Between Hatred of the Institutional and Appeal to the Everyday: Researching Greek Citizen’s Representations of Politics

This paper addresses the rise of anti-politics (Stoker, 2006; Hay, 2007; Fawcett et al., 2017) evidenced by the growing levels of citizens’ dissatisfaction and withdrawal from institutional politics, and the preference for individualised, “lifestyle” participatory modes (Dalton, 2008; Bennet, 2012; Stolle & Micheletti, 2013), within the framework of social representations theory. These developments could imply deeper qualitative divides in citizens' conceptualizations of politics and what constitutes the political as a distinct milieu of human activity that go beyond changes in the participatory repertoires. They seem to indicate a new way of defining and relating to politics, while research findings also document variations in people’s understandings of politics, as well as discrepancies in the definitions given by researchers and citizens themselves (Hay, 2007, Bang & Sorensen, 1999; Fitzgerald, 2013). Yet political participation literature operates under the implicit assumption that most citizens hold the same conceptualization of politics, illustrating the need to focus on contemporary democratic subjects and the way they experience and give meaning to politics. This reasoning is applied in the case of Greece, where the stereotypical depiction of the “politicised Greek citizen” has long been contested (Pantelidou-Maloutas, 1990), and more than decade of multiple crises have left their imprint on the diminished levels of institutional trust and electoral turnout. An interdisciplinary approach is adopted, bringing the fields of political behaviour and social psychology together, in an attempt to identify potential transformations not only in tangible political participation, but also at the latent level of citizens’ social representations of politics. To that end, the study employed a data-driven approach and relied on focus group data in order to explore the meanings Greek citizens attribute to politics and the constituents of political participation. Following the principles of purposive sampling, age was used as a as a break characteristic (17-24, 25-29, 30-34, 35-44, 45-54, 55-64), while ingroup variation was maximized to reach meaning saturation, cutting across socio-economic background, ideological positioning, and engagement (Patton, 2015). Data collection took place in 2022 and resulted in an overall sample of 32 Greek citizens (16 female and 16 male), living in the capital area. Images of various participation modes were incorporated in the focus group guide as a minimally intervening way of eliciting social representations. After all interviews were transcribed and imported to MAXQDA, thematic analysis was applied to the data, following an inductive coding process (Braun & Clarke, 2021). Research findings confirm the existence of varying (and altering) contents of citizens’ representations of politics and political participation, which oscillate between arena (hegemonic representations) and process definitions (oppositional representations), both across and within individuals. Moreover, a particular chain of associations emerges as part of a shared and highly consensual reality: in almost all citizens’ accounts, politics is equated with institutional politics, which is blamed as unresponsive and corrupt, justifying citizens’ decision to either exit the political system or resort to the politics of the everyday, as a way of resisting this hegemonic representation.