From health crisis to political crisis? A study on the politicization processes in France hit by the Covid-19 epidemic – COVIPOL

Firstly, the empirical strategy chosen is to conduct “praxeological” interviews in ten professional environments. The fields investigated are divided into four groups. The first two refer to the difference between the private and public professional sectors. The second group is structured according to another variable: the distinction between manual occupations and intellectual occupations, since political sociology has already shown that this distinction also strongly impacts on political socialization. The data is collected according to a collective and transposable protocol. This allows to accurately describe the social factors of the formation of political attitudes, and to develop a proper sociological understanding of the politicization processes that emerge in these different professional groups. Within each of these groups, we tackle the professional status and functions that determine their internal structure (in particular the hierarchical organization, but also the forms of internal representation – i.e. labor unions). The collective interview grid is composed of several major themes, related to work’s organization and to its evolution during the crisis. The grid also accounts for the explanations which actors themselves produce regarding the problems they have encountered and still have to face. We consider who or what they blame, be it individuals, non-human entities or collectives, and whether or not they formulate a general point of view on what the future of society should be, by adopting a State’s perspective. This enquiry into politicization processes involves describing how actors seek to 'ground' their analyses and knowledge of these issues, be it on practical intuitions and experiences, on evidence considered ‘objective’, or on the authority of certain peers or sources of information. To that extent, we place particular emphasis on understanding whether, in the course of this interpretative work, they find themselves contradicted within their professional groups (as well as in other groups) or, on the contrary, supported and encouraged. This requires observing the management of disagreements in the workplace. The purpose is to identify the different ‘steps’ of politicization processes, as well as their moments of slowdown and stalemate, or even avoidance of politics. Sixty-four semi-structured interviews have already been conducted, out of the hundred and sixty planned.
Secondly, these interviews are be complemented by a collection of conversations on social networks, but also the public statements and media interventions produced by the different professional groups studied.
Thirdly, we collect statistics on the structuration and transformation of these professions throughout the health crisis.

The first year of this ANR is dedicated to data collection, in several professional groups. Therefore, it is too early to report fully consolidated results.
Nevertheless, the data we already collected led us to formulate some first analysis. This already allowed us to identify operations and operators linked to the politicization process during the health crisis.
This starting work is promising: it suggests the value of the type of semi-structured interview we use (the so-called 'praxeological' interview). If these first leads will have to be tested by a systematic analysis of all the interviews, we have already been able to note their relevance in the understanding of politicization as a process that takes shape through workplace practices. Moreover, we have already had the opportunity to make some hypotheses about what is more likely to promote or, symmetrically, to limit these politicization processes in the professional groups investigated.
These hypotheses will be tested not only by the interviews conducted during the enquiry, but also by the other kinds of data collected. Indeed, in order to generalize the results, it is essential to rely on statistics regarding the structures of professional groups studied and their respective places in French society. On this issue, we noted that it was difficult to find accurate statistical data investigating correlation between professional groups and political practices. We are also in the process of setting up a workshop for the spring of 2022. The aim of this workshop will be to consider together how to measure the impacts of politicization processes on different professional groups’ electoral practices. As such, our ambition is to suggest a renewed approach of electoral sociology.

Given that the investigation is still in progress, we have yet to formalize scientific outputs in peer-reviewed journals.
However, we have already developed a plan in order to spread the results. This includes, in particular:
- A symposium, which aims at clarifying the research’s contributions to electoral sociology (early 2022).
- A conference, which will set out to present our first results to the various actors we met during the survey (mid-2022).
- A video, which will explain the first analysis to a more general public (mid 2022).
- A collective book, which will present the work done to the academic field (end 2022).

How is the health, economic and social crisis caused by Covid-19 affecting the political attitudes of citizens and their relationship to voting and democracy? We can assume that this question will be at the fore of the interrogations of the media and political parties during the next French national elections, scheduled for 2022. Aware that these interrogations will be marked by subjective impressions and retrospective illusions, we propose to carry out a field study the purpose of which is to better understand the politicization processes triggered by the crisis at the very moment when they are transforming—even if still underground—the political attitudes of the French, that is to say during the next few months.
Based on the well-established finding by electoral sociology that profession is one of the statistical variables that best predict voting behaviour, we will study these politicization processes by observing them in a reasoned diversity of professional environments (n = 16). The investigation, planned over a 12-month period, will thus be both ethnographic and comparative. Its interest as well as its feasibility are based on three key elements, which guarantee that it will be able to start as soon as the funding is received.
Firstly, the professional environments envisaged will be studied by the members of the team as a continuation of fieldwork that has already been carried out within the different professional contexts investigated (generally on the ground of problematics different from that of this project but with the same methodological interest in the interpretative practices of the actors). Long-term immersion in these professional environments offers the certainty of being able to proceed rapidly with observations and the collection of relevant data that show how the current crisis is changing in the practices and reasoning of the actors.
Secondly, the 16 professional contexts considered refer to distinctions that are characteristic of the structuring of French society, whose strong impact on electoral behaviour is statistically known: that between the private and public sectors, on the one hand, and that between manual and intellectual work on the other. These structuring oppositions, by providing the conditions for a comparative approach, will make it possible to organize the “picture of the actual political tendencies in French society” that we aim to produce.
Finally, the researchers of the team are all members of the same research laboratory and therefore share methodological and theoretical orientations. They are accustomed to collaborative work and coordinating within monthly workshops that have brought them together for several years. These conditions ensure a common scientific socialization which will greatly facilitate the project’s collective dimension.
The work will consist mainly, over this 12-month period, of the collection, comparison and pre-analysis of qualitative data (in situ observations, interviews [n = 160], corpus of documents and of social network data) built-up according to a common protocol. Towards the end of the 12-month period, the dissemination of the first results obtained will take the form of a half-day restitution session bringing together the actors studied but also political journalists and members of polling institutes, as well as a video questioning certain preconceived ideas on the political effects of the crisis. Beyond this first phase, the data collected will give rise to an in-depth analysis of the processes of politicization in crisis situations, which will lead to the publication of a collective book in 2022.