UNEQUALCITIZEN – UNEQUALCITIZEN

We have long known that citizens are not truly equal: the more affluent, the more educated and the more socially integrated participate more intensively and are more likely to see their preferences implemented in public policy. Despite the renewed interest in democracy in intellectual debate and institutional spheres, the socially situated nature of conceptions of democracy and desired institutional reforms has often been ignored. In a context of rising inequality, this amounts to legitimising the conceptions of democracy of dominant actors and ignoring the aspirations of the most vulnerable groups.

The UNEQUALCITIZEN project therefore examines the influence of social and political inequalities on conceptions of the political system in European democracies. To what extent do these inequalities help to explain the variety of citizens' conceptions of their political system and their positions on representative democracy and its alternatives?

Our main hypothesis is that the most socially disadvantaged and politically marginalised, although particularly dissatisfied with representative democracy, do not want the end of political representation or democracy, which remain unsurpassable horizons. They do, however, support the introduction of mechanisms to control and sanction political representatives in order to implement the general interest, understood as the single will of the people. We also hypothesise that national institutions strongly shape citizens' conceptions of their political system. Rather than focusing on the usual questions of trust or distrust in institutions, this project is original in that it examines head-on the normative conceptions of what constitutes a 'good' political system among citizens of consolidated democracies in Europe. It aims first to identify citizens' ideal-typical conceptions of their political system. It then aims to reconstruct the discourses associated with these conceptions and to analyse their normative foundations, while paying particular attention to the national and individual characteristics of the different discourses and to the question of conflicts and ambivalences running through these contradictory aspirations.

Three scientific obstacles explain our still very patchy knowledge of these diverse conceptions. The first is the lack of comparability of existing research protocols, leading to often contradictory results. The second obstacle is the lack of approaches that combine qualitative and quantitative approaches, despite their complementarity. The third and last theoretical obstacle results from a certain lack of interest in the contributions of political theory, which nevertheless provides key concepts for understanding normative conflicts on democracy and political representation.

To overcome these obstacles, the project proposes a comparative approach and the use of mixed methods. It combines survey data collected in 12 European democracies with in-depth semi-structured interviews in France, Belgium and Italy with citizens and activists from movements questioning representative democracy (the Yellow Vests, 'Anything Else', and the Five Star Movement). The comparison aims to explore the role of specific contexts. Mixed methods will allow us to study normative conflicts and the articulation of national, social and political characteristics with ideal-typical discourses on the political system. Finally, the mobilisation of works of political theory on representation will allow us to analyse the normative conflicts structuring these contradictory aspirations.