Equality principle, voting and constitutional decision making – Isovote

Constitutional judges play a fundamental role in contemporary democracies and, in particular, with regard to the interpretation and implementation of the principles of equality. Since the beginning of the 1970s, with the famous decision on taxation ex officio, the French Constitutional Council has progressively invoked the principle of equality - in its multiple dimensions - in its work of verifying the constitutionality of the laws. Today, it is estimated that one decision out of two involves, in one way or another, the principle of equality.
The principle of equality is at the heart of a tension between politics and law. The purpose of the Isovote project is to study the way in which the Council has progressively constructed its doctrine. To this end, the project provides a systematic study of an unexplored source, namely the minutes of the Council's deliberations. By crossing economic, philosophical, legal and political analyses, automatic language processing and quantitative analysis, the aim will be to process this exceptional corpus in order to better characterize the positions of each member of the Council, to explain and to better understand the logics at work in the deliberations of a collegial body such as the Constitutional Council. The challenge is then to better understand the role played by the Constitutional Council in the evolution of the social state in France and in the assessment of successive legislations that have sought to fight against inequalities.