Policies as anchors of politics Policy experiences and perceptions in Western European citizens political discussions

Feedback studies on mass publics revolve around the idea that “new policies create a new politics” (Schattschneider, 1935). The scholarship has researched how single policy experiences feed back into policy recipients’ specific policy attitudes and behaviours. Recently however, an emerging line of work offers a different take on Schattschneider’s oldsaw and, by getting closer to citizens’ multiple policy encounters in the course of their daily life, they suggest that specific political attitudes are grounded in citizens’ policy experiences and perceptions. In this article, we expand these initial results and ask: how do European citizens’ policy experiences and perceptions serve as anchors of their political discussions? We conduct a qualitative secondary analysis of four primary datasets composed of interviews and focus-groups with participants from different socio-economic backgrounds and political leanings collected in Belgium, France and the United Kingdom in 4 different points in time (1995-2019). By adopting an innovative research design, this article contributes a broader analysis of how citizens’ policy experiences and perceptions are tied to their understanding of the core components of politics, not only specific political attitudes, but their beliefs about their political world, the boundaries of their political community and what is to be understood as ‘political’.

Affiliations

UCLouvainSSH/SPLE - Institut de sciences politiques Louvain-Europe

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Dupuy, C., Van Ingelgom, V., & Defacqz, S. (2022). Policies as anchors of politics Policy experiences and perceptions in Western European citizens political discussions. American Political Science Association - Annual COnference, Montréal. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/102482