Real freedom for all turtles in Sugarscape? - Presses universitaires ...

196A r g u i n g a b o u t j u s t i c eas the highest obtained), a middle level (secondary school degree) and ahigh level (university or university college). This appears to be a strongpredictor of the way in which people think about democracy.Low Middle High1. Representation 21,3 28,2 35,22. Participation 8,5 18,5 30,63. Decision procedure 6,0 9,1 9,54. Freedom 50,5 50,0 48,15. Equality 28,2 26,1 25,76. Quality of life 16,7 13,6 11,0Don’t know 21,3 8,6 1,8Table 2: The relationship between levels of education anddefinitions of democracy (in percentages of respondents)The relation with ‘no answer’ is quite obvious: in the lowest group we findalmost one quarter of the respondents not giving an answer to the question.But on the categories itself the level of education also has a clear effect. Thedefinitions referring to political institutions and procedures are clearly moreoften mentioned by the respondents with higher levels of education. Forfreedom there is no significant difference, but equality and quality of life arementioned more often by those with lower levels of education. It means thatthe vision of democracy that links it to political participation andrepresentation is a rather elitist one. That is an interesting but also soberingfinding for political science. It means that the notion of democracy that isoften used without really reflecting on it, and for which indicators of‘decline’ can be measured, does not actually correspond to the way in whichmany people see it, especially in the first place in the case of lower educatedgroups. It is by now very obvious than when people talk about democracy,they might talk very different languages.Talking about language, the survey was conducted in Flanders andWallonia. And the responses to the question were of course given in eitherDutch or French. It might therefore be interesting to see whether the twolanguage groups rely on different definitions of democracy. There is noreason to expect any significant differences. In international andcomparative research we also simply translate questionnaires and use themin different languages, assuming that when people tell us for instance towhat extent they believe in democracy, they understand democracy in thesame way, irrespective of the language they speak. A simple check of theanswers in French and Dutch can however put this naive belief into