BOIRON Félicien

Abstract:
While political science has long focused on the construction of public problems, more recent work has examined the making of policy solutions (Zittoun et al. 2021) and non-problems (Henry 2021). This dissertation extends these perspectives by studying the making of non-solutions, understood as the processes through which certain policy solutions are kept at a distance from legitimate public action.
The dissertation draws on the case of free public transport in France. This measure has gained increasing visibility in electoral, media and professional debates, particularly during municipal elections. Yet it remains marginal within urban transport networks, often confined to small and medium-sized systems where fare revenues are limited
This restricted development contrasts with the intensity of the criticism it generates within the transport sector. Representatives of transport authorities, operators, user associations and professional organizations converge in disqualifying the measure. Why does free public transport generate such intense critical mobilization, to the point of being described as ”impossible”, even though it remains marginal within urban transport networks?
To answer this question, the dissertation is situated within a sociology of public policy that pays particular attention to the role of expertise, policy communities and evaluative instruments in the definition of legitimate solutions.

The dissertation combines two levels of analysis. At the national level, it brings together a historical analysis of the development of free public transport in France, a prosopographical analysis of local transport executives, and a study of reports, position papers and public arguments produced on the measure.
It shows that transport actors share categories of analysis, professional norms and evaluative instruments, shaped through their social, educational and professional trajectories. They thereby form a policy community that constructs full free public transport as an impossible solution.
At the local level, the dissertation is based on two process-tracing analyses, drawing on a media corpus, official documents, gray literature and semi-structured interviews. The case of Paris and Île-de-France shows how the transport policy community mobilizes to prevent full free public transport from becoming established as a legitimate solution. It also shows that certain forms of free public transport can be made possible when they are embedded in other policy sectors, particularly social or environmental policies. By contrast, the Montpellier case shows how free public transport was progressively constructed as an instrument for winning and exercising local power. Montpellier’s elected officials engaged in political work of legitimation in order to make the measure possible, despite the persistent reservations of some transport actors.

A first, technical register constructs the measure as infeasible, particularly in financial terms. A second, economic register constructs it as ineffective, mainly through the argument that free public transport would produce a modal shift away from cycling and walking rather than away from the car. A third, normative register constructs it as inadmissible, especially by associating the absence of a fare with a devaluation of the public service, captured in the saying that ”what is free has no value”.

More broadly, this dissertation calls for greater attention to the making of non-solutions in the analysis of public policy.