Experiencing Deliberative Democracy in Social Movements: The Case of General Meetings in French Student Mobilisations

Social movements are not only led to take a stand with regard to deliberative democracy institutions. They also use a lot of deliberative tools in their own decision making processes. It is the case in French student movements, where general meetings (assemblées générales) are a central place for decision. They are attempts to support decisions by collective and inclusive debates. In that extent, deliberative procedures in social movements are a place where we can ask how ordinary citizens learn how to practice and shape deliberation when they decide by themselves how to organize it. From what experience and references do they draw their deliberative practices? What are the processes of diffusion of deliberative tools and innovations? Do they see a continuity or a rupture between what they experience in social movements and more institutional deliberative devices? For instance, Polletta (2002) showed that American activists shaped their deliberative practices according to the social relationships they were familiar with. The paper would address these questions through the analysis of general meetings during French student mobilizations at the end of the 2000s, based on an ethnographic inquiry in three higher education establishments. What is at stake is the way ordinary students appropriate deliberative practices, skills and norms in social movements, which may fashion afterwards their relation to and participation in deliberative institutions implemented by governments. We will see that their approach of deliberation is based on a mix of representative democracy tools and a contentious style of building a collective. They also show a sharp attention to precise procedures and devices supposed to guarantee the quality of participation and deliberation, following a homologous trend to what can be observed in institutional deliberative scenes.