Céline Braconnier's presentation, based on electoral analysis in the field (particularly in the Cité des Cosmonautes in Saint-Denis), showed that the concept of the strategist voter had to give way to that of the voter as a member of a social community. The presentation began with a reminder of a major trend: the sharp rise in abstention, which has been remarkable in France for some thirty years, affecting all elections except the presidential one. Until now, the main explanation given for this spread of electoral intermittency, based on the analysis of opinion polls, insisted on the new political maturity of voters. The risk of declarative bias in surveys can thus be neutralized, and the analysis, carried out over time and on a local scale, is able to take the measure of phenomena that would otherwise be invisible.
Firstly, this method makes it possible to assess the impact of a certain number of social dispositions: age (young people are less sensitive to the civic injunction), but above all social inequalities (the more economically fragile you are, the less likely you are to vote), these two factors obviously having a cumulative effect. But the originality of Céline Braconnier's approach is to show that these social predispositions may or may not be offset by what she calls "environmental factors". While they played a positive role some thirty years ago, these environmental factors (in particular, the disappearance of political leadership in neighborhoods and workplaces) are now working in the opposite direction. Informal mechanisms for collective mobilization still exist, however, such as the family, which has a strong driving force, particularly in working-class areas, and political campaigns. In this respect, the earlier these campaigns begin, the more likely it is that the problem of non-registration or malregistration, which fuels constant abstention, can be stemmed. Céline Braconnier therefore concluded her presentation by stressing the decisive role of campaigns to encourage people to register in stemming the tide of abstention, and by arguing in favor of automatic civic registration.
