Abstract
The question treated by this thesis is to know to what extent mayor's councilors in charge of participatory projects use their executive position to build political leadership by recruitment and mobilization of supports among local society. By putting this interrogation, we analyze the role of these councilors and the use of their institutional resources in connection with clientelist practices of political activity. The demonstration aims at enlightening the transformation of executive positions dedicated to participatory democracy, their symbolic and material foundation and their uses in relation with the transformation of municipalities' political and administrative configurations. We demonstrate that those councilors convert their executive resources into material satisfaction transmitted on the basis of personalized exchanges with citizens. Far from the normative objectives promoted by political actors, participatory tools are in fact clientelist tools. Form this point of view, the reactivation of participatory offer observed in Montpellier in 2008 is an attempt lead by new political actors to reconfigure clientelist exchanges institutionalized over the past twenty years.