Resentment and Coping With the Democratic Dilemma

Karen Celis, Louise Knops, Virginie Van Ingelgom and Soetkin Verhaegen
Additional contact information
Karen Celis: Department of Political Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Louise Knops: Department of Political Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium
Virginie Van Ingelgom: Institute of Political Science Louvain-Europe (ISPOLE), UCLouvain, Belgium
Soetkin Verhaegen: Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, The Netherlands

Politics and Governance, 2021, vol. 9, issue 3, 237-247

Abstract: Resentment is a complex, multi-layered emotion, within which perceptions of unfairness and feelings of anger are central. When linked to politics, it has predominantly been associated with the alleged “crisis of representative democracy” and populism. However, recent studies have shown that resentment can intervene positively in people’s relations to politics and political institutions by facilitating certain types of political participation (Capelos & Demertzis, 2018). Despite this, the concept of resentment, and hence its role in contemporary representative democracy, is often poorly defined, with empirical investigations of its manifestation(s) remaining scarce. Borrowing a conceptualization of resentment as “resentful affectivity,” our article draws on the analysis of focus groups carried out in Belgium (2019–2020) with individuals where resentful affectivity is likely to be observed (i.e., contemporary movements of contestation such as the Yellow Vests, Youth for Climate, and individuals who occupy a socially disadvantaged position). We find that experiences of intense anger, fear, disappointment, and the unfairness of representative democracy, i.e., of how representative democracy works on the ground, coexist simultaneously with remaining hopes in the democratic system. We show how this complex blend of emotions confronts citizens with what we call a “democratic dilemma.” We document the different ways in which citizens cope with this dilemma and conclude by highlighting both the positive and negative ways in which resentment intervenes in the contemporary “crisis of representative democracy.”

Keywords: affectivity; emotions; representative democracy; resentment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cogitatiopress.com/politicsandgovernance/article/view/4026 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cog:poango:v9:y:2021:i:3:p:237-247

DOI: 10.17645/pag.v9i3.4026

Access Statistics for this article

Politics and Governance is currently edited by Carolina Correia

More articles in Politics and Governance from Cogitatio Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by António Vieira () and IT Department ().