Project duration: 2022
Staff:
- Prof Pamela Abbott, Dr Andrea Teti, Dr Ilia Xypolia, University of Aberdeen
Funder:
Partners:
Project Summary
Globally, public opinion polls have shown that most people agree that democracy is the best form of government despite its faults. However, democracy is a complex concept with a range of meanings, and surveys are blunt instruments for understanding people's political attitudes and values. Researchers' ways of framing political debates, most frequently based on liberal definitions of democracy and human rights, may not be congruent with respondents' understandings. There are few studies of everyday understandings of democracy and related civic, political, social, and economic rights. To carry out such research requires theoretical and methodological innovation to provide a conceptual framework for research.
Pilot research was carried out in Tunisia, which provided a paradigmatic case of mismatched conceptions. Western Governments, commentators, and most scholars consider that, following the Uprising in 2011, Tunisia has transitioned to democracy, a judgement with which most Tunisians disagree. In public opinion polls since 2011, Tunisians have consistently said that they want democracy but that their country is not one. The research will explore Tunisians' understandings of democracy and associated civil/political and social/economic rights. Participants spoke for themselves, explaining their political attitudes, values and goals on their terms and how they justify them, how they think about political institutions' performance, their understanding of the political transformation their country has undergone, why they have the political priorities that they do; and the meaning they give to their own political behaviour. We used cognitive and qualitative interviewing. Cognitive interviewing enabled us to understand how Tunisians think politically, to establish the logic behind the answers selected on public opinion surveys. The narrative interview transcripts were analysed using critical discourse analysis to understand political and cultural regularities in participants' accounts and make visible important debates, conflicts, and genuine ambivalence in political attitudes and values held by and between individuals in their everyday lives understanding of democracy. By speaking to the shortcomings of surveys, we uncovered perspectives and theoretical frameworks that researchers embedded within the assumptions of existing paradigms have not previously conceived.
