Les listes citoyennes

In the months leading up to the October 2018 communal elections, many articles reported on the emergence, and even the rise in power, of so-called 'citizens' lists'. The aim of this chapter is to outline the contours of this protean phenomenon and to analyse the extent of the political renewal brought about by this dynamic. But analysing these lists from a political science perspective is far from obvious. First of all, it is a communication strategy. All the lists claim to defend the interests of all the citizens of the commune. But beyond this discourse, how can we systematically identify that a list is 'citizen'? To do this, we propose to mobilise two main criteria: their name and the profile of their candidates. On the one hand, we are interested in the lists labelled as 'citizens', i.e. lists that refer to the word 'citizen' in their name. On the other hand, we consider non-partisan lists, i.e. lists composed of candidates with no party affiliation. In sum, the first characteristic relates to the container of the list, while the second to the content.