The deliberative imperative, a reconfiguration of negotiations between power and interest groups ? Study of the Citizen Climate Convention in France

Deliberative democracy emerged in the 1980s as a theoretical paradigm and practical experimentations, in response to the decline of representational capacities of certain interest groups but also because of the normative dissatisfaction with a pluralist or neo-corporatist conceptualization of democracy. Deliberative democracy and group theory appear therefore as competing political paradigms. While the citizen disappears in pluralist and neo-corporatist theories, groups are identified by deliberative theorists, first and foremost Jon Elster and Jürgen Habermas, as belonging to the market space (Elster 1994) and driven by strategic action (Habermas 1981), oriented towards negotiation and the search for gains rather than the general interest (Mansbridge 1992). Therefore, interest groups are initially seen as obstacles to the pursuit of the general interest. The ways in which the deliberative imperative (Blondiaux and Sintomer 2002) has been implemented have, however, allowed interest groups to enter these emerging arenas of public debate. For example, in France, debates organized by the National Commission for Public Debate (CNDP) have involved citizens and interest groups in deliberative arenas but their interactions have been little studied to this point (see Rui 2016 for an overview on this topic). Emmanuel Macron's mandate has given a new dimension to the participation of citizens in political decisions with the Great National Debate, the Economic, Social and Environmental Council's reform and the Citizen Convention for Climate (CCC). Citizen participation is no longer confined to the local level or to infrastructure projects, but is instead institutionalized at the national level, touching on a wide range of issues. Using the CCC as a case study, the objective of this paper is to investigate the reception of this new spirit of democracy (Blondiaux 2008) by interest groups : the way they respond to, get involved in or on the contrary avoid (or are excluded from) those arenas to favour more classical means of inside or outside lobbying. Based on an ethnography of all the CCC deliberations and hearings (approximately 200 hours of observation), interviews with key interest groups representatives and organizers (n = 20), and a network analysis of representatives and organizations participating, I will show the different ways in which interest groups interact with this democratic innovation. To this we add a study of the reception by interest groups of the measures proposed by the one hundred and fifty citizens. The economic interest groups strongly criticized these proposals at the end of the CCC. However, now it is the turn of the environmental associations to denounce the intense lobbying of the main industrial sectors after the CCC. Lobbying that emptied the citizen proposals of their essence. The Citizens' Climate Convention is therefore paradoxical: intended to give back to citizens a place in political deliberation, it instead displays the depth of the influence of certain interest groups in stopping climate change legislation.