Visible and Proximate Policies? Normative Policy Feedbacks in Europe

• In Event: New Directions in Policy Feedback and Mass Publics Studies

Abstract

Citizens’ lived, multiple and possibly contradictory, experiences with the government are now paid renewed attention to. This development allows for a fuller account of how these experiences feed back into citizens’ political attitudes and behaviours. However, a major gap remains: most research focus on the US, a case of a submerged state and targeting welfare state, and little is known in other policy contexts. In this paper, we narrow this gap by moving feedback studies to Western Europe and ask: How do Western European citizens’ experiences with multiple, often universal, policies feed back into their relations to politics and democracy? We conduct a comparative qualitative secondary analysis of focus-groups conducted in France, Belgium and England in 2005, 2016 and 2019 with interviewees from diverse social background and political leanings. Our empirical analysis shows that our French, Belgian and English interviewees experience a large range of visible and proximate policies in the course of their daily life. This result holds across time and across social groups. It stands in stark contrast with US-based research where different policies are visible to different social and racial groups. Theoretically, we elaborate on a feedback mechanism, the normative effect, to analyze how based on their multiple experiences of visible and proximate policies, European citizens acquire a sense of what is political. We show that European citizens’ policy experiences have a politicizing effect by framing a large range of issues as collective, subject to public choice.

Authors

• Samuel Defacqz, Université Laval

• Claire Dupuy, UCLouvain

• Virginie JN Van Ingelgom, Université catholique de Louvain