Pascale Dufour

Mobilizing in Borderline Citizenship Regimes: A Comparative Analysis of Undocumented Migrants’ Collective Actions

This article seeks to explain how and why groups and networks of undocumented migrants mobilizing in Berlin, Montréal, and Paris since the beginning of the 2000s construct different types of claims. The authors explore the relationship between undocumented migrants and state authorities at the local level through the concept of the citizenship regime and its specific application to undocumented migrants (which they describe as the “borderline citizenship regime”). Despite their common formal exclusion from citizenship, nonstatus migrants experience different degrees and forms of exclusion in their daily lives, in terms of access to certain rights and services, recognition, and belonging within the state (whether through formally or nonformally recognized means). As a result, they have an opportunity to create different, specific forms of leeway in the society in which they live. The concurrence of these different degrees of exclusion and different forms of leeway defines specific conditions of mobilization. The authors demonstrate how the content of their claims is influenced by these conditions of mobilization.

Comparing the protests of undocumented migrants beyond contexts: collective actions as acts of emancipation

The authors received financial support from the CPDS and the CERIUM (post-doctoral grant, 2008–2010; beneficiary: Pierre Monforte) and from the SSHRC [Social sciences and humanities research council of Canada] (individual research grant, 2008–2012; beneficiary: Pascale Dufour).

The Mobilization Against the 2005 Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe: A French Mobilization for Another Europe

Why did a majority of French voters reject the Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe in the 2005 referendum? We argue here that the collective mobilization of the left-wing ‘No’ camp made the decisive difference through its formation of ‘Collectifs pour le non’, a coalition which facilitated the public expression of an anti-liberal and pro-European position capable of bringing together the Green and Socialist electorates, along with other parts of the left. Using a comprehensive analysis of the multi-organizational field of protest constituted by the mobilization of the left-wing ‘No’ camp, we show first that the mobilization was a ‘European affair’, in the sense that it developed a pro-European position in the context of struggles against liberal forces. Second, we show that the mobilization was also a ‘French’ affair because it relied on the high valuation of the ‘national’ mode of belonging, through the defence of the French state model.

Street Politics in the Age of Austerity: From the Indignados to Occupy

In a recent piece, McAdam and Tarrow (2010) discuss the question of the relationship between contention and convention in political action. Self-critically, the authors observe that their joint effort (together with Charles Tilly) to overcome the compartementalization of studies concerning different forms of political action had given little attention to elections. They consider the inattention to the connection between elections and social movements ‘a serious lacuna’ of their Dynamics of Contention (McAdam et al. 2001), ‘as it is in the entire broad field of contentious politics’ (p. 532). To overcome the segmentation of the study of elections and social movements, they propose a series of six mechanisms that they think ‘link movement actors to routine political actors in electoral campaigns’. These mechanisms focus on how movements influence the electoral process: movements may turn into parties who participate in elections, or they may form within parties; they may introduce tactical innovations which can be adopted as electoral tools; they may become active in electoral campaigns or react to the outcome of elections. In our own attempt to link the two worlds of social movements and political parties, I have been interested in the opposite causal relationship, i.e. in the question of how political parties influence the mobilization by social movements (Kriesi et al. 1995). In our comparative analysis of the mobilization of the new social movements, we were able to show that the configuration of the old and new left, and whether the left was in or out of government made a key difference for their success.

Comprendre la mise en œuvre différenciée d'une politique publique : Le cas d'une politique de gouvernance au Québec

