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Some natural and social scientists seem to love the media, especially television. One of the most often seen is atheist and biologist Richard Dawkins who has fronted several TV series and is regularly seen on news programmes debating Darwinian evolutionary theory and religion. As Professor for the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University (1995-2008), Dawkins rose to prominence as a public intellectual advocating evolutionary theory, as well as the sternest public critic of what he sees as divisive religious schools, unquestioning religious faith and fundamentalisms of all kinds. [The website of Dawkins’ Foundation can be seen here.] Biology is more than adequately represented in the media with David Attenborough’s numerous wildlife programmes and a host of other presenters, too. Historians Simon Schama and Michael Wood are TV regulars as are numerous archaeologists, psychologists, criminologists, astronomers, economists and political scientists. But where are all the sociologists? And does it matter that we don’t regularly see sociology represented in the media?

It wouldn’t be an issue if the academic ‘ivory tower’ was still standing and sociology could continue on its merry way blissfully separated from the rest of society. But some sociologists have seen the separation of professional, scientific sociology from a much broader public sociology as a key and contentious issue for the discipline in the future. Michael Burawoy of the University of California has forcibly argued that professional sociology has become distanced from the concerns of ‘ordinary people’ and must re-engage with politics, social movements and shifting class inequalities in an era of neoliberal economic dominance. Not to do so runs the risk of irrelevance, but also gives all those other disciplines a free reign. This is ironic as many older sociologists today were drawn to the subject in the 1970s precisely because it seemed to have so much to say, much of it critical, about the direction society was taking.

Burawoy actually sees four types of sociology: professional and public sociologies, policy sociology and critical sociology. [You can read Burawoy’s mission statement here.] The first two have attracted most attention. For Burawoy and others, public sociology is opposed to but also dependent on professional or scientific sociology, both of which exist in a relationship of ‘antagonistic interdependence’. Detached, scientific sociology produces research methods, empirical evidence and theories, which are necessary for public sociology’s engagement with non-academic audiences. But unlike professional sociology, the public version opens up a genuine dialogue with those audiences, thus allowing the discipline to be partly shaped by the concerns of non-sociologists. Of course this is a very stark dividing line and in practice much scientific sociology today does try hard to engage with its audiences. And critics are right to point out that there is a risk of sociology being subordinated to political ideologies. Nonetheless, the basic idea that professional sociology does not do enough to engage with wider public concerns and political debate seems to me broadly correct. One aspect of this is the lack of a media presence for sociology.

To understand the problem of the invisible sociologists we have to grasp the general tenor of sociological studies of the media. For many, probably most sociologists, mass media forms are never neutral channels for the transmission of information and knowledge. In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan showed us that the medium doesn’t just carry our messages, but in fact ‘the medium is the message’. Hence, television requires us to watch from our armchairs inculcating passivity and an uncritical acceptance of the status quo. According to Neil Postman (1985) it’s also completely unsuited to serious matters, but is brilliant at ‘entertainment’, so good that TV reduces all news and political debate to an entertainment format, which thus depoliticizes and sanitizes it. Even worse, Marxist critics such as the Glasgow Media Group saw systematic bias in TV news against workers, strikers and less-powerful social groups and an inbuilt positive bias supporting political elites and the establishment. In the 1990s, French social philosopher Jean Baudrillard pushed these critiques to a logical conclusion, arguing that the mass media doesn’t just represent social life and politics but is complicit in creating it. We now live and are trapped within hyperreality (reality + its representations), a complex mix of ‘real-world’ events and media images and reports.

The upshot of all this is that most sociologists have a deep-seated mistrust of the media, particularly television, which makes them loath to engage with it on its own terms, fearing crude misrepresentation or the trivializing of their ideas. But the end result is a notable absence of sociologists in the mass media and a diminishing influence in shaping public consciousness. Whilst other disciplines have become familiar and expected parts of news programmes, political debate shows and documentaries, sociology has become publicly invisible to the wider population. Is this problematic? Some think it is. The lack of a public presence is damaging to the general awareness of sociological theories and evidence in many public debates. It’s no coincidence that the rising adoption of simplistic applications based on evolutionary psychology or individualistic arguments have taken place against this backdrop. If sociologists shun the media they can’t really complain when public and political debates are dominated by non-sociological theories and evidence.

Media invisibility also has a practical impact, for instance, on the course choices of students and therefore the viability of sociology departments and staff groups. If sociology loses out to psychology, criminology and political science then there will simply be fewer sociologists in the long run. Probably the most damaging aspect though is the possibility that the sociological imagination, that hard-won and crucially important ability to connect private troubles and public issues, will wither amongst the wider public, allowing individualistic ‘explanations’ of social phenomena to gain ground once again. The first line of defence must be for sociologists to swallow their professional pride and shelve their legitimate concerns about the media just long enough to enable the discipline to gain a public presence that will keep alive our distinctive sociological perspective in public and political debates.

Chapter 17 covers the sociology of the media and includes an extended discussion of media theories on pp. 774-57. The sociological imagination from C. Wright Mills onwards is discussed on pp. 3-9. The issue of sociology and science can be found on pp. 37-46.

Philip W. Sutton

As August is traditionally the ‘silly season’, talk about shopping might seem just the thing. However, far from being silly, shopping, aka ‘consumer confidence’, is deadly serious. As the UK holds its breath waiting to know the scale of the cuts expected in the autumn, there is much comment on consumers also holding onto their purses and how, as a result, retail and travel firms are suffering. Despite the ease with which patronizing remarks about shopping as ‘the religion of our times’ are made, the social reality is that to live we have to shop. An activity central to the lives of all urban dwellers, now the majority of the world’s population, the activity of shopping is nevertheless often mocked. Yet, after work and sleep, it is how we spend most of our time; and as time spent on an activity is a fair index of social significance, to better understand how our society works we had better take shopping more seriously.

J.K. Galbraith saw shopping as ‘the last leg of distribution’ and couldn’t understand why the ‘crypto-servants’ who undertook to shoulder the bulk of household shopping did so, as they received no personal reward in terms of money or prestige, while their labours benefitted producers, carriers, stores and the ‘final consumers’ more than it did them. Yet these crypto-servants (in Britain mainly, but not exclusively, women) do keep on shopping. Not because, as one common fantasy about shopping has it, of women spending extravagantly on luxuries for themselves, but because shopping is a central part of family life and the ‘kin-work’ done by most women. Aside from the practical reason for going shopping, (that we can’t grow or make all that we need to survive), shopping is an activity suffused with social meaning. While some of this meaning attaches to the goods bought, much more attaches to the thought and effort, the keeping in mind of other people’s likes and dislikes, and makes shopping an act of love and care. The meaning of shopping derives also from its place in a larger system of routines, rhythms and rituals, interactions, exchanges and transitions which make up everyday life, as well as personal and social identity. When we shop, as well as how or where we shop, is part of our identity, and as such is something integrated with its context.

As a species, humankind is distinctively adaptive and as modern society becomes increasingly ‘retailized’, minimally understood as the expansion of retail footage, so too are we. We work less and shop more, and shopping regularly tops the list of Britons’ favourite leisure activity. However shopping is not all about spending money and, save for some teenagers living at home, is not how most of us spend most of our money, but shopping is socially important because it is both more and less than buying. Shopping is a skill, a source of pride and respect, and of independence, as well as a bore and chore. The need to go shopping provides structure and pattern, and how it is fitted into the day, week, month and year, as Christmas comes round again, is part of how shopping gives meaning to our lives. Critically everyone, except the Queen, goes shopping, and while we do not all have the same amount of money to spend, shopping is the most common of common activities and produces an unmatched degree of social mixing as different social classes at least rub shoulders. Despite the growth of the internet most of us still do most of our shopping in the traditional way – by going to the shops – and not to be able to do this, for example, because of being housebound, is a form of social and cultural exclusion. Just going for a walk, if we live in a city, will generally mean passing by some shops and whether we enter or buy from them or not, they offer us a topic of conversation, a short cut, somewhere to shelter from the rain, or wait for a friend. We are sad to see shops close, or be boarded up, but we treat them, as many of us do our own family, with some disdain: complaining about them, avoiding them, but still expecting them to be there when we change our minds and want them.

The current global economic crisis has focused all our minds on the threat of cuts, lost jobs and, especially, perhaps, the difficulties likely to be faced by the young. Retail is where most young people in Britain get their first job, a step on the ladder, and this will be harder as more shops close and shoppers become cannier. However, as the austerity measures kick in many of us will be spending more of our time in the high street or shopping centre, ‘people watching’, stretching out a cup of coffee, checking stock, or daydreaming, since shops are a form of open college, of learning too. In abolishing the infamous ‘Asbo’, Home Secretary Theresa May showed, perhaps, a woman’s wisdom, knowing that wearing a ‘hoodie’ is no guarantee of causing trouble in a shopping centre, and that shopping holds society together far more than its critics, left or right, acknowledge. Shopping is part of a broad system of support and interdependence which works because it is taken for granted, which is also a reason we don’t take it seriously but slag it off as synonymous with the ‘social ills’ of consumerism, materialism, individualism which many, including moral philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre, hold responsible for the supposed moral vacuum at the heart of modern life. Yet it does not take much to see how well shopping, as it is actually done, fits with the definition of practice MacIntyre gives, namely ‘a coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity’. For MacIntyre the loss of practice to the modern world was a moral catastrophe and one reason why he was so keen on it was that it afforded those who participated in it what he called ‘internal goods’, for example a sense of achievement and joy in work well done with others. These goods were unobtainable except by taking part in ‘practice’ and had been all but lost to life in Britain as a result of the industrial revolution which destroyed household production. The fall out of that turning point in the economic and social history of Britain has been much examined, and not least the impact which it had on women and the devaluation of their labour. The place occupied by shopping in much political discourse in Britain today, that is, as an object of scorn and derision, is part of that legacy.

A more detailed analysis of all this discussion can be found in Jenny’s new book Shopping: social and cultural perspectives, along with analyses of the place of shopping in everyday life, in our hearts minds and memories, in nudging us along the life course and in mediating the rapids of class.

If you would like to pose any questions to Jenny about the place of shopping in social life, then email your question to us, and answers will be posted in the next week or so.

In sixteenth-century Paris, crowds at festive occasions were often entertained by hanging a sack or basket containing 20 or so cats from a scaffold above a fire, then watching them struggle and cry as they burned alive. During the same period in England even royalty would be entertained by ‘baiting’. This involved tying a bear, bull, badger, horse or even an ape to a stake, then setting a series of dogs on them, usually attacking the face and biting off ears and tearing the animal’s skin. Even reporting such historical facts may make you twitch, squirm or even feel physically nauseous at the thought of treating animals this way. Don’t worry; such jolly fun is no longer publicly acceptable or encouraged. But why not? Are modern human beings just better, morally superior or more civilized than our predecessors?

Before we draw that conclusion, consider two of the animal ‘sports’ that have actually survived into the twenty-first century – Spanish bullfighting and British fox hunting. How have they survived when many others have been outlawed? Bullfighting carries a major cultural significance for Spanish people and the ‘fight’ between bull and human is viewed as part ritual, part genuine sporting contest which has to be appreciated as such. Bemoaning the ill-treatment and ultimate death of the bull would simply mean you’ve failed to grasp the cultural centrality of the sport within Spanish culture. British fox-hunting’s supporters claim something similar, that hunters do not take pleasure in killing the fox or watching a pack of hounds tear it apart, they appreciate the thrill of the chase and understand the hard work and skill undertaken by hounds in their pursuit of the fox. In both cases, the creation of a sporting discourse which presents the killing of animals by humans in ritualistic ways as ‘sports’ seems to have given bullfighting and fox hunting their added longevity. But things may, it appears, be changing quite quickly.

