The Sounds of Silence – The Dialectic between Exit and Voice in Contemporary Democracy

Polarization, political disaffection and digital communication have driven new forms of political behavior and culture. Recent research has mostly registered shifts in the parameters of expressing voice in western democracies (Hobolt et al., 2021; Jäger, 2023; Norris & Inglehart, 2019; Hutter & Weisskircher, 2023; Borbáth et al., 2023). At the same time, silence as a political behavior and form of communication has become increasingly attractive for citizens – not only through abstention, but also through deliberately remaining silent at the ballot box by voting blank (Portos et al., 2020; Plescia et al., 2023). This raises the question why citizens, with the sufficient resources for political participation (Portos et al., 2020; Moualek, 2017) deliberately choose to remain silent and how they and political institutions make sense of this silence. The French phenomenon of the votes blancs offers an important heuristic to understand current shifts in political culture in looking into how citizens renegotiate central understandings of citizenship, democracy and politics. Historically, the votes blancs have been highly debated in France with the systematization of representative democracy and its models of citizenship and participatory culture (Ihl & Deloyé, 1991a; 1991b; Moualek, 2023). Now again, the dialectical and paradoxical resurgence of deliberately remaining silent in a hypercommunicative and hyperpoliticized age (Habermas, 2022; Jäger, 2023) indicate that norms of citizenship, political culture and democracy are being transformed. Contrary to more normative approaches to silence as a form of democratic expression (Gray, 2023; Brito Vieira, 2020; MacKenzie & Moore, 2020), or subversions and resistance (Brito Vieira, 2021; Jungkunz, 2012) I aim to ground the research in “existing motivations and our political and social institutions (not from a set of abstract “rights” or from our intuitions)” (Geuss, 2008, 59). Accordingly, I address the question of political silence in a threefold way: First, through conceptualizing and contextualizing a paradox way of expressing voice by being silent based on Hirschman’s (1970) seminal work Exit, Voice and Loyalty. This includes situating the votes blancs in the French institutional, cultural and political context and the recent shifts in political culture (Jäger, 2023; Mair, 2013; Amable & Palombarini, 2021; Gerbaudo, 2021; Rosanvallon, 2022; Hobolt et al. 2021). Second, based on qualitative interviews with central advocates of the votes blancs in France I aim to discern different ideal types of silent citizens, focusing on their own understanding of democracy, representation and citizenship. And third, I undertake a discourse analysis of political actors and parliamentary texts to understand how representative institutions make sense of their silent counterparts. In doing so, I aim to identify how understandings of citizenship, democracy, politics and participation are negotiated, expressed and transformed through the interaction of discourses that try to make silence meaningful. Next to these empirical insights, I also put recent methodological advances in dealing with silence – both as practice (Guillaume & Schweiger, 2019) and as an interconnected, discursive, political field (Freeden, 2022) to work.