How People Talk About Politics

Brexit and Beyond

Stephen Coleman

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780755618804
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politiche di comunicazione pubblica

During the Brexit referendum campaign it became clear how easily national conversations around politics could become raucous and bitter. This book explores the nature of talking about politically contentious issues and how our society can begin to develop a more constructive culture of political talk. Uniquely, this study focuses on citizens own experiences and reflections on developing, practising and evaluating their own political voices. Based on seventy in-depth interviews with a diverse range of people, Stephen Coleman explores the intricate nature of interpersonal political talk and what this means for public attitudes towards politics and how people negotiate their political identities. Engaging with a broad range of subjects from Political Communication to Sociology this book offers valuable insight into how the public can discuss politically turbulent topics in a meaningful and constructive way.

1

Political talk as social practice

In 2016, the British people engaged in a grand act of national catharsis: a referendum that was about their status; their borders; their fantasies of self; their grievances of decline; their interests; their emotions; their long-standing mutterings of ‘and another thing that really annoys me’; their right to piss off the government; their historic destiny; and, tangentially, whether to remain members of the European Union.

People were told that there was to be a ‘national conversation’ in which they would ‘have their say’. In preparation for this critical deliberation, newspaper editorials offered instructions on how to behave: ‘In the coming months, we are going to have to endure a great deal of disagreement – and must try to do so politely and with good humour, recognising that it is a sign of democracy in motion’ (Daily Telegraph, 6 March 2016). The ‘endurance’ of disagreement was presented as an imagined risk. Would it lead to fights in the street, bricks through neighbours’ windows or angry divorces? The prime minister David Cameron appealed to the democratic maturity of the British people: ‘We should all be big enough to have an honest and open, but polite disagreement, and then come back together again afterwards.’ Here again, the emphasis was upon resilience to endure the stress of dissensus. Political articulation was conceived as a temporary interruption of social accord, but its disruptive candour could only be sustained long enough to prepare the ground for renewed consensus: coming back together again afterwards.

The days and months leading up to the referendum entailed the playing out of a stock metaphor of ‘the people having their say’. Emerging languidly from the murky inattention that had prevailed in the days before plebiscitary responsibility was thrust upon them, non-politicians were invited to give voice to their interests and longings as if they could make a difference. This was democracy in its most potent symbolic register, bringing into being a demos capable of asserting, deliberating, demanding and resolving, while at the same time standing as a conspicuous addressee and vulnerable object of persuasion. Assured in their belief that this time they could not be ignored, people found themselves talking with an energy that many had forgotten they possessed. It was as if words might change everything.

What transpired turned out to be less like a national conversation than a fractious cultural convulsion. People began to fall out. There were whispered suspicions and shaming accusations, each side disappointed by the insensibility of the other. Strangers worked hard to ignore one another and then felt stranger than ever. Even loving partners and close families found themselves drawn into the enveloping animus:

So my partner said he felt like I was being racist. But I’m not being racist – because I’m not a racist person. But because I’d said ‘I do think it’s time we did say no to everyone coming in – and there are people that are working, but there are people that are scrounging, and to me it is time as a country that we said no’ . . . he just thinks that I’m being racist. . . . So we had arguments about that. It was pretty heated. . . . And yeah, it does insult me – because I’m not racist. I don’t see myself as a racist in that I don’t value everyone the same, because I do. . . . So yeah, it does insult me. I don’t think it’s fair. (Abbey, 26-year-old shop worker)

We spent about three hours on the phone between me, my mum, my dad and my brother, all on loudspeaker. My brother and me are very pro-staying in the EU, I don’t really believe in country boundaries and stuff like that. I think it’s all made up, to be honest. Great Britain is a boundary that we’ve made up. France is a boundary that we’ve made up. And we’re just deciding to keep these boundaries drawn, basically, by stepping out of the EU. And my mum and dad feel like it was better, we had so much more business, but for me, all those industries, like coal mining, all that, it’s kind of dead. There’s nothing we can do about it, it’s dead. But I don’t think cutting ourselves off from the world, as I said to them, is really helping us. Basically, the argument ended in my mum and dad putting the phone down, and we didn’t speak for a couple of days. (Will, thirty-year-old office worker)

In the sobering aftermath of the vote people found themselves looking at one another nervously, feeling like members of a split jury that had both made a decision and locked itself into irreconcilable disagreement. Sophie, aged twenty-two, spoke about how her initial enthusiasm for the long-awaited decision began to dissipate as she came to terms with its affective ambivalence:

I was excited. But then when you hear how upset other people were about it, it kind of took a bit of a toll. You felt a bit flat, rather than excited, because it was clear that it wasn’t the whole country wanting one thing . . . I thought it would be a bit more of a celebration. But instead, you had all the people that had been trying to persuade you to vote leave resigning, or going back on what they were saying, and it was just really disappointing.

