Did the Indignant Movements Change the Meaning of Democracy?

Democracy is a prominent object in politics, but, what does democracy means? Answering such a question could implicate the use of a theoretical methodology. However, there is also an empirical question related to it, namely: what does democracy means to citizens? In the period ranging from 2010 to 2011 the world witnessed a wave of global indignation, stronger in some countries than in others, mostly related to how democracy was not adequately working. But if there is an adequate shape for democracy it means that protesters had an ideal of how democracy should look like. A lot of literature has been written about legitimacy and trust in politics and its institutions; also about what protester might want; nonetheless, too little attention has been paid to what societies think democracy is. Taking profit of those nowadays already far social events, I wonder here, from an empirical and comparative point of view, whether the existence or not of indignant movements might have affected the conception that citizens have of democracy. Based on secondary data from Latinbarometer and the Spanish Center for Sociological Research (CIS), and taking as variable factor the existence (or not) of significant indignant movements, this paper aims to examine the case of Spain to see if social opinion has changed significantly before and after the appearance of the indignant movement. It will be also interesting to evaluate from which conception to which other may conceptions have changed.