CRESE asked Salma Larabi, a PhD student at Université Marie et Louis Pasteur, to summarise the experiment carried out during the ‘Researchers’ Night 2026’
‘I took part in Researchers’ Night on 25 September 2026. To get people to guess my research topic, I’d brought along two cubes of different sizes (one large and one smaller), both bearing the same name: “Room 1”. The question I asked visitors was simple: why?
The answer boils down to one idea: these two objects represent the same inter-municipal body. The large one corresponds to the actual distribution of seats amongst the municipalities, whilst the small one represents its minimal configuration – that is, the smallest possible distribution that preserves exactly the same majority coalitions. The two councils therefore make exactly the same decisions, and each municipality has the same power within them.
This question forms part of my PhD thesis, which focuses on democracy and new forms of participation. In particular, I am working on minimising the number of seats on the councils of French inter-municipal bodies. Many thanks to the visitors for their curiosity and for the fruitful discussions.”