Citizens as Sense-Makers: Towards a Deeper Appreciation of Citizens’ Understandings of Democratic Politics

Abstract

An important literature has emerged that seeks to explain political disaffection and the resulting problem of disengagement by looking into citizens’ understandings of democratic politics and approaching understanding in cognitive terms. On the basis of an empirical study, this article proposes an alternative approach that can contribute to a deeper appreciation of the way in which citizens approach democratic politics; one that we need in order to address political disaffection. This article shows how a citizen’s understanding should be viewed as the outcome of a dynamic between a citizen and the democracy she/he is trying to understand. Understanding is then about knowing how politics works: an embodied achievement, contextually embedded. This article concludes by arguing that confronting political disaffection by changing understandings would demand an acknowledgement and appreciation of why a certain understanding is a valid way of seeing for a citizen, in order then to be able to plausibly shift such understandings.