Electoral "sciences". 

Expertise, devices and circulations of knowledge about elections

Call for papers

Conference at the University of Picardie 28 and 29 March 2024

            Elections are often the subject of scientific investigations, participating to the construction of a corpus of knowledge and patented methodologies. Political science shares the production of this knowledge with at least economics, sociology, history, information and communication sciences, but, beyond the disciplinary inscriptions, journals, handbooks, conferences and professional associations organise the existence of this knowledge. However, academic disciplines have never acquired a monopoly on electoral analysis in the public sphere. On the television platforms during election nights, for example, political journalists and pollsters comment on the results and deliver their analyses. Less visible, within the political parties, the analysis of the election results is generally entrusted to a specialist (national election secretary, electoral adviser, etc.) to draw political conclusions about the election. In other words, knowledge about elections that is to say operations of classification, designation of realities, classification, interpretation, etc. is largely developed outer academic spheres to constitute practical electoral expertise.

In France, the history of electoral sciences is relatively well known: its inception is marked by its links with political action (Offerlé, 1988; Phélippeau, 1993, 1994; Déloye 2012). The mapping of results, the monitoring of electoral operations, the debates on voting systems are all knowledge and techniques that were developed for partisan movements, the first journalistic media, the prefectural administrative apparatus, or the legal sciences related to the republican elites of the Third Republic. In other words, before the institutionalisation of political science and the development of links with other social sciences (Favre 1989; Favre and Legavre 1998; Blondiaux 2002), knowledge about elections were linked to the political field and the sciences of government. André Siegfried's book Tableau politique de la France de l'Ouest is a good example of these links. The book draws on prefectural knowledge for data collection and cartographies as much as on the political experiences of its author (Le Digol 2016). This socio-historical research is therefore valuable for understanding the production of electoral knowledge within the political, administrative, journalistic and scientific fields. However, while the analysis of political science remains a regular subject of investigation (Leca 1982, Déloye 2012, Gaïti, Scot 2017), the production of knowledge on elections outside a strictly disciplinary perspective or outside the academic field remains largely unexplored.

The conference aims at bringing together studies that focus on electoral knowledge produced or mobilised mainly outside the academic field, within the electoral administration, in organisations involved in electoral mobilisation (on this point see Baudot, Lehingue, 2015 and Pène 2013) but also within a wider range of organisations working for democracy (NGOs, Think Tanks, etc.). Examining these plural spaces of knowledge production requires us to think of electoral 'science' in the plural. In fact, these spaces are not separated from the academic field; the boundaries are so penetrable. Therefore, academic and non-academic knowledge and practices are not opposed to each other but must be analysed in the moments of export and import and in their hybridisation. It is then necessary to think about the transactions, the cooperation and the competition phenomena between these spaces or between agents belonging to these different spaces.

The conference will develop a programme of sociology of science and expertise to understand how practical or theoretical knowledge is constructed and circulated in different social spaces. The conference will analyse the spaces of production of this knowledge, the social properties of the producers, but also the socio-technical devices invented, used and mobilised, as well as the knowledge constructed, hybridised and domesticated. Moreover, it will address the issues of (de)politicisation of knowledge: knowledge about politics, electoral 'sciences' can be the object of partisan uses as well as recommendations whose technical nature seems to guarantee neutrality. These processes of (de)politicisation can also be understood in the circulation of knowledge between different spaces (scientific, political, journalistic, administrative fields, etc.) and in the work of legitimisation to which they are subjected. 

The call for papers of the conference is structured around three axes which are not exclusive but rather an invitation to think together about the object of "electoral "sciences".

Sociology of the spaces of production of “electoral sciences”

            Socio-historical research identifies the production of electoral knowledge within administration (Phélippeau 1993; Marty, 2006; Pierre Karila-Cohen 2008), intellectual, journalistic or partisan spheres (Offerlé 1988), law faculties (Marty, 2011; Déloye 2012) and analyses the parliamentarians’ electoral engineering of (Dompnier, 2003; Marty, 2006). The conference aims at identifying the spaces in which electoral expertise is produced. In an article about the birth of 'electoral science' in the law universities during the Third French Republic, Yves Déloye uses the term 'laboratories' to encompass 'all the places and manufacturing processes of knowledge relating to the nascent "electoral science"'. In this founding moment, these 'laboratories' (Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques, École Libre des Sciences Politiques, Law faculties, Parliamentary Commissions...) are not unrelated to each other and are in a perpetual state of re-composition by the actors' (Déloye, 2012). The understanding of these 'laboratories' should be updated by considering polling companies (Caveng, 2011), media spaces (the journalistic field but also popularisation of science on digital platforms), 'militant knowledge' constructed by practice in political organisations, but also expert knowledge formulated within administrative institutions (James, 2012), professional training, international organisations, non-governmental organisations, etc. In addition, we should also count the electoral experiences of other spaces such as professional elections (Leclerc, Lyon-Caen, 2011). Rather than a vain and never exhaustive inventory, the contributions will be concerned with making explicit the logics of production of practical knowledge according to the rules of the spaces, but also the imports of knowledge from other spaces. For example, electoral expertise within the journalistic field can be understood according to specific positioning, popularisation or translation logics (Buxton, James 2005; Lensing-Hebben 2008; Gombin, Hubé, 2009). Another example, the technologisation of international expertise and the wish not to interfere in national partisan issues, contribute to depoliticising election observation (Guevara, 2018). The literary production of electoral scenes is not independent of the novelists' knowledge and social representations (Voilliot, 2003, 2017 and 2018). The idea is therefore to understand that electoral knowledge can develop, have scientific pretensions, but be inscribed in spaces of production that give them meaning. A sociology, attentive to the properties of the agents involved in the spaces of production, will analyse in greater detail the construction, uses and mobilisations of this knowledge, but also its place in the production of electoral verdicts.

