Lessons from the Fair: Practicing Quality of Life Politics

• In Event: Politics of Personal Experience

Abstract

Do clean public parks create voters? Do potholes create protesters? In this paper, we investigate how an individual's quality of life, as determined by their access to public services, influences their political behavior. Even beyond voting, protesting, and other conventional forms of political action, we investigate how the political building blocks of someone's quality of life, their interactions with various governmental institutions, as well as their quotidian interactions with local politics are themselves political behaviors. We argue that government and public service provision affect peoples’ everyday lives, and how people perceive and interpret the government's investment shapes their political beliefs, knowledge, and actions. We develop a theoretical typology of political action and draw on literatures in political psychology, political economy, and sociology to explain how municipal service provision translates into public opinion and political action. We use an online survey as well as surveys, interviews, and focus groups from the 2021 Minnesota State Fair to examine how individuals define and understand government, perceive their own quality of life, and how they engage politically to analyze how public service provision works as both a means to political expression as well as a way of expressing politics.

Authors

• Adam J Lê, University of Minnesota

• Jane Lawrence Sumner, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities