distinct and identify specific areas of social interaction as cultural while seeing others as distinct from culture. Like her, we assume culture can be generative without being deterministic: culture attaches shared meanings to things or events without compelling people to endorse these interpretations or to adhere to the values or ideas supported by these things or events.

3. In other words, pupils stopped attending school before the end of junior-high school, i.e. between 11 and 13 years of age.

4. This sentence was identical in the prospectus of each citizens’committee presentation.

5. All the direct quotations in this text are our own translations of French documents or conversations.

6. Journal de la Fédération du 16ème arrondissement, May 1995, p. 7.

7. The reference to names follows local practices. While CCQSS members were on a first-name basis, CIQ were not. Refer to our discussion of this phenomenon below.

8. Journal de la Fédération du 16ème arrondissement, May 1995, pp. 4, 5.

9. The term could be considered stigmatising. However, it corresponds to the denomination of the group by the members themselves and by people outside. In Marseilles, ‘Roma’ could be also used but it designates people who have recently arrived from the Balkans. To understand more about the Gypsy ethnic identity, see: Thede (1998).

10. Police groups in charge of public security interventions.

11. Contrary to our findings here, some studies show the parallel rise of the distinction between ‘vous’ (formal) and ‘tu’ (informal) in different European languages and claims for egalitarian visions of citizenship (Brown & Levinson, 1987). This contradiction points out the fact the use of ‘vous’ or ‘tu’ in the language is never neutral and engages both a situation and a history.

12. Alinsky is considered to be the founder of community organizing. His vision of community development was a political one, in which mobilization and political activism was crucial (Shragge, 2003).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Science and Humanity Research Council (SSHRC) under Grant (370058).