‘Will They Listen to Us?’ Working- Class People and Social Representations of Participatory Democracy.

In recent years, many studies have investigated the popular attitudes towards participatory democracy. These works show heterogeneous evidence regarding the class background of the participatory democracy preference. In this paper, we focus on the discourses of different types of working class people as they are frequently targeted as recipients of local democratic innovations. How do they see participatory democracy? Is it familiar to them? Do they see it as a convincing alternative? We depart from a longitudinal study of nine focus-groups which were organized in different Spanish cities in 2011, 2012 and 2015. As we will show, the interviewees display a positive view of the participatory reforms; however, they also harbor deep feelings of political exclusion and distrust which cast doubts towards participatory democracy as a credible reform.