Sociology of socio-technical devices

            Building a science also means inventing and legitimising specific instruments. Michel Offerlé had already shown how journalists and socialist militants used electoral maps, a geographical instrument, to settle controversies on the legitimacy of the parties to speak for the working class (Offerlé, 1988, see also Garrigou, 1990). Among the devices developed by the electoral 'sciences' is the 'swingometer', a televisual device invented by Robert McKenzie to explain how changes in voter orientation produce changes in the distribution of seat within the House of Commons in the UK (Kelly, Foster, 1990). The fortunes of the swingometer, used on British election nights to report tendencies and developments, have even established Robert McKenzie or David Butler as the leading 'psephologists' (a very British term for political scientists who comment on results). In the same perspective, knowledge linked to electoral estimation (Grunberg, 1989; Aldrin, 2010) allows electoral comments to be scientifically based (discursive devices could also be analysed, see Lehingue 2011; Brissaud, Brun, 2021) and legitimate the experts in the name of science. In the field of electoral observation by international organisations, socio-technical devices are found in the operationalisation of observation forms to translate the criteria of free and fair elections into concrete terms (Elklit, Svensson, 1997) or in the production of reports and the formulation of recommendations to the countries organising the elections (Kelley, 2012). Beyond these devices, it is also interesting to study their promoters who then become the 'specialists' of the electoral map, the re-districting, opinion polls, jurisprudence, etc. Moreover, the invention or adaptation of these devices is a privileged way to understand both the electoral "sciences" but also their adaptation to uses within spaces where the scientific concern is combined with other expectations. This material history of the electoral 'sciences' then allows us to go beyond the analysis of the devices to take a broader interest in what these 'social technologies' allow us to do (see for example Combes, Vommaro, 2017, Debos, 2021). Counting, sorting and classifying make it possible to transform the electoral act by (re)districting constituencies, for example (Sabbagh, 2004, Ehrhard, 2013), or by changing the voting methods.

Circulation of knowledge 

            The conference will study the circulation of knowledge and practices between scientific and expert areas, and the imports and exports. We can thus question the “histories” of notions and concepts, their circulation within the scientific field and the professional circles that mobilise them, as well as the effects of these uses on scientific productions (theory effects, blurring, etc.). The papers will be interested in the social operations of selection, of (crossed) readings of knowledge and practices that concern elections (Bourdieu, 2000) but also in the phenomena of translation (Callon, 1986). The idea of circulation also invites us to examine the hybrid spaces experts and scientists meetings, such as electoral integrity circles (Norris, 2013), exchanges between national administrations (Jaffrelot, 1993; Crook, Crook, 2011; Baudot, 2014), parliamentary commissions, information missions, etc. To question the circulation is also, in a way, to scrutinize the professional opening of political science. The development of bachelor's and master's degrees in political science trains professionals organising, processing, or analysing elections or accompanying candidates in campaigning (forecasting results, analysis tools, use of Nation Builder, mapping of door-to-door campaigns, etc.). Data allows, for example, to understand territories on a larger scale (local socio-economic difficulties, sociological profile of voters, potential electoral behaviour, etc.). However, to make (truly) strategic use of this data, political parties must have internal teams with new expertise (data analysts, community managers, etc.) or hire specialized companies (consultancy agencies, start-ups, etc.), which offer electoral Big Data services and wish to stand out from competing professions (pollsters, political communicators, web designers, etc.) (Théviot, 2018, Politiques de Communication, 2019, see also Fauconnier 2021).

            The conference broadly invites contributors to submit proposals that address both the early developments of electoral "sciences" from a socio-historical perspective, and more recent social processes of circulation. Monographs on a particular national case are as welcomed as comparative papers.

Timetable and proposals

Proposals must be sent by 20^th June 2023 to the organisers:

Clément Desrumaux (University of Lyon 2, TRIANGLE) 

Sébastien Vignon (University of Picardie, CURAPP-ESS) 

Proposals should include:

- The title of the paper and email address. 

- An abstract of about 3,000 characters, in French or English, specifying the axis in which the proposal is inserted. 

- Responses to this call for papers should present the object of study, the theoretical framework, the problematic and the methodological and empirical elements. 

Deadlines:

- Deadline for submission of proposals: 26^th June 2023

- Examination by the scientific committee: 31^st September 2023. 

- Submission of the full text: 10^th February 2024 (50,000 characters, in French or English).

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