Some people began to wonder whether they had merely been playing at being citizen-jurors, adopting theatrical civic voices derived from trace memories of crowded meetings in mythical village halls and fictitious insurgencies staged to amuse viewers of the black-and-white film classic Passport to Pimlico. Drawing upon such popular imaginaries of vibrant democracy, they had convinced themselves that there was a direct correspondence between public expression and institutional efficacy. Critics who regarded the referendum as a ‘depressing, divisive, duplicitous political event’ (Robert Harris on Twitter, 16 June 2016) began to suggest that what had been celebrated as ‘the people speaking’ had amounted to little more than the people listening to politicians speaking and then stumblingly mimicking their most mendacious gestures. The normative character of the public as addressee was well defined, but it began to appear that the expressive and reciprocating role of citizens was radically under-rehearsed. Questions about the cultural mechanics of plebiscitary sovereignty began to be asked. If the vote was merely the end point of a national conversation, when was the starting point? What was a national conversation supposed to sound like? What constituted meaningful political talk about a decision that would affect everyone? How were citizens supposed to attain the confidence and competence to speak with an authority that would justify the force of their decision? What is political talk for? Where might it lead?

This book is about how people talk about politics – how turbulent topics and deadlocked disagreements come to be aired in a culture where there are no reliable scripts to turn to. It is not about the political machinations that led to Brexit but it seeks to explore how it feels for people when their voices (and silences) become integral to political dramas that enfold them. It might be imagined that in any society calling itself a democracy most people would find it easy to speak confidently about political issues and values, but what follows suggests otherwise. It was within the hum of millions of mundane conversations that Brexit was translated into the lexicon of personal experience, as people formed and firmed up their positions through stuttering starts to speech, pregnant pauses, semi-revealed thoughts and lingering memories of conversations past. Through such talk, political predilections leaked out as expressions of personal troubles. This is an observation to which we shall return often in this book, for the ways in which political talk moves fluidly between private identity and public sociality forces each into the orbit of the other and defines the political as a peculiar space of translation.

What political talk does

Talk turns to politics when there is doubt about ‘the only possible way to do things’. Harold Garfinkel (1967: 50) famously claimed that for social stability to prevail there must be ‘a relationship of undoubted correspondence’ between what people assume about others, what others assume about them, and what each assumes the other assumes about them’. In the social performance of everyday life, populated by curious and restless subjectivities, such neat correspondences are frequently called into question. People not only disagree with one another but also cast doubt upon the sincerity or competence of those committed to rival perspectives. They question partisan interests, argue about the record and meaning of experience, dispute norms and resist resolution. It is within such moments of disquiet and contention that political talk emerges, confronting the already constituted significations of everyday life with subjective accounts, beliefs, assertions and justifications that throw ‘common-sense’ perception into crisis. Politics entails a relentless struggle to define social reality and the persistence of political talk stands as an empirical repudiation of the hope that such a contest can ever be finally resolved.

Extensive scholarly research has been devoted to characterizing these moments of interpersonal contention. Such studies have been dominated by a conceptual framework in which the meaning of ‘political talk’ is taken for granted. Methodologically, researchers have tended to ask people survey questions about how often, with whom and about which topics they talk about politics, assuming that this will mean more or less the same thing to everyone. Findings from these surveys suggest that most people feel safer expressing their disagreements with people they think will share them because they are similar to them (McPherson et al., 2001; Eveland and Kleinman, 2013; Colleoni et al., 2014; Lev-On and Lissitsa, 2015); that most people recall talking about politics with conversation partners with whom they have had a long-standing relationship, such as family members and close friends (Bennett, Flickinger, and Rhine, 2000; Knoke, 1990; Mutz, 2006); that such conversations take place overwhelmingly face to face, though increasingly online (Stromer-Galley et al., 2015; Barnidge, 2017; Chan, 2018); and that people only very rarely change their views as a result of political conversations (Eveland et al., 2011). While such studies have resulted in rich findings, they are limited by a misplaced confidence that when asking respondents questions about political talk they will answer with reference to a single, defined activity. But this is rarely the case. In a fascinating empirical study, Jennifer Fitzgerald (2013) has shown precisely how varied and inconsistent people’s responses are when they are asked to classify an event or phenomenon as being ‘political’. She notes that ‘regular people often disagree with one another over what the term “political” signifies. . . . Some people have broader interpretations of the political sphere than others; that is, some people operate with a sense that very few themes are political while others perceive many as such’. Such semantic pluralism poses a formidable challenge to studies of political talk as a quantifiable activity. Given that survey research has focused on themes deemed to be politically relevant rather than a broader range of situations in which the meaning of social reality is contested, it is hardly surprising to find that there are concerns about its ‘relative neglect of important aspects of the interpersonal communication process that we should consider more carefully to enrich our understanding of political conversation’ (Eveland et al., 2011).