Last week the Catalan Parliament voted by 68 to 55 to ban bullfighting within the Catalan region from January 2012, a landmark decision given the history and cultural significance of the ‘sport’ in Spain. [See the pro and anti-bullfighting arguments here: PROU – campaign to abolish bullfights; Pro-bullfight Andalucia site.] Or is it? Many commentators have suggested that the ban has more to do with the politics of Spanish–Catalan relations than with animal welfare [see, for example, this report]. For example, the Catalan Parliament recently pushed for increased powers over taxation, language and much else to be devolved to it, but in June a constitutional court in Spain ruled against this, saying that the Spanish nation was the only nation recognized constitutionally. The decision led to over 1 million people protesting in the Catalan capital, Barcelona. Was it just coincidence that less than a month later, the Catalan Parliament voted to ban the ‘Spanish’ sport they feel was ‘unsportingly’ forced on them as part of ‘their’ culture? Possibly it was. The anti-bullfighting campaign has been running for more than 20 years and the idea of bullfight-free cities began with Tossa de Mar as far back as 1989 and now stands at more than 90. The current campaign for a ban gathered a 180,000-signature petition to demonstrate the strength of feeling in advance of the parliamentary debate. Such evidence illustrates a much broader opposition based on opposition to animal cruelty and concerns for animal welfare.       

In the Anglo-Saxon world, bullfighting has long been seen as cruel, an anachronistic throwback to a pre-civilized, that is pre-modern, age. In England, for example, cockfighting, bear-baiting, dog fighting and many more sports using animals were outlawed in the first half of the nineteenth century, though, of course, some of these carried on in secretive underground networks and still do. The one animal sport that survived was fox hunting. [See the competing views of the League against Cruel Sports and British Traditional Field Sports.] But in 2002, hunting with dogs was banned in Scotland and, in 2004, England and Wales also moved to legislate against the hunting of animals with hounds. Some sociologists see the survival of fox hunting as inextricably tied to the power and class privilege of the upper classes which enabled them to protect their own ‘gentlemanly’ sports at the same time that they derided similar working-class ones as barbaric and ‘uncivilized’. On this account, it took until the early twenty-first century for the democratic, egalitarian impulse to reach into the leisure pursuits of the wealthy social classes. But was it concern for animal welfare that prompted the ban or the Labour government’s symbolic way of showing it was tackling class privilege? Again, we have to note a very longstanding opposition to fox hunting stretching back to the mid-nineteenth century whilst opinion polls today continue to show a large majority in favour of the ban.

Whilst short-term political manoeuvring is part of any explanation of the timing of such bans, for sociologists there has been a discernible long-term modern trend or social process towards the appreciation and conservation of nature and increasing concern with the welfare of animals. Modern cultures are generally animal welfare cultures. From the sixteenth century onwards, but gathering pace during eighteenth-century industrialization and nineteenth-century urbanization, as more people became less directly involved in working with animals in agriculture, a more detached view of human–animal relations emerged that spread across social groups and classes. With the growth in power of the modern state and its monopolization of the means of violence also came a revulsion at the use of violence against both humans and animals so that previously enjoyable animal ‘sports’ came to be re-classified as just so many instances of intolerable cruelty. Gradually, animals became the subject of increasing moral concern and any social practices which harmed or injured them were called into question. Similarly, the mass slaughter of animals for food had to be hidden out of sight behind the scenes of everyday life. Adopting this long-term perspective helps us to better understand why we remain so much more disturbed by animal cruelty than people were in previous times. But whether that makes us ‘better people’ is an entirely different matter.

There isn’t much directly on animals in the textbook, but see pp. 252-4 on human and animal communications. Norbert Elias’s theory of the ‘civilizing process’ can be found on pp. 1037-8. In addition, for anyone interested in taking these issues further I’d recommend two books. Adrian Franklin’s (1999) Animals and Modern Cultures: A Sociology of Human-Animal Relations in Modernity (London: Sage), which is an excellent introduction to all of the key debates and theories. Then Keith Thomas’s (1983) Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800 (London: Allen Lane) which is an historical account of the early-modern period with many insights and fascinating examples from the historical record.

Philip W. Sutton

The football World Cup in South Africa ended yesterday, with early exits for the last Cup’s finalists France and Italy, quite a surprise and a shock to many. The Wimbledon tennis championships have signalled the start of summer. And the London 2012 Olympics will soon be upon us with all the excitement such a varied competition brings. The calendar of national and international sporting events helps to shape much of our leisure time with many people organize their entire lives around the football fixtures and other sporting competitions. Of course many millions of people are not just sports spectators, but are also actively involved in playing sport themselves and will continue to do so throughout their lives. Sport involves and even centres around the expression of emotions, which can be found in the mutual hostility of rival football fans, continuing reference to tired old national stereotypes in the mass media, the team spirit created amongst teams considered ‘underdogs’ or the outbursts of tennis players on court during matches. Why is sport so significant to people and why does it arouse such strong emotions? 

