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.
