Serbia 2000-2008: a changing political culture?

The aim of this paper is to indicate some trends in the changing political culture in Serbia from the point of view of ordinary citizens. Discussions of political and economic transitions in Eastern Europe have tended to privilege the top-down approach, presenting general outlines and macro-processes. This paper on the contrary starts from the assumption that this must be complemented by a more bottom-up, fine-grained view that takes seriously what ordinary people think and say about what is going on. The choice is methodological and does not imply that what citizens think is necessarily "correct" in cognitive or moral terms. There is just the belief that, in a democracy, the real, living people, with all their virtues and vices, must be taken into account since they are the true basis of any political processes and the source of their legitimacy.