The study of sport has, since the late 1960s, gradually become part of the established order and sociology was among the first disciplines to embrace sport as a subject worthy of academic attention [BSA Sport Study Group here]. One important aspect of the sociology of sport is the finding that sport is significantly related to identity formation, and this is particularly noticeable at the national level of our identity. Extensive preparations are made, especially in World Cup years, to manage and police fans travelling to international fixtures to avoid trouble between national fan groups and there have indeed been numerous cases of violent outbursts during tournaments. Indeed, the absence of aggressive and violent behaviour by England fans was something worthy of media comment and political praise following England’s defeat by Germany. The assumption being that national identification in sport is so strong that we might expect trouble when ‘our’ team is beaten by an historic ‘enemy’ with the implication that sport is really war conducted by other means (with apologies to Carl von Clausewitz). The sense of national shame which pervades countries that haven’t performed as well as expected is quite palpable and startling. In England the team manager’s position was under severe threat, in France the national team’s poor showing has been the subject of a parliamentary inquiry, whilst in Nigeria the national team was apparently so bad it is to be prevented from taking part in international tournaments for two years. I’m really not making this up, check out the stories here and here. Sport apparently has the power to shake our sense of national identity and esteem and to strike at our very sense of who we are.

Understanding how sport has taken on such an important role in social life requires an historical-sociological approach. The gradual emergence of modern societies from the traditional social structures of the Middle Ages has often been referred to as a process of ‘civilization’. If we ignore the obvious normative dimension of the concept of civilization as meaning somehow better than what came before, the civilizing process can be taken as those social changes leading to a state monopoly of the legitimate use of violence, the consequent pacification of everyday life and an increasingly stable control of emotion at the personal level which makes for a more predictable life [see Norbert Elias (2000) The Civilizing Process (Cambridge: Wiley-Blackwell) for the original theory of the civilizing process]. In this context the development of sports with codified rules, national standards of behaviour and an ethos of fair play, created arenas in which participants were expected to exercise more stable and even emotional control, whilst at the same time offering the experience of intense emotions and genuine pleasure and excitement. Sports not only allow emotional expression then, but actually generate emotional experiences not only for participants but also for spectators. One way of putting this is to say that sport offers a pleasurable and exciting, but quite clearly controlled, decontrolling of emotions. The things that spectators do, say and sing during football matches, for example, they wouldn’t dream of doing outside that arena and would find them rather ‘un-civilized’. Similarly, the ‘hardest’ and most aggressive of players can be quite shy and unassuming in every other part of their life. Sport, on this view, is a kind of emotional safety valve for our pacified societies, which offers the kind of experience that is hard to replicate in other spheres of life. No wonder then that ordinarily sane, rational individuals can sometimes be seen crying at sporting occasions, whether they happen to be televised or not.

[Issues of sport in society are scattered within the book, but the box on pp. 241-2 specifically covers the Olympic Games. Elias’s theory of the civilizing process can be found on pp.1037-8, whilst national identities are covered in Chapter 23. Human emotions are discussed on pp.25-6, 252-4 and 853-4.]  

Philip W. Sutton

I was in a shopping centre last week and my eye was drawn to the rules governing entry. Apparently the centre does not allow anything ‘which obscures the face’ including motorbike helmets, hoodies, baseball caps ‘with the peak turned to hide the face’ or anything else which makes faces less visible. Such rules are no doubt seen as reasonable anti-shoplifting and anti-terrorist measures. Of course dress codes are common at various social events and occasions such as funerals, dinners in polite society (not that I get invited to many) and lots more, but my shopping experience made me think about the significance of the human face in social interactions.

