What Do We Know About People’s Politics? Testing a New Framework for Understanding Different Conceptions of Politics

Abstract

This study aims to increase the understanding of citizens’ different conceptions of politics. This is done by constructing a framework based on Heywood’s seminal works (2002; 2004) on three prominent understandings of politics. Guided by the framework and adopting a factor-analytic approach using the National SOM survey conducted in Sweden in autumn 2020 ( N = 1845), I found two theoretically interesting dimensions: a ‘macro-politics’ dimension that covers content related to government and the welfare state and a ‘micro-politics’ dimension that concerns content associated with everyday life. The largest group of respondents consists of people whose conceptions of politics solely cover ‘macro-politics’ (76.4%). The second largest group are those who do not consider either of these two dimensions to be political (12.9%). The opposite view to this, which combines ‘macro-politics’ and ‘micro-politics’, is held by a slightly smaller group (9.4%). A minor group was also found, consisting of people whose conception of politics only covers ‘micro-politics’ (1.2%). We ran analyses based on previous important findings on people’s conceptions of politics. Contrary to prevailing knowledge, the results show that left-leaners conceptualize (only) ‘micro-politics’ content as political more frequently than right-leaners, older people do not perceive more content as political than younger people (but view different content as political), and women, compared to men, identify more areas as political irrespective of content.