Project Presentation

QUALIDEM is an interdisciplinary project that intends to bridge the gap between scholars of public policy and students of mass politics. Based on their previous research, it brings together Virginie Van Ingelgom (principal investigator), who specializes in the study of mass publics, and Claire Dupuy, a scholar of comparative public policy (principal collaborator).

The QUALIDEM project offers a qualitative (re)appraisal of citizens’ (dis-)affection towards politics by relying on the core argument of the policy feedback literature: attitudes and behaviours are outcomes of past policy. It aims to explain the evolutions of democratic linkages – political trust, political support, loyalty, formal and informal participation – as being shaped by public policy, and specifically by the turn to neoliberalism and supranationalisation.

On the empirical level, QUALIDEM relies on the reanalysis of qualitative data – interviews and focus groups – from a diachronic and comparative perspective focusing on four Western European countries – Belgium, France, Germany and the UK – with the US serving as a counterpoint. The objective is to systematically analyse the domestic and socially differentiated effects of both the major policy-related macro transformations on citizens’ representations and experiences of politics.

QUALIDEM is funded by a Starting Grant of the European Research Council. It is hosted by UCLouvain – ISPOLE in partnership with Sciences Po Grenoble – PACTE.

01. Experiencing Democracy

02. Médiatisation

03. Public Policies

04. Neoliberalism

05. Democratic Linkages

06. Supranationalisation

EXPERIENCING DEMOCRACY

Political developments in Western democracies over the last three decades – such as the rise of populist and radical right parties, the turn to neoliberalism in most welfare states, and the trend towards supra-nationalization and globalisation – raise questions about the future of democracy. Specifically, by looking at policy feedbacks we attempt to understand and explain the evolving nature of citizens’ relationship with the political system in terms of the interplay between the structural constraints of the policy environment and agency as well as subjective experiences.

MEDIATISATION

It has been repeatedly shown in the literature that the media play a crucial role regarding two of the core dimensions of the QUALIDEM project, namely citizens’ democratic linkages and policy (feedback). With respect to citizens, the media contributes to shaping their perception and understanding through agenda setting, framing and, ultimately, priming effect. Accordingly, citizens adopt different attitudes and behaviours vis-à-vis politics. As to (social) policies and the policy feedback effect, media make information about policies more visible and proximate to citizens thus making policy feedback more likely to happen. However, what remains unclear is the way citizens use media frames and information. To shed light on this blind spot, we analyse media coverage and citizens’ opinions (as expressed in their discourses) about policies which enables us to better understand how media coverage about social policies influence citizens’ opinion and the nature of this influence.

PUBLIC POLICIES

NEOLIBERALISM

QUALIDEM analyses the potential impact of the neoliberalization of social and education policy on citizens’ links to politics in a cross-national and cross-sectoral perspective. This analysis will be instrumental in identifying policy change mechanisms, here the turn to neoliberalism within social and education policy, may affect citizens’ representations of their political systems and themselves in relation to the former. Two distinct areas of analysis of linkage mechanisms are studied:

normative and moral judgments that stem from neoliberal policy principles and
judgments of trust and fairness.

DEMOCRATIC LINKAGES

The past two decades have seen a wave of scholarly analysis of democratic disaffection that focuses on whether citizens’ relationships with the political system and the state – known as “democratic linkages” – have changed. Starting from the concept of democratic linkages, we are not solely interested in the evolution of a single indicator. Instead, we adopt a broader perspective where we aim to explain the evolution of democratic linkages as the various ways in which citizens are connected in a structural and durable way to their political system. Linkage mechanisms include feelings of trust, political support, loyalty, identity—but also participation, mobilization and electoral behaviour. Our focus is therefore intentionally broad and builds upon the literature that focusses on the changing nature of democratic linkages.

SUPRANATIONALISATION

Supranationalisation, and the blame avoidance game that often comes with it, tends to obfuscate the role of domestic political actors and their ability to act independently upon the society of their country. Interestingly for QUALIDEM, when constructing globalisation as imposing economic imperatives or when shifting the blame to ‘the EU’ or ‘Bruxelles’, the media and political elites convey messages about the agency of political actors and their sheer ability to act upon their society in a complex globalized environment. In addition, the Europeanization of a significant array of policy domains further blurs the ability of politics, here domestic political actors, to govern in a multilevel environment made of intergovernmental, international and bureaucratic constraints. Previous work underlines that the supranationalisation and in particular the politicisation of the EU have made citizens, especially working class citizens, more uncertain about the consequences of European integration (Van Ingelgom, 2014). Fatalistic indifference is reflected in the weakening of the belief that the European system offers an opportunity for the improvement of the conditions of its citizens. The project will cover at least two realities: the conviction that it is impossible to have an impact on the decisions taken by European leaders and/or the belief that even leaders are powerless to resolve citizens’ problems, especially in a globalised world. Moreover, the project will also ask if this process is specific to the European integration or if one can find similar patterns in the US, where supranationalisation equals globalisation.

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