Building one’s political capacity with symbols in the margins of the State: a symbolic analysis of the governance of rural shops in France

The empirical focus of this paper is the implementation of “1 000 cafés”, an NGO-led policy supporting the last remaining businesses in French rural areas at a municipal level. To this end, 1 000 cafés’ employees attempt to intervene in how elected officials engage with public policy making in various ways: conducting economic viability studies, recruiting shopkeepers, mediating between the different parties… While 1 000 cafés has operational and analytical capacities, its political capacity to engage as a legitimate actor (Wu, Ramesh and Howlett, 2015) with these municipalities actually raises a theoretical puzzle for governance studies that only a symbolic lens can overcome. Indeed, unlike their urban counterparts (Béal, Epstein and Pinson, 2015), French rural elected officials seem “ungovernable”: without political parties, an administration and with little professionalisation (Nicolas, Vignon and Laferté, 2019), these actors rely on highly personalised and local resources to carry out public action. They are therefore autonomous from broader institutionalised policy networks upon which the State or private actors – such as 1 000 cafés – usually build their political capacity to regulate social activities. In this context, 1 000 cafés’ employees must assert their legitimacy at the local level on a case-by-case basis. A symbolic analysis helps to untangle the variables and mechanisms that matter in this political capacity-building process. First, the paper identifies the symbolic repertoires (Boussaguet, Faucher and Freudlsperger, 2021) 1 000 cafés’ employees display while encountering rural elected officials. Second, it defines the communities these repertoires rely on in order to identify the multiple – and at times contradictory – realms within which both 1 000 cafés employees and rural elected officials actually engage with public policy making: gendered personal honour and perceived bravery, territorial belonging and republican officiality for instance. Whenever the symbols displayed by 1 000 cafés’ employees are not understood, their legitimacy is threatened and elected officials either terminate the partnership or divert it. Third, the paper elaborates on the methodological difficulties associated with analysing symbolic repertoires that are empirically intertwined and draws on ethnographic theory to identify solutions. Applying symbolic analysis to policy making at the margins of the French state, the paper thus aims at contributing to the theoretical literature on the regulation of complex societies by both private and public actors (Le Galès and King, 2017) by underlining how symbols matter in the construction of one's political capacity to overcome the relative autonomy displayed by certain actors. The argument relies on data from a doctoral project investigating the rural retail policy sector in France and more precisely on an ethnography of the implementation of 1 000 cafés in a comparative design between ten municipalities and five different employees between 2022 and 2025.