Citizens as Sense-Makers: Towards a Deeper Appreciation of Citizens’ Understandings of Democratic Politics

Abstract

An important literature has emerged that seeks to explain political disaffection and the resulting problem of disengagement by looking into citizens' understandings of democratic politics and approaching understanding in cognitive terms. On the basis of an empirical study, this article proposes an alternative approach that can contribute to a deeper appreciation of the way in which citizens approach democratic politics; one that we need in order to address political disaffection. This article shows how a citizen's understanding should be viewed as the outcome of a dynamic between a citizen and the democracy she/he is trying to understand. Understanding is then about knowing how politics works: an embodied achievement, contextually embedded. This article concludes by arguing that confronting political disaffection by changing understandings would demand an acknowledgement and appreciation of why a certain understanding is a valid way of seeing for a citizen, in order then to be able to plausibly shift such understandings. Keywordspolitical disaffection, citizenship, interpretive political science, hermeneutics, understandings of politics Accepted: 3 February 2016 Is it possible that we 'hate' politics because we have forgotten its specific and limited nature, its overwhelming value and also its innate fragility? Could it be that our expectations are so high that politics appears almost destined to disappoint? Flinders (2012: 7).

Picturing deliberation: How dissatisfied citizens make sense of it

“…We find that when these citizens thought of deliberation as low-key, informal discussion, they linked it to respectful communication and beneficial outcomes such as learning, bridging differences, and problem-solving; when they thought of it as formalized, structured discussion, their appraisals became much more negative. This explanation fits well with a broader literature that has demonstrated a link between citizens’ understandings of ‘politics’ and their political attitudes and behaviour (Bedock, 2020; Fitzgerald, 2013; Morey and Eveland, 2016; van Wessel, 2017).…”

Communication Practices and Political Engagement with Climate Change: A Research Agenda

“…Political subjectivities are discourse-based but are also linked to multiple social practices, such as participating in demonstrations, meetings or various modes of organization, like the Indigenous Environmental Network. Lived experience, including material conditions such as whether one has access to a library, the Internet or computers, also influences political subjectivities (Van Wessel, 2016).…”

Political transparency matters: Citizens challenging officials via ‘have you planned X’-type questions

“…Should the officials disconfirm, they may be accused either of non-professionalism (not having given thought to a straightforward matter) or of non-responsiveness to the citizens (not addressing a concern that has been much debated and therefore treated as relevant). Non-responsiveness is not only one of the major reasons for the lack of participation by citizens, as claimed in the literature (Flinders, 2012; Van Wessel, 2016), but it also operates against interactional preference as set in motion by a question, the first pair part of an adjacency pair (Stivers and Robinson, 2006).…”