The Good Politician is an innovative contribution to the burgeoning literature on public attitudes toward democratic actors and institutions in British politics. It is a thoroughly interdisciplinary work in its authorship and evidence, which is part of its innovativeness. As a result, its theoretical reach and evidence are much broader than most works in this field.
Nick Clarke and coauthors’ central question is whether an “anti-politics” mood has grown among the British public over time. This links their work to the debate on the erosion of democratic political culture among established democracies, especially under a recent populist onslaught. Have citizens’ images of their position in the democratic process, the behavior of elites, or the overall workings of the process changed over the past half-century? And more deeply, what has caused any changes in Britain’s political culture, and what are the implications of such changes?
Three things stand out in this book. First is the use of evidence from the Mass Observation (MO) data project. This project asked an unscientifically selected panel of British citizens to comment on questions about politics and society selected by the project. The first period of the MO ran from 1939 to 1955, and it began again in 1981 continuing to the present. For each panel used in this book, the authors selectively drew 60 individuals for analysis. More than half of the book is devoted to extensive verbatim quotes from the panelists that illustrate the authors’ points. Many of the quotations provide interesting views drawn from the average citizens’ thoughts and give life to the authors’ larger academic questions.
A second innovation is the parallel use of a diverse set of national public opinion polls to describe public opinion and track it over time. British pollsters have asked a rich variety of questions, but this variety and the changing mix of questions over time present a challenge when comparing opinions in the 1960s to those in the 2010s. In one chapter, the authors turn to Stimson’s methodology to combine differently worded questions from different survey firms into an aggregate measure of the anti-politics mood of Britons over the past half-century. They find a fluctuating overall increase in anti-politics sentiment from 1965 to 2015. This is consistent with most descriptions of the contemporary political culture in Britain and of most other affluent democracies. Citizens today are more critical of politicians, parties, and political institutions. Yet, one might be skeptical of the measure itself of the anti-politics mood. After discussing the literature highlighting the important differences between levels of political support and specific/diffuse support, all of these survey questions are mixed in the mood algorithm to produce a single number. Thus I was unsure what exactly the anti-partisan mood index measured and hence its interpretation.
Most of the other chapters focus on the responses from panelists in the MO, but there is always an effort to find parallel survey data on the topic. This blend of both methods gives more value to the findings.
A third distinguishing point is the extensive review of diverse kinds of literature related to the themes of political culture, democracy, and the trajectory of British politics. Not all the discussion of the literature is on point or still held in esteem, but it is all examined. This is a resource for those interested in the rich literature from political culture to political psychology.
As someone new to the MO research, which is quite a rare resource among democratic nations, I hoped that the authors would make greater use of this evidence. Chapter 7 is a good example of the methodology of the book. The chapter features 180 excerpts from MO panelists. These provide rich views of opinions, such as when one panelist describes David Cameron: “He’s a bit like a geography teacher that sits on your desk trying to be friendly, but you know he has a bottle of Purell ready for when he goes back to his office” (p. 196). This method becomes a descriptive, largely inductive presentation, however. There are useful summaries in tables 7.1 and 7.2, but the two tables use different theoretical categories and are non-empirical. I yearned for a deductive approach, with theory-based categories and the distribution of comparable response options over MO studies. Analysis of a representative 2017 national poll complements the MO results. The authors identify the variations in political elite images across various social groups, because people are relatively less supportive of government over time. The variation in citizen opinions is perhaps just as important theoretically and politically as tracking the time trend. This analytic mix of MO and national samples extends across chapters as a positive feature of the book.
Since the MO panels are not representative, the quotes cannot substitute for evidence of the overall climate of opinion or change over time. However, could the study use social variation by class, region, gender, or other factors to systematically explore variation within panels? Are gender, age, or class patterns changing over time? Is there an additional value of the panels beyond the 60-case subset for each? In short, exploring the variation in opinions among MO panelists, as is done with the national polling data, would have been instructive.
The concluding chapter is a constructive contribution to the literature on the rise of anti-politics. The authors discount an explanation based on the policy choices available to citizens, although Geoff Evans and James Tilley’s recent study of electoral change in Britain makes a strong counterpoint (The New Politics of Class: The Political Exclusion of the British Working Class, 2017). And the authors discount decreasing deference among the British public, even though analyses of the World Values Survey by Ronald Inglehart, Christian Welzel, and others make a strong counterpoint. Instead, this book stresses the public’s changing images of a “good politician” as a key element without fully addressing the overlap with the two prior points as an explanation of why candidate images have changed. The conclusion also offers a critical discussion of whether institutional reforms can substantially reverse the anti-politics trend. This skepticism seems well placed, because other democracies with widely varying institutional structures have experienced the same downward slide in public images of government. This study leaves one thinking that public cynicism is the new normal of democratic politics, with all its benefits and limitations.