In 2001, the Quebec government adopted its Politique de reconnaissance et de soutien a l’action communautaire. The implementation of this policy has led to contrasting results depending on the fields of intervention considered. We argue that the different implementation pathways of this policy are directly linked to the structuring of social actors in each field. Using two fields of intervention – the environment and advocacy – as case studies, we show the need to go beyond the usual explanations regarding the implementation of public policies which stress the importance of political actors and policy networks. Without neglecting the role of the latter, the different pathways in the implementation processes of this policy are also largely due to the autonomous action of social actors. pour Matland, 1995; O’Toole, 2000; deLeon et deLeon, 2002!. Deux raisons principales expliquent cette baisse d’interet. Premierement, les approches en analyse des politiques ont, dans une large mesure, cesse de distinguer les processus d’emergence, de formulation et de mise en œuvre des politiques, pour s’interesser davantage a l’ensemble du processus et au changement politique plutot qu’uniquement a leur mise en œuvre ~Sabatier, 1999 et 2008!. L’approche des reseaux de politiques publiques, qui part des configurations d’acteurs ~groupes d’interets, bureaucrates et acteurs politiques! pour expliquer les politiques, a aussi eu tendance a delaisser la mise en œuvre au profit d’une analyse plus globale ~Coleman et Skogstad, 1990; Marsh, 2000!. La deuxieme raison est que la mise en œuvre des politiques a progressivement ete integree a la notion de gouvernance, c’est-a-dire les mecanismes de coordination, de negociation et 0 ou de cooperation entre les acteurs des politiques publiques ~Jessop, 1999; Bevir et Rhodes, 2003!. La nature equivoque et les multiples sens accordes a la gouvernance au cours des annees n’ont toutefois pas toujours permis de donner une image claire des processus de mise en œuvre. En somme, les explications usuelles des processus de mise en œuvre sont demeurees centrees essentiellement sur l’Etat et les relations plus ou moins serrees entre groupes d’interets, acteurs politiques et acteurs administratifs. Pourtant, avec l’accroissement du role et des responsabilites des acteurs de la societe civile – au-dela des groupes d’interets traditionnels –, de plus en plus de « details » relevent maintenant de la mise en œuvre. Des dimensions telles que la distribution des ressources financieres ~programmes de financement et de subvention! et l’acces a l’Etat ~sous forme de consultation et de concertation! sont souvent negociees et peuvent varier notablement en fonction du contexte de mise en œuvre ~Bell et Park, 2006!. Cette dynamique est de plus en plus apparente alors que plusieurs politiques publiques cherchent a avoir une portee intersectorielle. Pour ces raisons, l’analyse des processus de mise en œuvre demeure pertinente et importante. La nature des ecarts de mise en œuvre La mise en œuvre d’une politique refere a ce qui se developpe entre l’intention d’agir ~ou de cesser d’agir! de la part d’un gouvernement et les impacts observables dans le monde de l’action ~traduction de O’Toole, 2000 : 266!. Dans l’analyse des processus de mise en œuvre, on etudie la maniere dont se transposent les orientations prises par une instance gouvernementale en termes de structure organisationnelle, de processus et d’outils afin de concretiser ces orientations. Il est reconnu aujourd’hui que la mise en œuvre d’une politique implique un grand nombre d’acteurs, tant politiques et administratifs que sociaux; il ne s’agit donc pas d’un processus purement administratif ~Mat610 FRANCIS GARON ET PASCALE DUFOUR

Governing without a majority. What consequences in Westminster systems

This special section showcases four papers first presented at a conference organised in November 2010 at the Université de Montréal. The conference’s point of departure was simple: given the political context in several countries with Westminster-style parliamentary institutions, and especially the UK since May 2010, Canada from 2006 until 2010, and Australia in 2010, we asked participants to explore the consequences of minority or coalition Parliaments for the political process. The four articles published here all provide an answer to this question. Contrary to popular impressions and media presentations, experiences with minority and coalition government have been relatively frequent in systems governed by the rules and norms of Westminster. Nonetheless, the embedded notions of politics dominated by the Government and the Opposition mean that such moments in political time are often feared, with minority governments termed ‘hung Parliaments’ in British political discourse. They certainly provoke media attention, sometimes leading to the cliffhanger style of analysis so familiar in Canada that continually asks, ‘will Parliament fall today?’ Surprisingly, however, the consequences of minority and coalition governments in these Westminster systems have not, with a few notable exceptions, attracted sustained attention from political scientists and political sociologists. There is a long tradition and a huge literature, for example, of positing a link between proportional representation and parliamentary outcomes, including those with Westminster-style institutions. Others analyse effects on the strength or stability of government (for example, Cairney, 2011), including the factors that can make minority governments work (Hazall & Paun, 2009,

Finding Feminism(s) in Canadian Political Science Scholarship: Diversity and Resistance in an Era of Global Uncertainty

It is with great pleasure that we present this special issue showcasing contemporary feminist political research, theories and practices in Canada. In an era characterized by global movements and numerous transformations that range from the economic to the environmental, the political to the cultural, from macro- through to micro-scales, including complex debates about the fluidity of gender, and where “backlash” against the symbols and agents of past feminist activism is rife, this special issue queries where do we find feminism(s) today? The responses to this question, as well as to the interrogation of the place of gender in the discipline of political science more generally, are undoubtedly diverse and contested. The collective efforts contained in this special issue feature a mere taste of the rich range of thought-provoking recent scholarship on feminisms. And even with this necessarily condensed portrayal (the articles in this issue are shorter than is normally the case to allow for more work to be featured), the special issue is ground-breaking in that it marks the first time the Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique has dedicated an entire issue to topics of gender and feminisms.

