The Mirage of Democracy: How the Political Process Nurtures Disillusionment and Distrust

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Political Processes (Table 18)

Abstract

What are the local foundations of democratic crisis? Most often, scholarly accounts of democratic crisis focus on elites or macro-level factors: populist political leaders, stagnant economic conditions, rising economic inequality, transnational geopolitics, and a rapidly changing media environment. While these are important factors to consider, this project takes a different approach, turning the gaze inward to the micro-and meso-level foundations of this crisis: the structure of institutions, the day-to-day work of policymaking, and how it is experienced by ordinary people on the ground. Drawing on more than 550 hours of participant observation and interviews with 90 people in two civic associations that work with predominately young, working-class, communities of color, I make two arguments:

(1) That we should re-conceptualize political trust as the gulf between what people think government should be and their perceptions of how government actually is. This breaks from both rational choice approaches and social capital approaches, to put the state and democratic process front and center in our theorizing of political trust.

(2) That people learn to distrust government through their participation. Most research looks at how trust shapes participation. This project looks at the inverse to examine how participation shapes trust. As young activists gain new political experiences, I show how they also accumulate countless instances of political exclusion that erode trust and nurture disillusionment.

By turning our attention to the micro- and meso-level factors that contribute to widespread disillusionment with government, it also invites us to consider how to build political institutions worthy of trust.

Author

• Sadie M. Dempsey, University at Buffalo