Channelling Discontent? Non-voters, Populist Party Voters, and their Affective Political Agency

The dominant strain of democratic thought argues that the will of the people is satisfied by the democratic process through the articulation of the people’s concerns in the institutionalized political arena, i.e. elections. Something similar is argued with regard to the democratic value of populist parties. While some of these parties’ proposals (appear to) threaten the rights of minority groups in their alleged representation of the will of the people, it is often claimed that these parties channel popular discontents into the electoral process, i.e., that they function as a ‘democratic exhaust valve’. In this paper I assess the assumption that populist parties form an efficacious exhaust valve for voters, the channeling discontent thesis as it is referred to here. This thesis implies that populist party voters will have an efficacious advantage over nonvoters. After all, populist party voters share with nonvoters their political distrust, but they do have an ‘exhaust valve’, while nonvoters apparently lack such a source of democratic fulfillment. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Dutch PVV voters and deliberate nonvoters, I assess the channeling discontent thesis in a comparison between them, conceptualizing political efficacy qualitatively as fulfillment on three dimensions: collectivization (the sense of being part of a larger collectivity), representation (seeing one’s opinion represented in the public sphere) and mobilization (meaningful (affective) political action). The analysis reveals that nonvoters do not lack fulfillment when it comes to collectivization and representation. On the third dimension, it is not electoral participation, but respondents’ perception of the locus of political power that explains differences in political efficacy. This locus of power can be transparent (when ‘official politics’ is perceived as the center of political power) or opaque (when there are allegedly more powerful forces at work behind the official scenes). Among the former, populist party voters indeed had this efficacious advantage over nonvoters. Among the latter, however, nonvoters appear to have an advantage, due to their non-institutionalized activities. The channeling discontent thesis, I conclude, only ‘works’ for citizens insofar as individuals share the thesis’ institutional assumptions and it thus marks that much democratic theory has a blind eye for what happens outside its established institutional framework. In the discussion, I argue for a cultural sociological perspective in the study of political discontents, allowing for theory based on how people decide for themselves what are meaningful realities and actions.