Activating European Citizens: Process-related, informal and emotional aspects of trust in representative democracy

Representative democracy in Europe is currently said to be under pressure: low turnout in elections, a more diverse set of protest activities, and decreasing levels of political trust in the representative institutions of the state are paradigmatic indicators. However, previous research mixes up different attitudinal and behavioural components when analysing representative democracy under pressure, so the empirical findings on this broad phenomenon are still inconclusive. The conceptual as well as empirical linkage between political attitudes and engagement is still underdeveloped. Citizens may display low levels of trust in their representative institutions, distrust their politicians or feel not well represented by them. But is this related to the way they engage with politics, for example voting in elections, joining demonstrations, or participating in #activism? To deal with these questions, we conceptualise citizens' disaffection with representative democracy from both an attitudinal and a behavioural perspective. Using an innovative exploratory, sequential research design, we combine data collected through 16 focus groups conducted in June 2023 in Czechia, France, Germany, and Greece with a novel survey and web-scraping, from early 2024 in ten EU member states within the Horizon Europe-funded ActEU project. We study the determinants of both the attitudinal and behavioural perspective of citizens' disaffection with representative democracy. This design gives us an in-depth understanding of process-related, informal, emotional aspects and the demand side of how citizens perceive themselves with regard to attitudinal trust, participatory trust and representational trust and an explanation of the decline of citizens’ approval and support of representative institutions.