Social Alterity, Class (Un)consciousness and Feeling of (Mis)representation in the EU Capital : the Social Anchoring of Political Resentment

This paper analyzes how the experience of social inequalities, in various contexts and with different meanings, shapes criticism of representation and democracy. We consider the experience of social downgrading and socio-economic alterity as a vector of resentment towards our (so-called) democratic institutions. We analyze this relation with a double context in mind: the rise of a “regime of multiple inequalities” and the loss of legitimacy of representative democracy, or even the “end of representative politics”. Our fieldwork is concentrated in Brussel, providing a single but contrasted context to our observations. We rely mainly on series of focus-groups that allow us to consider different layers of “social domination” : individuals engaged in the yellow vest movement ; inhabitants, mainly with foreign origins, who live in a poor neighborhood exposed to gentrification ; social workers who are directly in touch with the most marginalized population ; working-class individuals, who work in a privileged environment, namely the EU Bubble. These groups have been held since January 2019, with only the last one still to be done in early 2020. Our main research question relies on an important hypothesis about the structure of inequalities: the transition from a class-based inequalities system to a regime of multiple inequalities, where individuals are more and more held accountable for their own troubles and defects. Our main guideline is to explore through this mosaic of cases how people mobilize their social experiences in their understanding of politics by giving a collective meaning to their individual resentment. By doing so, we will explain the structural deficit of “substantive representation” of dominated social interests, by asking directly to various individuals how and at which conditions they would effectively feel politically represented, or if their loss of faith in any kind of institutions confirms the end of representative politics.