Unpacking democratic resentment: a qualitative research approach
(2019) 8th Belgium State of the Federation Conference — Location: Université Saint-Louis Bruxelles (19.December.2019)
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- Abstract
- Discussing the importance of resentment towards political institutions of representative democracy, yet the lack of a deep understanding of the concept and phenomenon, this paper first engages in a conceptual discussion of political or democratic resentment. This conceptual exploration proceeds in three steps. Section 1.1 sums up the philosophical genealogy of political or democratic resentment, helping us to distinguish its moral and sociological acceptation Section 1.2 locates political or democratic resentment alongside close emotions in relation with politics. Section 1.3 delineates resentment by inquiring the similarities and differences with neighboring concepts. This conceptual discussion serves as a roadmap for setting out a strategy to empirically study political or democratic resentment.Section 2.1 discusses in what contexts one can expect to be able to observe political or democratic resentment. In other words, this section proposes parameters for a case selection that allows for gaining the needed deeper understanding of political or democratic resentment. Section 2.2 proposes focus groups as a suitable research method to observe and gain deeper understanding of the political emotions and narratives that are key to political and democratic resentment. subject to further revisions, the paper ultimately aims to make four contributions to the literature. First, defining political or democratic resentment and highlighting its boundaries with related concepts makes it possible to operationalize and empirically study the phenomenon. Second, theorize what experiences and situations engender democratic resentment. These two elements lay the groundwork for future research that aims to assess how citizens’ political behavior is shaped by democratic resentment, and how it relates to other political and societal attitudes and behavior. Third, the study of democratic resentment sheds light on the democratic nature of regimes from the citizen’s perspective, but is also insightful for increasing the resilience of democratic representative institutions. Fourth, by using the concept political or democratic resentment as an illustration, we contribute to the development of research designs and methods suited to capture complex phenomena in political sociology more generally.
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Petit, G., van der Does, R., & Louise Knops. (2019). Unpacking democratic resentment: a qualitative research approach. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/93372