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Anti-Party, Pro-Politics: The Gilets Jaunes’ Challenge To French Representative Democracy, Anna Liss-Roy

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper aims to evaluate the implications of France’s Gilets Jaunes movement for French representative democracy. The Gilets Jaunes movement is unprecedented due to its durability and its resistance to institutional support, including political parties, labor unions and civil society organizations. This paper contextualizes the movement’s demands and particularities through a demographical analysis of its participants and an investigation of its characterization as “anti-system” to understand what changes in partisan identification foreshadow for French democracy.