The French Senators: representatives of “grass-roots France”?
(“ The Senate represents grass-roots France” is the title of the chapter on the Senates role on the official website of the Senate)
The second chamber of the French Parliament suffers, even more than the National Assembly, from a negative image and a lack of knowledge about the institution and its members. The Senate itself writes on its official website: “Even in France few people have an in depth knowledge of how the Senate works as only local electoral office holders and members of the Assembly of French Citizens Resident Abroad elect the senators.” The quasi absence of research on the French Senate and its members limits the understanding of the French political system.
The purpose of this paper is to analyze how the Senators place themselves in the system of representation. There seems to be a contradiction between the Senators answers in quantitative interviews on the one hand and the image promoted by the Senate as the institution on the other hand. In qualitative interviews the Senators underline the national dimension of their mandate while the image promoted by the Senate is the one of an advocate of the regions (see the official homepage of the Senate) and the declarations the Senators made in qualitative interviews in which they never missed to underline this mission of the Senate (the 1958 Constitution entrusts it with a special mission: representing the local bodies of the Republic - municipalities, départements and regions).
Who do Senators consider to represent before all? The whole French nation, following the doctrine of national sovereignty (see: Costa et Kerrouche (2007)) Their departement of election? The Electoral College or all voters of their constituency?
The ongoing research project “SENATE: Actors of Bicameralism in France: Biographies and Activities of the Senators” under the direction of Sylvain Brouard seeks to remedy the deficiency of research on the second chamber.
This article mobilizes data collected by the SENATE project (quantitative and qualitative interviews) and additional in-depth interviews.
