Embodied civic intimacy : small states, symbolic power, and the lived experience of democracy

Abstract

How is democracy embodied in everyday life, and how can lived experience enrich how we measure it? Procedural indices offer fine-grained measurement of institutional architecture but capture less of the affective, embodied, and reputational textures of civic life in small, densely networked polities. Mainstream political sociology compounds this gap by centring large Western states and reducing small-state democracies to narratives of clientelism or elite capture. This thesis develops Embodied Civic Intimacy (ECI), a mechanism most legible in small state conditions but portable to compressed publics more broadly, to explain how compliance, dissent, and belonging are negotiated where visibility and proximity are inescapable, and where democracy is constituted through bodies, silences, and rituals as much as through institutions. The analysis is organised around three strands: the infiltration of elitism, the state management of dissent, and civil society's navigation of patronage networks. The question matters increasingly as compressed visibility, long characteristic of small states, now diffuses through digital publics and surveillance capitalism. Malta and Singapore are compared through a most-similar systems design: postcolonial island states sharing density and colonial inheritance yet diverging sharply in regime trajectory. A convergent parallel mixed-methods design integrates political ethnography, forty elite interviews, discourse analysis, and longitudinal V-Dem and Freedom House data (2004–2024), with divergence between strands treated as analytical evidence rather than measurement error. Extending Bourdieu's symbolic violence and building on Machin's embodied democracy, the thesis shows that despite divergent index scores, both states display convergent civic textures in which neutrality is conspicuous, absence is legible, and silence carries political weight. ECI operates through reputational sanction rather than material inducement or legal coercion. The contribution is empirical (small-state experience), theoretical (a relational, affective lens for ECI), and methodological (enriching quantitative indices with embodied evidence).