Educational populism as a policy configuration: the struggle against school absenteeism in France
Résumé
In this chapter, I propose to consider populism not as a specific political system, ideology or discourse, nor as the property of extreme political forces, but as a policy situation. I show that populism can be analysed as the outcome of specific policy configurations which themselves predetermine the scope of public speeches, their content, salience and effectiveness. In the case studied - the fight against school absenteeism in France - this configuration of sayability led to a strong politicisation of the policy debate which itself permitted the emergence and permanence of a true educational populism on the topic. This populism is not only ‘educational’ because it is deployed in the education sector, but also because it conveys a simplified vision of education and because it allows a part of the population traditionally far from school governance processes to be socialised to educational policy issues. Resolutely sociological and empirical, this approach considerably broadens the field of analysis of populisms. It allows the researcher to take into account least salient cases and to go beyond the analysis of the radicalization strategies of political actors to address the overall set of interdependencies between policy actors which produces this populism.