Recent political developments have led several observers of the political life to question the reoccurrence, of populisms in various parts of the world, including Europe (Cox, 2017). At the very same time, we are witnessing a revival of the issue of populism among political scientists since the years 2000. Indeed, beyond the classic, and still open, academic reflections on the relevance of populism as a concept (e.g. Taguieff, 2002), its different historical manifestations and meanings, moving from a positive connotation to a more negative one (Laclau, 2005, Hermet, 2012), its links with democracy (Panizza, 2005; Rosanvallon, 2018) and its ideological nature or not (Taggart, 2000; Stanley, 2008), a growing body of research has empirically established the rise of various forms of populism in different political systems in the world (Mény & Surel, 2002; Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2008). This trend also interpellated education scientists. Recently, a new series of studies proposes to reflect on the effects of the renewal of populism on public education (Akbaba & Jeffrey, 2017, Nordgren, 2017) and intend to think how to promote critical thinking and democratic, media or civic education (Peiser, 2013; Ranieri, 2016, Mårdh & Tryggvason, 2017, Zembylas, 2020). Nevertheless, little research has questioned the links between populism and education policy, with few exceptions (Lauglo, 1995). This is precisely the gap that this communication intends to bridge by considering populism, not as a specific political system, ideology or discourse on political affairs (populism as polity), nor as the property of extreme political forces (populism as politics), but as a policy situation. More precisely, populism is regarded as the outcome of specific policy configurations – i.e. particular set of factors within the policy process that shape specific interdependencies between policy actors (Elias, 1993, Pons, 2016) – which predefine the scope of public speeches, their content, salience and effectiveness. To consider populism in this way makes it possible to considerably broaden the field of analysis and to take into account "populist situations" that can emerge and stabilize even when no political force considered as populist is at the origin, nor even when the political regime studied is characterized as a populist one. This communication analyses the evolution of the political debate in France on school absenteeism among pupils and the educational policies implemented to solve this policy problem since the late 1990s (Pons, 2017). We show that this debate is essentially punctuated by the controversy that very regularly arises over a policy measure proposed by the right-wing party: the suspension/suppression of family allowances paid to parents whose children are absent. The focus on this specific measure, which is particularly popular in some opinion polls, hinders the capitalisation of knowledge on absenteeism and the debate on other considerations. It leads to a very strong politicization of public debate conducive to the emergence of educational populism, which we define as a political will to propose a public action program that flatters the perceived expectations of the population without taking into account the proposals, arguments and knowledge produced in the course of public action by intermediary bodies or specialists in the subject. This populism is not only "educational" because it is deployed in the education sector, but also because it conveys a simplified vision of education and because it allows a part of the population traditionally far from school governance issues to be "educated" about educational policy issues.

In terms of logic, this case is particularly interesting to study for our purpose for two reasons. France can be seen as an established democratic regime which, although it includes political forces sometimes described as (national) populist, is not generally perceived as a populist regime. The struggle against absenteeism is also a good example of an education policy that could a priori easily be evidence based, given the amount of statistical data and research on this topic. Despite these points, however, there has been an educational populism on the subject in France since 2001. The refutation of this most likely case therefore suggests that this phenomenon may be found in other European, less likely contexts. The second reason is that the debate on school absenteeism in France is rapidly focusing on a controversy on the suspension/removal of family allowances paid to parents of absentee children. This controversy occupies most of the public debate and is therefore a relevant salient case to study. This communication is based on a qualitative survey of 44 interviews with actors of the policy process (n=44) and substantial corpus of documents: 258 reports of parliamentary discussions available online, 532 national newspaper articles consulted on Europresse, 907 dispatches from a press agency specialising in education, the AEF, which regularly covers institutional news in education, and finally 44 scientific publications identified by crossing various search engines. This study is part of a more general research on how the education policy debate has been structured in France since 1997 (Pons, 2017). This research consisted of studying and comparing the way in which several education policy issues (Pisa, school absenteeism, school violence, reform of the state budget framework) were debated in different arenas of the "mosaic public space" (François & Neveu, 1999): the political, media, institutional and scientific arenas. The corpus of documents cited above concerns only the debate on absenteeism. Of the 44 interviews mentioned above, some thirty were cross-cutting to the different issues studied (interviews with journalists, experts, pollsters, etc.), the others were conducted with policy actors directly concerned by the issue of absenteeism.

The analysis shows that this educational populism emerges and stabilizes in a specific policy configuration that leads to a strong politicization of public discourses. This configuration of sayability is characterized by an interdependence between four sets of explanatory factors: 1) the intrinsic properties of the object "absenteeism" which is conducive to radical discourses, 2) the ineffectiveness in the case studied of the traditional mechanisms of institutional regulation of the school system, 3) the dynamics of politicization of self-reinforcing discourse and 4) the low presence in the debate, for several reasons that are studied, of scientific or technological counterarguments. To consider educational populism as a policy configuration, through a resolutely empirical sociology of public action, thus presents two advantages for us. The first is not to limit the scope of the analysis to salient cases characterized by a change in political regime, the rise of extreme forces or a simplification and radicalization of both political discourses. There may be populist situations in less likely cases, in stabilized democracies, or on subjects for which academic or expert knowledge is available. The second advantage is that it does not limit the field of study of populism in education and the factors of its development to the radicalization strategies of political actors, but considers it as the product of an entire system, more precisely here of a set of interdependencies.

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