Eroding Democracies. A qualitative (re-)appraisal of how policies shape democratic linkages in Western democracies

Project Information

QUALIDEM

Grant agreement ID: 716208

DOI

10.3030/716208

Project closed

EC signature date 21 November 2016

Start date 1 April 2017

End date 31 March 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 491 658,75

EU contribution

€ 1 491 658,75

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITE CATHOLIQUE DE LOUVAIN
Belgium

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - QUALIDEM (Eroding Democracies. A qualitative (re-)appraisal of how policies shape democratic linkages in Western democracies)

Reporting period: 2021-10-01 to 2023-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The future consolidation or erosion of Western democracies depends on the political perceptions and experiences of ordinary citizens. Even when previous studies disagree on the implications of their findings, they stress that both attitudinal and behavioural forms of democratic linkages – political trust and support, formal and informal participation – have come under considerable pressure in recent decades.
QUALIDEM offers a qualitative (re)appraisal of citizens’ (dis-)affection towards politics by relying on the core argument of the policy feedback literature: attitudes and behaviours are outcomes of past policies. It aims to explain the evolutions of democratic linkages as being shaped by citizens' multiple experiences of public policies, and specifically by their turn to neoliberalisation and supranationalisation. It aims to systematically analyse the domestic and socially differentiated effects of both of these major transformations on citizens’ representations and experiences of politics, as an addition to the existing literature on disengagement and disaffection towards politics.
On the theoretical level, this project therefore aims to build bridges between scholars of public policy and mass politics. On the empirical level, QUALIDEM relies on the reanalysis of qualitative data – interviews and focus groups – from a diachronic and comparative perspective focusing on three Western European countries (Belgium, France, and the UK) with the US serving as a counterpoint. It renews the methodological approach to the question of ordinary citizens’ disengagement and disaffection by providing a detailed and empirically-grounded understanding of the mechanisms of production and change in democratic linkages mobilizing abductive theory building.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

How do public policies and their changes shape democratic linkages? To tackle this question and to meet the project's objectives, the following research activities have been achieved:
First, a corpus of qualitative data for secondary analysis has been assembled. Primary data has been provided by the CITAE project (Duchesne, et al., 2013), C. Belot (2000), WelfSOC (Taylor-Gooby and Leruth, 2018), H. Mercenier (2019), and L. Vila-Henninger (2020). Further, QUALIDEM has obtained access to the qualitative data collected by the RESTEP network in return of contributing to its collection and analysis (Beaudonnet, et al., 2022 & 2023).
Second, the research team has produced mappings of changes in relevant fields of public policy over the observation period. The task has been accomplished through a study of primary and secondary sources and led to a database of policy changes in several domains in the countries analysed by QUALIDEM (Dupuy and Bussi, 2018).
Third, the analytical work has necessitated theoretical groundwork to identify the core concepts, such as “policy feedbacks” (Bussi, Dupuy & Van Ingelgom, 2022), or “(de-)politicization” (Dupuy and Van Ingelgom, 2019). Moreover, to allow the reanalysis of qualitative data coming from different origins, the QUALIDEM team has elaborated a set of common coding guidelines. The team followed an iterative process to jointly develop through an abductive approach a consolidated codebook which helps identifying the presence of references to public policies, democratic linkages, neoliberalism, and supranationalization in ordinary citizens’ discourses (Vila-Henninger, Dupuy, Van Ingeglom, et al., 2022). Based on this abductive codebook, the QUALIDEM team has jointly coded its complete corpus with the help of the CAQDAS software (Evers, Caprioli, Nöst & Wiedemann, 2020). In this way, the team has entered the empirical analysis of its phenomenon of interest and started answering its overarching research questions (e.g. Vila-Henninger, Caprioli and Van Ingelgom, 2018; 2019; Dupuy & Van Ingelgom, 2022; Le Gall, Van Ingelgom & Dupuy, 2022; Dupuy, Defacqz & Van Ingelgom, 2022).
Fourth, taking stock of the developments in the existing literature on policy feedbacks, we have followed the call of prominent scholars to further expand this body of scholarship beyond citizens’ experiences with single policies to account, instead, for their lived, multiple, policy experiences. However, from a methodological perspective, acknowledging the multiplicity of citizens’ policy experiences in Western Europe raises two main challenges pertaining to (i) the research designs and (ii) the causal inferences that are common in this body of work. In our project, we tackled both challenges (Dupuy, Teuber & Van Ingelgom, 2022). In response to the first challenge, our approach applies a comparative and longitudinal qualitative secondary data analysis with no a priori policy selection. We also develop a precise and robust operationalization of multiple policy experiences and perceptions in policy-selection-free datasets. In response to the second challenge, we elaborate theoretically on a third feedback mechanism which is normative and collective (Dupuy, Verhaegen & Van Ingelgom, 2021; Dupuy, Defacqz & Van Ingelgom, 2022). Empirically we study collective norms linked to multiple policy experiences from individual-level data. By getting closer to citizens’ multiple policy encounters during their daily life, we suggest that specific political attitudes are grounded in citizens’ policy experiences and perceptions.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

QUALIDEM has contributed to the development of two novel methodologies. First, QUALIDEM empirical research is based on the secondary analysis of pre-existing qualitative, comparative, and diachronic data. Comparative qualitative data has been extensively produced over the past decades for diverse scientific purposes. Secondary analysis benefits from the fact that, during the process of qualitative research, the collected data, i.e. interviews and focus groups, are generally richer than what is needed to answer the original research questions. Hence, re-analysis of such data allows researchers to investigate new research questions by making use of existing data. In the context of QUALIDEM, as for similar types of research with the not uncommon objective to shed light on processes which have taken – or been taking – place over a longer period and starting in the past, secondary analysis was the only feasible way to do empirical research. QUALIDEM has thus contributed to methodological debates on the feasibility of qualitative secondary analysis (Vila-Henninger, et al., 2022; Vila-Henninger, Dupuy & Van Ingelgom, Forthcoming) as well as on comparative qualitative research design allowing for theory building (Dupuy, Teuber & Van Ingelgom, 2022).
Second, as qualitative secondary analysis has generated heated debate regarding the epistemology of qualitative research, QUALIDEM argues that shifting to an abductive approach provides a fruitful avenue for qualitative secondary analysts who are oriented towards theory-building (Vila-Henninger, et al., 2022). However, the concrete implementation of abduction remains underdeveloped – especially for coding. QUALIDEM has addressed this key gap by outlining a set of tactics for abductive analysis that can be applied for qualitative analysis. A key contribution of our project is the development of “code equations” – defined as the combination of codes to operationalize phenomena that span individual codes. Code equations have been an important resource for abduction and other qualitative approaches that leverage qualitative data to build theory.

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