When ordinary people are asked how they feel about politics, negative terms enter into the conversation. In this work we analyse how people build their relation­ship with politics, to explore to what extent political representation is challenged by either participatory trends or by expert-based governance in citizens’ mind. To do this, we use focus groups in Spain, where popular distrust of political institutions rose dramatically in the period 1980-2012. We analyse the meanings associated with expert-based, representative, and participatory governance models. In this way, the tensions and contradictions in political preferences for one type of institutional design or another are unveiled.