Abstract
Participatory democracy and public consultations are increasingly being used to shape public policy or resolve political issues. In France, the Grand Débat was launched in early 2019 as a democratic response to the Yellow Vests movement, a massive grassroots social protest. With more than 500,000 participants, the Grand Débat platform was interpreted as a popular success by the government and the media, but little is known about which citizens expressed their opinions online. Although participants on the platform were anonymous and only answered public policy questions, we are able to infer their support for the Yellow Vests movement by using a second platform (a Facebook app) that asks similar questions as well as support for the Yellow Vests. We find that a large majority of participants in the Grand Débat did not support the Yellow Vests movement, in contrast to the general population at the time. This is evidence of a strong self-selection of participants on political grounds, resulting in a biased representation of French public opinion.
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Source: author’s calculations, data from Ifop and OpinionWay
Source: authors’ calculations, data from granddebat.fr and the Facebook app Entendre la France. Note: marginal effects from linear probability models, with robust standard errors. Q refers to the question (from Q1 to Q14), A refers to the answer, A1 is the reference category (0 by construction), A2 the second answer, A3 the third answer, and A9 refers to “don’t know”
Source: authors’ calculations, data from granddebat.fr and the Facebook app Entendre la France. Note: the predicted probabilities are calculated from linear probability models
Source: authors’ calculations, data from granddebat.fr and the Facebook app Entendre la France
Source: authors’ calculations, data from granddebat.fr and the Facebook app Entendre la France. Note: the distribution is obtained from 49,772 simulated cases. FB is the point estimate obtained from the age structure of the Facebook participants, GP is the point estimate obtained from the French general population
Source: authors’ calculations, data from granddebat.fr and the Facebook app Entendre la France. Note: the distribution is obtained from 100,000 simulated cases. FB is the point estimate obtained from the gender, age, and education structure of the Facebook participants, GP is the point estimate obtained from the gender, age, and education structure of the French general population
Source: authors calculations, data from granddebat.fr and the Facebook app Entendre la France. Note: the different point estimates of support for the Yellow Vests are obtained from simulations with different combinations of the confounder’s influence
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Notes
A recent survey of 866 elected representatives in four democracies (Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, Germany) shows that politicians are inaccurate in their assessments of where their fellow citizens stand on key policy issues (Walgrave et al., 2023).
This caveat probably explains why, since 2010, there has been a ‘deliberative wave’ in OECD countries, with an increasing number of deliberative institutions being set up, in which lay citizens are consulted extensively after random recruitment to ensure representativeness (OECD, 2020).
The petition was started by a citizen, Priscillia Ludosky. By March 2020, it had been signed by 1.2 million people (https://www.change.org/p/pour-une-baisse-des-prix-%C3%A0-la-pompe-essence-diesel). For further evidence, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests.
See Buge & Morio (2019) for a thorough legal and political discussion of the Grand Débat.
See https://granddebat.fr/media/default/0001/01/39520feb60078392ddde45ddf9e29873e2ca8070.pdf, https://granddebat.fr/media/default/0001/01/d3d9143d11c4b6f28aabe71dfb9859aa03b236da.pdf, https://granddebat.fr/media/default/0001/01/cc2163b5498cec875689b34c7c18b7a21a25961b.pdf, https://granddebat.fr/media/default/0001/01/1c5eca558a413a22aace5918155f532b7c85eac8.pdf.
For the sake of robustness, we have also estimated Probit regressions to explain the probability of supporting the Yellow Vests. Unsurprisingly, the results are very similar (available upon requests).
Again, we estimate linear probability models, so the coefficients are also marginal effects.
See https://www.ined.fr/fr/tout-savoir-population/chiffres/france/structure-population/population-ages/ and in particular https://www.ined.fr/fichier/s_rubrique/156/fm_t6.fr.xls. The population in metropolitan France is estimated at 65,096,768 in 2019. The number of people aged at least 18 is 51,108,919.
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Acknowledgements
We are indebted to Ennio Piano, the associate editor, and an anonymous reviewer for their very helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft. We also received useful feedback from Hamza Bennani, Noémi Berlin, François Briatte, Florent Dubois, Magali Dumontet, Romain Espinosa, Abel François, Pauline Gandré, Vincent Pons and participants in the EconomiX Lunch seminar (Nanterre), the MetSem workshop on Yellow Vests (Sciences Po Paris) and the EP@L workshop (Lille). We thank the team of Entendre La France, in particular Alexis Watine, for providing access to their data. Any remaining errors are ours.
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Appendix
Appendix
1.1 Linear probability estimates of the support for Yellow Vests
See Table 7.
1.2 European election of 2019 in France
Source: authors calculations, data from https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sondages_sur_les_%C3%A9lections_europ%C3%A9ennes_de_2019
Intention to vote for Yellow Vests political parties according to general population polls.
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Monnery, B., Wolff, FC. Is participatory democracy in line with social protest? Evidence from the French Yellow Vests movement. Public Choice 197, 283–309 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-023-01105-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-023-01105-5