Do people want more participation? Tensions and conflicts in governance in times of scepticism

Abstract

© 2017, Centro Estudios Politicos Constitucionales. All rights reserved. When ordinary people are asked how they feel about politics, negative terms enter into the conversation. In this work we analyse how people build their relation­ship with politics, to explore to what extent political representation is challenged by either participatory trends or by expert-based governance in citizens’ mind. To do this, we use focus groups in Spain, where popular distrust of political institutions rose dramatically in the period 1980-2012. We analyse the meanings associated with expert-based, representative, and participatory governance models. In this way, the tensions and contradictions in political preferences for one type of institutional design or another are unveiled.