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The veil of duty: can dutiful forms of citizenship mask feelings of political dissatisfaction?

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British Politics Aims and scope

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that political dissatisfaction is rife across many established democracies, and yet we generally know very little from citizens themselves about what might be driving this disaffection. Where attention has been paid it typically focuses on groups whose relationship with politics is deemed problematic for one reason or another (e.g. young people). Those with higher rates of political participation are often overlooked, but if participation is undertaken by such people because they feel a sense of duty and obligation then we have little reason to accept their engagement as tacit approval of the political system or status quo. This article explores the question of how those at the normative core of citizenship feel about electoral politics. It uses data from the Mass Observation Project to explore feelings of electoral dissatisfaction amongst dutiful citizens over the seven UK elections between 1983 and 2010. The findings show that high participation and adherence to dutiful norms of citizenship can mask profound and sustained feelings of political dissatisfaction.

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Notes

  1. But see also Popular Understandings of Politics in Britain, 1937–2015—http://antipolitics.soton.ac.uk/.

  2. See also the Qualitative Election Study of Britain—https://qesb.info/.

  3. But see the new Mass Observation Project Database—http://database.massobs.org.uk/.

  4. The alphanumeric number is the identifier given to each Observer by the Archive. The year refers to the year the Directive was issued, not necessarily the year in which events described occurred—e.g. the directive to keep an election diary for the 1997 election was issued late in 1996, hence much of the commentary refers to events in 1997.

  5. Space does not permit further discussion but respondents were also critical of the standards of MPs’ behaviour in general. Many feeling politicians were generally self-serving, untrustworthy and false.

  6. There is some evidence to suggest that young people combine the norms of dutiful and self-actualising citizenship (e.g. Loader et al. 2015), but older citizens are much less likely to do so (e.g. Dalton 2009).

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex for permission to reproduce material from the Mass Observation Project. Funding for this research was provided by a British Academy Leverhulme grant (SG130352) for which the author is grateful. I would also like to thank Ariadne Vromen, Brian Loader and Mary Holmes for providing useful comments on earlier drafts.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of York, York, YO10 5DD, UK

    Nathan Manning

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Manning, N. The veil of duty: can dutiful forms of citizenship mask feelings of political dissatisfaction?. Br Polit 13, 467–483 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-017-0060-x

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