University of Southampton

Tweet Click here for the link to our online publication This document was published to accompany the event of the same title. On 19 May 2016, in the Macmillan Room of Portcullis House, Westminster, we discussed the rise of anti-politics in Britain with MP and historian Tristram Hunt, journalist Isabel Hardman, and audience members.

Tweet Portcullis House, Westminster, 0930-1130, 19 May 2016 In this session, a team of researchers from the University of Southampton will present findings from a project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council on ‘Popular Understandings of Politics in Britain, 1937-2015’. Using data from Mass Observation and various polling organisations, they will focus in […]

Tweet On Monday 21 March, Will Jennings will be presenting findings from the project at the PSA Annual Conference in Brighton as part of a panel on ‘Causes, consequences and cures of anti-politics’. Click here for more information about the panel.

Tweet Will Jennings, Gerry Stoker and Joe Twyman have published a paper in Parliamentary Affairs on ‘The Dimensions and Impact of Political Discontent in Britain’. Abstract: Political discontent remains a pressing issue for UK parliamentary democracy that needs to be better understood. We offer a range of theoretical perspectives on dimensions of political disaffection and […]

Tweet On 12-13 January, we organised a two-day workshop to report initial findings from the project and to invite comments from participants to help guide our research over the forthcoming months. The workshop revealed an interdisciplinary concern with popular understandings of politics by bringing together political scientists, geographers, pollsters and historians. In the first session, […]

Tweet Today, Nick Clarke presented findings from the project at the University of Southampton’s Centre for Citizenship, Globalization and Governance seminar series. Here is the paper abstract: This paper reports emerging findings from an ESRC-funded project on popular understandings of politics. The context for the project is current discussion of disaffected democracies and hatred of […]

Tweet Last month, we presented findings from the project at the History of Parliament: Parliament, Politics and People Seminar at the IHR. Click here for an overview of the paper.

Tweet Democratic engagement in the immediate post-war period is sometimes understood as a paradox. Record high levels of voter turn-out, party membership, and support for the two main parties mean the period can be described as a highpoint of political participation. However, evidence of cynicism, self-interest and anti-party feeling has led revisionist historians to characterise […]

Tweet We’re currently at the stage of the project where we’re analysing the material we’ve collected from the Mass Observation Archive. One of the things we’ve been doing is comparing the election diaries of volunteer writers in 1945 and 2001, to see if they can shed light on why anti-political feeling and associated action grew […]