How, then, should one go about exploring the ways in which people talk about an ‘essentially contested concept’ (Gallie, 1956) like politics? There are two ways of thinking about this. The first conceives of political talk as a discrete discursive domain. We live in a world in which ‘politics’ seems to be relentlessly going on around us. Even the most energetically inattentive find it hard to resist its encompassing noise, while the actively interested buy into its headlines, jargon, policies, personalities, events, jokes, slogans, outrages, histories and evasions, thereby perpetuating its semblance of urgent relevance. Political talk in this sense is a mode of cultural acknowledgement – an expressive yielding to a defined object.

A second way of thinking about ‘political talk’ is as a manner of relating to and intervening in the world. In this sense the embodied act of speaking is itself political, for it constitutes an incipient exercise of agency. Rather than defining political talk with reference to its thematic content (government policies, election campaigns, wars, taxes), it can be read as a gesture of self-disclosure – a mode of announcing that one is actively in the world and not merely a mute spectator. As a tacit, habitual and infraconscious social practice through which people seek to register their public presence, political talk is performative: it makes things happen, even if only by breaking what would otherwise have been an inert silence.

There is a tension between these two conceptions of political talk. According to the first, politics is an object of attention and attachment that suffuses the cultural atmosphere. To recognize and reflect upon this object is a form of acculturation. People inhabit political cultures and learn to express themselves in relation to their norms, narratives and institutions. The mode of such expression is open to normative evaluation, allowing scholars who study political talk to arrive at qual itative assessments based on the extent to which it is civic (oriented towards public rather than selfish ends), civil (conducted with appropriate restraint), propositional (semantically structured with a view to making its implications explicit) and reasonable (weakly conceived in terms of basic coherence, but sometimes strongly appraised in terms of epistemological rigour). Such standards have led political scientists to merge description and appraisal in their accounts of the relationship between types of political culture and qualities of public discourse. For example, Almond and Verba (1963), in their seminal study of ‘political cultures’ in five nations, argued that the more democratic and tolerant a culture is, the more likely it will be to generate voluminous and pervasive political talk. The more authoritarian and sclerotic a culture is, the more it is likely to be characterized by political reticence. Having asked their survey respondents ‘how often they discussed public affairs’ and having found that Americans and Britons engaged in such conversations more often than West Germans, Italians and Mexicans (even though a significant number in all countries claimed that they rarely or never did), Almond and Verba concluded that these findings reflected different qualities of ‘civic culture’, some of which were more conducive to political talk than others. Civic political cultures, they argued, are ‘allegiant participant cultures’ (1963: 31), characterized by the positive orientation of their members towards their input structures and processes. Building upon this line of theory, Ronald Inglehart (1988: 1220) felt sufficiently confident to assert that ‘over half of the variance in the persistence of democratic institutions can be attributed to the effects of political culture alone’ and that ‘[t]he same is true of a given public’s rate of political discussion’. Thought of in this way, culture is an immensely powerful independent variable. On the one hand, it possesses active, transmissive agency which makes things happen through socialization and on the other hand, its very survival depends upon strong normative allegiance from socialized actors.

The circularity of this explanation has led more recent social theorists to cast doubt upon the notion that ‘culture shapes actions by supplying ultimate ends or values towards which action is directed’ (Swidler, 1986: 273; see also Pateman, 1971, 1980; Lane, 1992; Street, 1997; Jepperson and Swidler, 1994; Wedeen, 2002; Couldry, 2004; Jones, 2005; Dahlgren, 2002, 2009; Dalton and Welzel, 2014). In contrast to the cultural determinism of functionalist political...