Which tools (do we need) to understand the Yellow Vests movement and analyze the data of the French National Debate?

This special issue is drawn from a workshop held in Paris on January 16 and 17, 2020, about empirical ways of studying the French Yellow Vests movement and the “National Debate” it sparked. In this introductory article to this special issue, we take a look back at the origin of the workshop. After putting it back in context – an unprecedented social mobilization and an abundance of analyses in the heat of the moment – we present the methodological questions raised by the study of this movement, from the analysis of social networks to the epistemology of the debate. We then present some of the main results drawn from the articles in the issue (articles that, given the journal, are drawn from empirical experiments usually described as “quantitative”).