Collective Negotiations of Public Action between Dialogue and Protest

From an ethnographic investigation (observations, interviews, administrative and militant files), this paper studies logics and organization of various forms of political participation to parents of pupils in France at the local level. While carrying the focal at the same time on militants of associations and other families, the analysis underlines the mechanisms of selection and the social differentiation of commitment of parents within participative tools. The behaviors of the parents in these arenas fluctuate from the extension of other militant invests for the most politicized to a distant participation for essentially informative issues for the few popular families. Then the investigation shows how the participation of parents in instituted forms constitute a political objective valorized by the actors of the public action, which do not prevent the best endowed militants to protest within the context of these devices as outside. The comparison of various arenas of dialogue underlines whereas the political recourse to tools of the “participative democracy” constitutes a practice of canalization of protests, allowing militant resistances while integrating them into routine-minded functioning of the public action.