Question 39645 — elections and referendums

Summary

Mr. André Villiers questions the Minister of the Interior on the digital ways and means to help overcome the crisis of representative democracy and fight against the resulting abstention. The Viavoice institute survey for the daily Libération published on June 15, 2021 (https://www.institut-viavoice.com/ressorts-abstention) confirms the lesser interest of the French in politics, their democratic malaise and the crisis without precedent of representativeness. Indeed, 28% of French people consider that their interest in public debate has decreased, 55% that democracy is functioning poorly and 68% that their interests and ideas are poorly represented by their elected officials and political leaders. Result: abstention grows regularly and significantly whatever the election - presidential, legislative, regional, departmental, municipal or European. According to the study, it is first of all the inadequacy of political and programmatic offers which explains the level of abstention: the growing misalignment of interests between representatives and those represented creates a deficit of trust which leads to abstention, which undermines legitimacy and weakens elected officials and public policies. However, it emerges from the analysis of the causes of the crisis of representative democracy that the interval between two elections distances voters and elected officials, each struggling to inform and engage mutually in a democracy that is still poorly participatory, and that the scarcity of remote voting possibilities on election days is a loss of opportunity for electoral participation. Of course, the crisis of representation cannot be solved by technology and civic tech tools are not a panacea. But, while public debate and politics sometimes regresses on social networks, digital technology has not yet kept all its democratic promises. He asks what initiatives the Government intends to take in the digital field to help rebuild the weakened bond of trust between the French and their elected officials in an increasingly widely connected society, by developing representative democracy in a more participatory direction in the interval between two elections and by facilitating remote voting on election days.

Machine translation from French. The official text remains authoritative.

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