The participatory democracy turn: an introduction

Since the 1960s, participatory discourses and techniques have been at the core of decisionmaking processes in a variety of sectors of society and of policy domains around the world – a phenomenon often referred to as the participatory turn. Originally associated with this turn have been a strong critique of liberal and representative democracy, the corollary idea of a ‘real utopia,’ that is, the necessary radicalization of democratic practices (Barber, 1984; Mouffe, 1992), and a rethinking of the public sphere (Fraser, 1990; Habermas, 1962/1989). Participatory mechanisms were thus initially conceived and designed as a way for citizens’ views and input to have some influence on otherwise political and bureaucratic decisionmaking processes. It was also imagined that they would become tools for making elected leaders accountable for their decisions, and for citizens to become empowered through the participatory process (Fung & Wright, 2003). The idea of participation has also attracted considerable attention in the ‘good governance’ literature (Tendler, 1998), where it is rather understood as a way to make governments (especially local ones) more transparent, responsive, and in turn more efficient with regard to public spending, as well as to make public (and sometimes contested) decisions socially and politically acceptable. Over the years, the participatory turn has given birth to a large array of heterogeneous participatory practices developed by a wide variety of organizations and groups (Bherer & Breux, 2012), as well as by both leftand right-leaning governments around the world. Among the best-known practices of citizen participation, we find examples such as participatory budgeting (PB), citizen councils, public consultations, neighbourhood councils, participatory planning, etc. Participatory processes are thus often associated with the idea of a top-down mechanism implemented to include citizen input in the public sector. However, participatory practices have also grown in a variety of – sometimes unexpected – public and private spaces. Social movements have adopted participatory strategies in order to (re)mobilize their members and citizens (Occupy, Podemos, for example) (Della Porta, 2013; Nez, 2012; Polletta, 2015); bureaucratic organizations have adopted practical participatory reforms (Nabatchi, 2010); NGOs and community organizations have included participatory elements in their programmes and in the way their own organizations function (Eliasoph, 2011); unions have become more and more interested in a variety of participatory mechanisms in order to mobilize and get in touch with their members; and even private companies are using certain forms of participation as an internal management mechanism, or as a social acceptability tool for economic development projects (Lee, 2015). A whole industry of participatory consultants and experts has emerged, marketing participatory practices among organizations of all sorts and

« Faire la politique soi-même » : le cas des mobilisations contre le gaz de schiste au Québec

The literature on activism characterizes the recent transformations of activism as part of a process towards the “personalization of politics”. For structural or cultural reasons, committed citizens appear to be developing a new relationship to politics, seeking personal satisfaction in their engagement. We propose an alternative interpretation, and characterize this transformation as “do-it-yourself” (DIY) politics. Based on the protests against shale gas development in Quebec, we show that the DIY politics is the “logical” (in the sense of rational) result of citizens developing the means to compensate for the lack of institutional opportunities in the context of developments that potentially threaten their lives and livelihoods. Hence, rather than a quest for personal fulfillment, DIY politics must be understood as a more prosaic and contingent reaction to a specific situation, an individual and collective response to a situation experienced and perceived as problematic. In the conflict surrounding shale gas development in Quebec, which serves as our case study, we show that 1) the initial impulse to mobilize may be accurately interpreted as moving from the “territory of the self” (“ territoire du moi ”) to the “territory of the us” (“ territoire du nous ”), and that 2) it is the double failure of institutional representation that underpins civic engagement: the failure of institutional representation and the lack of representation by collective actors already in place.

Practices of Local Social Forums: The Building of Tactical and Cultural Collective Action Repertoires

Since the first edition of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2001, similar initiatives have flourished at the local scales. In the existing literature, local social forums are generally considered to be a natural replication of the world social forums. Beyond the label “social forums,” what do the practices of local social forums specifically entail and what is the meaning of these practices for local activists?I propose a comparison of eight cases situated in two distinct societies (Quebec and France). I use a multi-approach methodology, combining direct observation, focus groups, interviews, and documentary analysis.I show that despite strong national differences, a highly decentralized process, and the strong autonomy of local actors, local social forums share structural characteristics, and the expression “social forum” is associated with ways of doing things that limit the variety of local social forum initiatives: organizers share a common intentionality; the mode of operation of local social forum process and event belong to the same political culture and translate into the same practices; and the outputs of these gatherings are similar in terms of the building of ties. Overall, local social forums are used as tactical and cultural collective action repertoires by actors, redefining the boundaries of social resistance and its practices.