From a sociological perspective, covering the face in public, however it’s achieved, leads to a lessening of communication. Being able to ‘read’ facial expressions is something we get used to without thinking about it and in any encounter we continuously monitor other people’s faces as well as managing our own facial expressions and the impressions we give out to others. As Norbert Elias pointed out, the human face is a remarkably flexible signing board which is capable of very subtle manipulation, and communicating in this way is part of all human cultures. At the same time though, our emotional states often breach our surface demeanour and we find it almost impossible to manage the facial signing board to avoid giving our real emotions away. How many times do we listen, apparently intently, to others whilst our face gives away to them just how tedious and dull we find their words? I know this to be true just by reading the faces of students during my lectures, though hopefully not all of them.

In short, it isn’t called ‘face-to-face’ communication for nothing and covering the face partially or entirely prevents much or all of this type of communication. This can be a positive thing and certainly doesn’t constitute a reason for banning some items of clothing. There are times when we just don’t want to communicate with other people. For example, I sometimes use dark sunglasses and a hat in public to avoid making eye contact with others and them with me, as I really can’t be bothered or don’t want to engage in conversation or interaction. Others use more subtle devices such as staring at the ground and walking quickly or talking on a mobile phone, even if it’s switched off. Avoiding face-to-face social interaction is part of what Georg Simmel called ‘urban reserve’, aimed at preserving our precious energy in densely populated cities.

Of course, for shopping centres and other public areas covered by the now ubiquitous CCTV systems, the face is central to identification and matching up live and recorded images with real people forms the basis of many criminal prosecutions. The logic of banning the covering of the face therefore seems legitimate. But how does this logic survive the adoption of dress codes based on religious belief? For instance, it is noticeable that the local shopping centre makes no mention of the burka or niqab, two forms of Islamic dress which many Muslim women wear as part of their commitment to their faith. I assume this is too sensitive an issue to deal with on a large sign at the entrance to the centre. But is there any difference between young men wearing fashionable hoodies and baseball caps and Muslim women choosing to cover the face for religious reasons? Certainly not if the issue is purely to enable facial identification on CCTV.

This polite bypassing of contentious matters of religious dress is quite typical of what used to be called ‘British reserve’, that less-than-explicit approach to establishing, monitoring and enforcing rules to avoid confrontation. No such reserve exists over in France, though, where public debate continues over proposed legislation to ban the burka and niqab in public places, with a vote in parliament due in July to settle the matter. Belgium has also moved to outlaw the burka, its Home Affairs Committee arguing that the garment is ‘not compatible with an open, liberal, tolerant society’. [See here for Belgium and other national campaigns.] In France the full burka has been banned in state schools and for public employees since 2004 as part of a general attempt to keep ‘religious symbols’ of all kinds out of public-sector employment and education. But the burka has been singled out as particularly ‘anti-French’ and President Sarkozy recently repeated yet again that ‘the burka is not welcome in France’. A parliamentary commission recently completed its deliberations, recommending a ‘partial ban’ on Islamic face veils. It suggests that face veils should be banned in schools, hospitals, state employment and on all public transport while anyone exhibiting visible signs of ‘radical religious practice’ should be refused citizenship, describing face veils as an unacceptable challenge to the Republic. The proposal includes fines for female wearers of the veil of 140 Euros with much larger ones for their husbands of up to 20,000 Euros.

By focusing specifically on religious symbols, the report is making essentially political arguments about the incompatibility of what it sees as religious fundamentalism and the oppression of women with French culture and its social ideals. Unlike crash helmets, the government argues that the burka and niqab are not freely chosen by women but are forms of dress they are made to adopt by their husbands. Hence the disparity in fines for men and women. If so, then banning them should represent liberation for women in line with foundational French national ideals of liberty, fraternity and equality. The problem of course is that Muslim women wear these items for a range of different reasons including expressing their personal commitment to Islam within a publicly secular society. [For a discussion of the various reasons why women wear the veil, see here.] Banning face veils on the basis of just one possible interpretation of their adoption means infringing the rights of others to wear what they freely choose as part of their religious life. In multicultural societies, this policy seems likely to highlight and reinforce social divisions rather than to promote better cross-cultural understanding and solidarity.

