The Representations of “Crisis of Representative Democracy” of Young People from the Working Classes

An inquiry conducted before, during and after the 2012 French presidential and legislative elections (Project SPEL – Political Sociology of the Elections) allowed us to reach out a population supposedly distant from politics: boys and girls studying in a vocational high school in Paris suburbs and coming from different but all socially disadvantaged backgrounds. The aim of this inquiry was to question their relationship to the political processes and more specifically to the electoral campaigns and the elections. The analysis questions the social properties of the young people, their practical experiences and the differentiation of the working classes. The first results, obtained through an original and multimodal method (in-depth interviews with ten panelists all along the year, collective discussions, observations in the high school) put us on the path to an analysis focused on their practical apprehensions of politics, those latter deriving from a process of oblique politicization. How do those boys and girls, socially distanced from the rules and stakes of the political field, perceive the “representative democracy”? Through this general notion of “representative democracy”, we intend to question more precisely their perceptions of the components of our political system: how do they apprehend the vote and what importance do they attach to it? What are their judgments upon the mechanisms of delegation/representation of power? What do they think of the elections? How do they perceive the political parties but also the male/female politicians (the actual candidates and those who have been excluded from the electoral competition)? We will thus try to take a fresh look to the so-called “crisis of the democracy” through the lens of its popular representations and practical experiences of politics.