Article by Jessy Bailly: "Contestation par les chiffres: analyse des collectifs d'audit citoyen de la dette en France, en Espagne et en Belgique" (in French)
Article by Jessy Bailly in International reviews 2024/2 (N° 103)pages 113 to 137
This article looks at how figures are used by activists from 'citizen audit of local debt' collectives (in France, Spain and Belgium) to criticise governments' management of local debt and finance. The article makes two contributions. On the one hand, it reports on the critical uses of figures already identified in the literature (warning, criticising accounting conventions, introducing alternative indicators), but also on uses that have not yet been identified but are very much present among the groups studied (attributing political responsibility through quantification and pointing the finger at the irresponsibility of political representatives because of the opacity of the data available to the public). Secondly, following on from the work of Alain Desrosières and Joel Best, the aim is to shed light on these activists' relationship with figures. This will make the heterogeneous and ambivalent uses of figures by audit collectives more intelligible. Emphasis will be placed on some of the limitations faced by these activists in using figures to carry out their criticism.
