Citizens' Contrasting Aspirations About Their Political System: Entrustment, Participation, Identification and Control

Abstract

Empirical political science has increasingly focused on citizens' conceptions of their political system. Most existing studies draw upon large quantitative datasets which have produced contradictory results. Qualitative approaches are used more and more commonly to identify the general narrative produced by ordinary citizens on their political system, but they tend to underplay the variations found in their discourses. In this article, I use semi-directed interviews to explore citizens' contrasting aspirations about their political system. This article is based on 32 interviews conducted with French citizens across Fall and Winter 2017 and on 24 interviews conducted during the Yellow Vests movement in fall 2019. During these interviews, citizens were asked to define in their own terms what politics is, what it should achieve, what the flaws and advantages of their political system are and what should be changed. These citizens have produced four ideal-typical discourses, uncovering four distinct conceptions of what the political system is, how it legitimizes itself, what types of procedures it should lay on and what types of outcomes it should produce. Citizens' discourses heavily focus on alternative logics of political representation, which remains unavoidable to channel political decisions. They express four competing aspirations: entrustment, participation, identification, and control & sanction. The two latter conceptions remain under-explored empirically.

Engaged, Indifferent, Skeptical or Critical? Disentangling Attitudes towards Local Deliberative Mini-Publics in Four Western European Democracies

“…The finding that skeptics are the highest educated group, echoes previous research demonstrating that education is negatively related to support for instruments incorporating citizens into policymaking [12,15,42]. All in all, the characteristics of this group portrays them as elitists with an "entrustment" conception of politics [21].…”

“…However, unlike the disengaged, they are eager to participate in decision-making since they are more interested in politics and feel their participation will make a difference. Contrary to skeptics, engaged democrats are strongly opposed to the professionalization of politics, which they believe should be carried out by ordinary citizens temporarily engaged in collective initiatives for the common good [21]. Therefore, we expect that engaged deliberative democrats are more skilled and resourceful, more critical of political elites and institutions, and more confident in the abilities of ordinary citizens to understand politics than other attitude groups (H4).…”

“…Skeptical deliberative democrats are similar to those Bedock describes as individuals with an "entrustment" conception of politics [21]. Despite being interested in politics, skeptics do not support a sustained role for citizens in policymaking since politics is not for everyone.…”

Control or participate? The Yellow Vests’ democratic aspirations through mixed methods analysis

“…They have a pluralist vision of politics inherited from their previous politicization and favor all sorts of democratic innovations, including more time-demanding ones resulting in a greater degree of citizen involvement. Our findings fully corroborate studies stressing that the representation of the general interest (pluralist, or unitary) is one of the most structuring lines to analyze the democratic aspirations of French citizens (Bedock, 2020).…”

“…The second step consisted in the inductive coding of the interviews for each of the themes covered in the interview guide. The initial codes were elaborated inductively thanks to the interviews with 32 lay French citizens, whereas we used and completed the existing thematic codes for the interviews with Yellow Vests activists (Bedock, 2020). Each of these general themes is divided into sub-themes.…”