IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/crc/wpaper/2303.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Democracy and Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) - The example of mutual health insurance in France

Author

Listed:
  • Yannick LUCAS

    (Le Mans Université, Chaire ESS - Laboratoire ARGUMANS, (France))

Abstract

Democratic governance is a constitutive element of a large part of social economy enterprises. In France, the first mutuals, in the modern sense of the term, appeared in the early 19th century. Bringing together free and equal citizens sharing a collective identity and wishing to break away from charitable practices based on unequal conditions, mutuals immediately adopted democratic principles. The statutes provide for the compulsory participation of members in the general assembly during which important decisions concerning the management of the mutual are taken. The specific features of democratic practice within mutuals will evolve over time. In the first legally recognised mutuals, the President was appointed by the public authorities to prevent mutual benefit societies from being used as a front for trade union and political activities in a context where trade unions and political parties were prohibited. Democratic practice was then limited to management decisions. With the development of political freedoms, this control was to diminish and eventually disappear, but another form of limitation of democracy was to appear with the supervision of the guarantees offered by the mutual societies. At the same time, the increase in the size of mutuals and in the number of their members limits the possibilities of direct participation of members in management decisions. Democratic practice is evolving towards a representative democracy in which democratic procedures are essentially used to appoint leaders. The democratic exercise is then situated at another level within the governance bodies. These developments, combined with an increase in the consumerist practices of members, mean that mutuals, like other organisations, are suffering from a "democratic crisis" which they are trying to resolve by recreating spaces for exchange and meeting with their members.

Suggested Citation

  • Yannick LUCAS, 2023. "Democracy and Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE) - The example of mutual health insurance in France," CIRIEC Working Papers 2303, CIRIEC - Université de Liège.
  • Handle: RePEc:crc:wpaper:2303
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ciriec.uliege.be/repec/WP23-03.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Governance; Democracy; Mutuals; Social Economy; History;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • I13 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Health Insurance, Public and Private
    • L31 - Industrial Organization - - Nonprofit Organizations and Public Enterprise - - - Nonprofit Institutions; NGOs; Social Entrepreneurship

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:crc:wpaper:2303. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CIRIEC (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ciulgbe.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.