Chapter 7 covers social interaction and body language extensively and has much relevant material on face-to-face encounters. Chapter 16 can then be approached for issues of religion, particularly pp.711-14 on ‘Islam and the West’ debates. Finally, the current context of governments introducing measures for controlling the ‘new’ terrorism is described on pp.1055-62. For a discussion of the veil in Western Europe, see Christian Joppke's Veil: Mirror of Identity . 

Philip W. Sutton

Two damaging wars, an economic crisis, a government that has served three terms in power, and an unpopular Prime Minister. If you wanted to create the circumstances for an opposition victory in the UK 2010 election you couldn’t do much better than this. Yet the Tories have been unable to win a clear victory in the way Labour did by a landslide in 1997 after 18 years of Conservative rule. In local elections on the same day as the national poll the Conservatives and LibDems lost ten or more councils while Labour gained at least a dozen. Labour has been written off many times in the past. And Britain has been seen as natural Conservative territory that social democracy has to fight to win every time. But, despite heavy losses for Labour nationally, this result doesn’t support such a thesis. One of the most striking things about the 2010 election is that the Conservatives, with an articulate young leader, failed to win more handsomely in circumstances about as propitious for them as it’s possible to get.

Turnout, a key issue for the health of British democracy, was up a bit and decent – 65%. At some polling stations queues snaked around street corners. Voters who couldn’t get in by the close of polls vented their spleen at election officials. But given the closeness of the parties in the polls and the much-discussed leaders’ debates on TV, it was noteworthy that turnout did not rise more. Expenses scandals may have played a part. Key things to find out are whether the 18-24 year olds who turned their noses up at the politicians last time failed to vote again, or whether first-time voters this time joined the ranks of non-participants in electoral politics. This age group is where antipathy to electoral politics has hit hardest. The prominence of issues such as climate change and war should have created a basis for greater electoral participation amongst the young. Data on their turnout will be crucial to understanding the future of British politics.

A small bit of history was made in Brighton. The Green Party won its first ever seat in the national parliament. Under a first past the post system, in what was often a Tory seat pre-1997, the local electorate returned a representative to the Commons from outside the mainstream. Her policies were about fairness as much as the environment and, in an all-female contest, her fiercest competition came from a Labour candidate with similar social justice concerns. This may be quorn country with its own demographic profile. But those who scorn the politics of social movements outside the establishment should take a second look. The labour movement started from such roots before it entered the political sphere. And Labour has now left quite a bit of space towards the egalitarian and green ends of parliamentary politics waiting to be filled. Reform of the voting system would make it easier for parties moving into this space to enter parliament. Other small parties did not achieve the same success. Business returned to normal in former Respect territory. The far right failed to win any seats. In Barking all 12 British National Party councillors were wiped from the political map. The danger of the far-right should not be underestimated. History has shown that race-hate needs just a foothold in democracy and the media to build more power. But this was a trouncing for the BNP. The UK Independence Party, who sound increasingly like the BNP with home counties accents, failed to make any extra ground.

Televised leaders debates, held for the first time and watched by many, suggested that the UK could move to a more volatile politics like the US where voters’ intentions chop and change and the outcome is less predictable. But voters’ willingness to shift to the LibDems’ Nick Clegg, expressed in polls, did not materialize. The election result was not wildly dissimilar to that predicted by many for weeks or months beforehand.

The outcome was a hung parliament where no party has a majority, the biggest party, the Conservatives, seeking LibDem support to make up the numbers. This produced some interesting discourses. One was that the lack of a clear result shows that politics, like society, is ‘broken’, a verdict that does not account for the fact that alternative electoral systems also do not produce clear majorities. Another is that the electorate ‘have told us’ that they do not want one party to rule. But this imposes a unitary personality on 30 million voters. The reality is that those voters were divided between different parties rather than united against any one of them ruling alone.

A result with no overall majority is common under Proportional Representation (PR) but less usual in First Past the Post systems like the UK’s. A different voting system was on the election agendas of both Labour and the LibDems, to produce a distribution of seats that better reflects the spread of votes. The party leaders looking for deals to secure a majority is a test for what a more proportional system would lead to. But majority-making deals prevent the sort of transparent, planned approach New Labour had in 1997, at least in economic and social policy. Instead it leads to policies decided one-by-one in post-election backroom negotiations. Who is to govern after the 2010 election is the decision of elites from the two or three main political parties, the most significant being those from the party with the least votes. Some agreed with Nick in the UK election. But only 23%. In coalition politics smaller parties wield influence out of proportion to their support. What is proportional in PR in terms of votes and seats can lead to disproportionality in government power. The voter gets a fairer say in their MP on election day; less so in the formation of government and policy when they wake up the day after.

