To Örebro University

Existing studies suggest that what people do and do not think of as being ‘politics’, varies a lot. Some citizens embrace narrow understandings, regarding only few issues as ‘political’. While others hold broad conceptions. What remains unclear is to what extent citizens agree on the contents, i.e., which topics are ‘political’. Using representative survey data from the U.S. (N = 1000), this article illustrates the over -laps and differences in conceptions of politics that different groups of citizens hold. Specifically, the results of a cluster analysis reveal five groups. The citizens within each group share similar conceptions of politics, while across groups conceptions differ. We find one group considering everything as political, one not regarding anything as such, and a third one identifying only tax-cuts as ‘political’. In between these extremes, two groups identify politics in terms of rather demarcated spheres of issues: domestic, or cross-border/global issues. Further analyses point to important differences in the groups’ socio-demographic profiles, political interest, and political behaviors. This shows, in their minds, people draw boundaries around politics in quite varied, yet principled, ways. This comes with a meaningful diversity in citizens’ connection to the political world around them, and with important implications for their roles within it.

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.