Discursive Styles as Minority Strategies to Reconstruct Democracy as Hegemonic Social Representation: The Case of Young Adults’ in Greece Before and During the Financial Crisis

This paper provides a theoretical and methodological contribution to the study of lay thinking on democracy, between a constructivist understanding of social representations and discursive psychology (Batel and Castro, 2018) and at the interface of individual and collective dynamics. Young Greek adults, feeling a lack of efficacy in the public sphere, were interviewed over time on their understanding of democracy. The discursive analysis utilised draws from seminal work in pragmatics, and concepts developed both by Ducrot & Anscombre in France (i.e. 1983) and Roulet and Rossari in Switzerland (i.e. 1990) on the importance of linguistic connectors for social interactions. The results present two discursive strategies used to claim ownership of democracy and to contest the mainstream constructions present in the public discourse. The paper discusses how lay thinking constructs conflicting positionings and power dynamics, using a “hegemonic social representation” (Moscovici, 1988, Magioglou and Coen, 2021) such as democracy, as the canvas. It offers an alternative reading of hegemonic social representations, as axiological representations where an appropriation of “values” becomes central for the debate between different groups (Staerklé et al., 2015; Gillespie, 2008).