France

Paris had an early experiment between 2005-2009 in a specific district, but the link between the district experiment and the city-wide experience starting in 2014 is not clearly documented. The phase for collecting proposals is much broader than a decade ago, as the early experiment was only dedicated to local pavement infrastructure (“voirie”). If there is a link to former cases, that would be the only exception.

Rocke (2014) explains that French PB were not the results of bottom-up initiatives and are very similar to “Neighbourhood councils”. These councils were compulsory for cities above 80 000 habitants and created by officials from City councils (officers or politicians) and they were merely consultative instruments, letting space for “selective listening” or cherry-picking. On the other hand, Sintomer et al, (2016) describe other permanent features such as these PB were about mainly neighbourhood allowing funding for micro-local projects and limited independence for civil society was also constrained by a poor deliberative quality. At the local level, R.cke (2014) described how “local politicians (whose power position is that of ‘local kings’) dominate the meetings in that they chair the discussions and resume their results.” However, different features show that current cases in France are less related to proximity democracy. Most cases have published public regulations online, which means a greater procedural clarity. When the first wave was only allowing district-level proposals, there is a clear change because 76% cases allow voting at the city-level while only 24% allow only district-level proposals. Nowadays, more and more digital tools are made available for city councils to use, especially for the second phase (collecting proposals) and for the voting phase. Most cases allow online submission (63.93%), whether it’s a specific platform or a simple form to email. Digital vote happens in 44% of cases and fraud is not controlled. Only 6 cases could ask for ID check in order to prevent multiple votes. Even if current trend relies on online platforms, PB is far from being linked to some open government strategy: less than 10% of cases are implementing both PB and open data for finances. Indeed, only 5 cities have published their budget using open data standard, while 37% local authorities are at least providing some basic financial data. French PBs are not about raising awareness about finance constraints or making budgets more transparent. With social network analysis software, detection of communities based on nodes and edges could help to identify 4 families based on procedural rules:

1. Proximity democracy in orange (i.e. Bar le Duc);
2. City-level process with face-to-face meeting in purple (i.e. Grande-Synthe);
3. IT-mixed processes in yellow (for example Avignon);
4. More online deliberative PB with a greater level of transparency in green (for example Montreuil or Paris).

There are main waves of diffusion of PB in France:

1. The first wave appeared after World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, where personal networks were linked to the French Communist Party and a small NGO called “D.mocratiser Radicalement la D.mocratie.” These French networks were essential in order to translate documents and train people based on the principles seen in Porto Alegre.
2. The literature is not clear about how much money was spent through PB during the first wave. At the city level, its political impact was quite limited: Sintomer’s team only listed a dozen of cases. They pointed out different similarities between these experiences and they seem to share the same framework they called “proximity democracy”.
3. A second wave aimed after 2005 to diffuse participatory democracy to high schools, in Poitou-Charente region (Mazeaud, 2011, 2012). This wave in high-schools also disappeared after the 2015 regional elections, due to major political shifts.

​On the other hand, the third wave of PB experiences shows a true formalisation of regulations. Objective criteria are found in regulations and they define what is the scope of proposals citizens could propose in order to make this proposal adequate to be formally put to the vote. I’ve found 22 types of criteria, and the 10 most common ones are: