Towards a deeper appreciation of

citizens’ understandings of democratic politics

Margit van Wessel

Wageningen University

Margit.vanwessel@wur.nl

Problem I started out with:

Citizens’ discontent about ‘not being heard’

How may this discontent be understood by looking closely to

citizens’ interpretations of democratic politics?

Recent literature proposes that:

Citizen’s’ political disaffection and/or disengagement can be understood as rooted in an underappreciation of the value and possibilities of democratic politics – a failing ‘understanding’

Which is caused by certain large-scale developments in politics and society, which we can identify

E.g. ‘Distorted expectations because of individualization’

‘Discourse and practice of collective decision making sits very uncomfortably alongside the discourse and practice of individual choice, self-expression and market-based fulfilment of needs and wants’. (Stoker 2011)

‘Because of this form of individualism, people fail to appreciate the inherently collective characteristics of democratic politics’. (Stoker 2011)

E.g. ‘Increased expectations, in turn harder to fulfil?’

Range of systemic developments such as decline of citizens’ deference, globalization impacting role and capacity of politicians have led to an increase of citizens’ expectations of democratic politics that are in turn harder to fulfil. (Flinders 2012)

This is a problem of understanding: citizens need to become realistic about what they can expect, and see more of what through democratic politics has been achieved and can be achieved. (Flinders 2012)

E.g. ‘Depoliticization undermining democratic politics at the basis’

‘Citizens hate politics because of elites’ practices of appealing to a variety of forms of depoliticization (e.g. delegation, privatization), removing our collective challenges and the possibilties of charting a collective future from the political arena’. (Hay 2007)

Consider the construction of ‘understanding’:

Citizens’ understandings are reconstructed from from what analysts identify as the meanings available to citizens

Understandings are shaped by those meanings in ways we can predict

Understanding as cognitive

No role for citizens as interpreters, beyond the large-scale processes supposedly structuring their understandings

Citizen understandings as ‘wrong’ in the sense that with other cognitions made available, there could be more justice to the ‘true’ meaning of democratic politics

So: misunderstanding as the problem?

But....

How these developments really figure in people’s understandings is an open question

In a previous project, working with Charles Taylor’s notion of “social imaginaries” I learnt that citizens, angry as they often are, approach politics with a measure of confidence, and a working orientation, suggesting we should also look into more practice-based understandings

Without having explored how an understanding makes sense to people, disqualification is problematic

* See my papers in Parliamentary Affairs (2010); Representation (2010);

Citizenship Studies (2014)

Therefore: a project that approaches citizens as sensemakers – how do people understand?

What reality do people see that makes a certain understanding sensible to them?

How come people living in an apparently singular democratic context come to very different assessments of it?

What selection and interpretation of phenomena do we see going on here?

How can we relate to these interpretations when thinking about ways to change understandings?

Study design

Selection of 76 Dutch citizens who in a survey evaluated government responsiveness positively (30) or negatively (46)

Selection to maintain representativeness of larger populations evaluating government responsiveness either positively or negatively

Semi-structured interviews in respondents’ homes

Exploring selection and interpretation through an open questio: does government take into account views of citizens sufficiently?

Comparative analysis of positive and negative interviewees’ selections and interpretations

Negative citizens

failing government responsiveness as evident in the way government presents

itself to negatives:

● conditions of daily life as failing standards of normalcy

● policy controversy as sign of govt. acting against ‘the people’

● confrontations with bureaucracy as ‘unreason’

● elite behaviours showing disregard for ‘the people’

See how democratic institutions and processes appear marginal to

understanding; negatives hardly interpret politics from assumptions that these

structure democratic politics – we are not partakers in democracy, but

undergoers

Note: people know about parties, coalition politics but these don’t figure much

in their understandings

Positive citizens

Government responsiveness as evident in the way government presents

itself to positives:

● (we can assume that) institutions of democratic government guarantee

responsiveness (existing, operational)

● No reason to question such assumptions: life is good; ‘things are

running alright’; no reason to complain

● Identification, sense of a shared culture

See how politics and its tensions are remote: little talk of actual political

differences, policy process or outcomes; orientation towards abstract ‘textbook’

understandings of democracy + performance

That was the easy part...

But how to get beyond identification of the differences?

Basic questions: why are these understandings so different?

● In their selection of phenomena that are relevant to one’s understanding?

● In the interpretation of these phenomena?

Hans Georg Gadamer (1)

How understanding comes about:

Understanding as pragmatic

Arising in practice

Through everyday engagement

By people approaching the matter from their situation, within a horizon

With preconceived notions of what to expect

Understanding is thus always someone’s understanding – the understanding of someone seeking to understand, from a background

Hans-Georg Gadamer (2)

How a person’s understanding is a person’s truth, and how it could be changed:

The hermeneutic circle: we apply our preconceived notions to the parts of reality we are confronted with, which we project onto the whole

As we we proceed in interpretation, we have our preconceived notions confirmed or disrupted, upon which we may adjust our understanding

Changing understandings starts with creating such disruptions

Back to negative citizens…

Failing government responsiveness as

evident in the way government presents

itself to negatives:

● conditions of daily life as failing

standards of normalcy

● policy controversy as sign of govt.

acting against ‘the people’

● confrontations with bureaucracy as

‘unreason’

● elite behaviours showing disregard

for ‘the people’

Now:

● Selection and interpretation reflect

presupposions that one is an outsider to,

and undergoer of, democratic politics

● Selection and interpretation emerge

from everyday engagements

● Selection and interpretation reinforce

presuppositions of exclusion

● In everyday engagements

presuppositions do not get challenged

● As they do not offer an alternatively

meaningful engagement with politics,

e.g. interpreting through the lens of

party politics

…and the positives

Government responsiveness as

evident in the way government

presents itself to positives:

● (We can assume that) institutions

of democratic government

guarantee responsiveness

(existing, operational)

● Life is good; no reason to complain

● ‘Things are running alright’

● Identification, sense of a shared

culture

● See how selection and interpretation

reflect presuppositions of inclusiveness

● Presuppositions are reinforced by:

-experience of democratic instutions

being there and operational (rather

than actually responsive)

-embodied experience of one’s socio-

economic conditions, govt.

performance and shared culture

● Understanding here is as far removed

from dealing with the messiness,

merits and disappointments of

democratic politics as with the

negatives!!

In conclusion (1):

Understandings of democratic politics are not simply cognitive, but rather a translation (Grondin 2002 on Gadamer) of democratic politics into terms that make sense to a citizen, from their position in the world

Understandings are what you have learnt to be true

Understandings are partial

We should therefore not be too ready to denigrate understandings that do not match abstract principles as ‘misunderstandings’ to be ‘corrected’

● They have earned their validity for people

● Their mistakenness is not exactly a given

In conclusion (2):

On this basis, we can consider what forms of intervention could help change understanding from another foundation: one that takes ciizens as sensemakers more seriously

● Towards more constructive interrelating

● Disrupting learned truths, starting out by acknowledging these not only as truths that need disrupting, but as truths to learn from

● For this disruption to take place, politics need to take existing understanding seriously, and offer alternative experience compelling enough to be disruptive

● Which would amount to a dialogic process of meaning-creation

● So, merger of horizons rather than ‘correction’ - demanding mutual engagement between citizens and government/politics