What do people think and know about politics? Strangely, this classical political science question has generally been answered using artefactual or experimental methods. Converse (1964), Bourdieu (1979) or Gaxie (1978) for instance mostly used questionnaires, thus placing actors in artificial situations where they had to produce answer of little value to them (Zaller 1992). More qualitative have been used however, based on focus groups (Gamson, 1992 ; Duchesne, Haegel, 2010), but it is not clear whether what people say under experimental conditions (people are often paid to participate, and above all, talk is cheap in such conditions, having especially no consequences for one’s reputation) is reliable and transferable to the social world. It therefore appears that only direct observation can offer data unbiased by the method that is used. This endeavor has partly been achieved by Nina Eliasoph (1998), who convincingly showed how citizens avoided politics in the American public sphere through detailed ethnographic material. Inspired by Eliasoph, I however show that politics can appear in certain public situations (therefore not only backside in casual and private conversations), in European spaces of participatory democracy. Based on a two years ethnographic study in Rome, this study highlights the different steps in the construction of civic competence for citizens so far from politics initially. Starting with private or local issues or concerns, some actors can progressively get socialized to “higher” political stakes. Contrary to the dominant literature on the topic that stresses the virtue of public deliberation in such public arenas (Fung and Wright 2003; Fishkin 2009), I show that the construction of civic competence in participatory democracy institutions mostly stems from the informal interactions between non-politicized actors and activists. This result would not have been possible without the fine-grained material accumulated all along the ethnographic study and the intimate connections constructed with some actors through time. This leads to reformulate the conception of civic competence and political socialization, that need to be apprehended in an enlarged and praxeologic perspective (Talpin, 2011).
