University of Southampton

Tweet Gerry Stoker and Will Jennings have recently examined the relationship between populism and the surge of support for UKIP. Some claim that UKIP are fast becoming the Teflon party of British politics immune from media exposure of scandals affecting it because its base reflects a value or cultural rejection of liberal Britain and a […]

Tweet Last month’s YouGov poll showed that political dissatisfaction is on the rise, and is driving UKIP support. It also illustrated that anti-politics is not new. The fact that 35 per cent of respondents to a 1944 Gallup Poll felt that politicians were ‘out for themselves’ suggests that citizens have been sceptical towards formal politics […]

Tweet At Tuesday night’s Policy Network public debate, key note speaker David Farrell praised the value of Peter Mair’s pessimism about formal politics excellently expressed in Ruling the Void, but went on to ask five questions which might put things in a more positive light: 1. Were things ever really better? Less exclusion of access […]

Tweet This week, we have been considering how we might address the challenge of combining a deductive focus on anti-politics with an inductive focus on popular understandings of politics. On the one hand, the project seeks to explain the rise of anti-politics and political disengagement that appears to have taken place in Britain in recent […]

Tweet Gerry Stoker and Will Jennings’ previous research on anti-politics has stimulated discussion about the ‘spectre of populism’ spreading across contemporary European democracies in The New York Times, Reuters and The Irish Examiner.

Tweet In a blog for Public Policy Network, Will Jennings and Gerry Stoker have argued that the rise of anti-politics in the present is not just a symptom of a political failure on economics, but citizens’ sense of being failed by a political class that lacks the competence and strength of character to follow the […]

Tweet Last week’s YouGov poll and official launch of the project stimulated discussion about the impact of public disengagement with formal politics in the present. The poll’s results were included in The Independent’s daily catch-up, whilst Nick Cohen suggested in The Spectator that our early research indicates the difficulty of the task that faces the […]