Abstract
This article revisits democratic engagement in post-war Britain in a context of debates about political disaffection in the current period. The study systematically reanalysed volunteer writing in the Mass Observation Archive and represents a significant methodological advance on previous studies. Little evidence was found to support common existing interpretations: whether ‘golden age’ narratives of deference to authority, partisan alignment and high voter turnout or revisionist accounts of apathy. Instead, evidence was found of something akin to what Hibbing and Theiss-Morse call ‘stealth democracy’. Citizens thought democracy to be important and felt a duty to vote, but wished for government by experts in the national interest. This ‘stealth’ interpretation builds on existing studies of duty, populism and expertise in twentieth-century Britain. It helps to move discussion of democratic engagement after the Second World War beyond the binaries of self/collective and private/public, and to explain the paradox of high voter turnout in a context of hostility to party politics. It also promises to inform debates about declining political support in the current period.
Highlights
Historians need to keep revisiting the formal politics of post-war Britain, not least because it is often positioned, implicitly or explicitly, as a ‘golden age’ in debates about rising political disaffection
In the context of these debates, it remains important for historians to continue investigating citizen engagement with formal politics, asking what formal politics meant to citizens in the past and what and how citizens thought about democracy
We suggest that Hibbing and Theiss-Morse’s writing on stealth democracy provides a useful framework in which to view democratic engagement at this moment in contemporary British history, a short period when people held negative views about formal politics but participated in representative democracy to an extent not witnessed since
Summary
Historians need to keep revisiting the formal politics of post-war Britain, not least because it is often positioned, implicitly or explicitly, as a ‘golden age’ in debates about rising political disaffection.
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