Under a minority government the opposition can vote down government policies too often for it to stagger on. With such a government the bookies will be taking odds on another election in the near future. Between now and then the Conservatives will have either made hard decisions, or avoided them to keep up electoral support. Neither may go down well and voters could resent the government for instigating another election campaign so soon. At this election Labour and the LibDems took 52% of the vote, and centre-left and liberal parties took just over 50% of the seats. While Britain has often been seen as a naturally Conservative country it has also been said to be one where progressive anti-Conservative forces are divided by party but together make up a majority. Labour changing leader could add to the viability of this force at a second election in the near future.

The hung parliament raised some antiquated constitutional issues that rarely come to the fore when election results are clear. The head of state in the UK is a hereditary monarch. She calls on a party leader to form the government but she is not accountable to the people. Not only does the incumbent PM get to choose the election date, he or she is allowed to make the first attempt to form a government after polling day, even if s/he loses. Nick Clegg set the agenda for the shape of the next government by bypassing this convention and first approaching David Cameron. Gordon Brown did not try to hold Clegg to the rules. It’s unlikely the monarchy will be abolished but other constitutional oddities may get swept up in any future political reforms.

Another ongoing issue that has raised its head concerns the political geography of Britain. The South of the electoral map is drowning in blue, the North covered with red, with a similar split along rural-urban lines. These differences can’t be reduced to economic inequalities, but neither can they be divorced from them. Of course there are other complexities, areas where the LibDems are popular or there are nationalist parties. But some of the problems of this divide have returned. Scotland has 59 seats. In 2010 just one was won by a Tory and Labour’s vote north of the border increased, yielding 41 MPs. The Tories won only 8 of 40 seats in Wales. This sort of thing didn’t matter so much when there was a Labour government, and New Labour’s devolution of power ameliorated the situation. But now we are back with a Conservative government, and Scotland and Wales, as far as the UK parliament goes, are ruled by what is effectively an English party. This would repeat the Thatcher years where these two countries did not vote for the government they got landed with time after time.

Beyond the bubble of the UK election, power over what happens in Britain lies with unaccountable corporations and international finance as much as with elected politicians. Political turmoil and uncertainty in the UK does not compare to that on the streets of Greece. Our problems are on a different scale to the conflict and poverty across sub-Saharan Africa. 80% of the world’s population live in developing countries; two out of five people globally live on less than $2 dollars a day. The world is under threat from climate change and nuclear proliferation. At election time obligations to those beyond ourselves can disappear from the political radar. There is space for them to become part of politics again once the buzz of electoral intrigue has died down.  

The outcome of the forthcoming British General Election on May 6^th seemed a formality just 10 days ago. David Cameron’s Conservatives had been well ahead in the polls for a long time and looked a safe bet to gain a working majority. The only issue was how large that majority would be. The Labour Party was running well behind, with the Liberal Democrats even further adrift, whilst the backdrop of recession, public spending cuts and a static property market appeared to offer little to get excited about. That all changed with the first ever televised debate between the three main party leaders on 15^th April. Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg, previously seen as an inexperienced lightweight who had been largely invisible in the campaign, came out of the debate the clear winner, sending the polls, Gordon Brown and David Cameron into a tailspin.

On 6^th April the BBC’s averaged ‘poll of polls’ showed the Conservatives on 39%, Labour at 31% and Lib Dems way behind on just 19%. But five days after the first televised debate, the same averaged poll had the Conservatives on 33%, Labour on 28% and the Lib Dems in second place on 30%. An astonishing turnaround in such a short period. How did Clegg do it? Well, he did give a very naturalistic performance in the debate and was able to skilfully present his party as offering something genuinely new compared to the other two ‘dinosaur parties’ of British politics. Brown gave some detailed answers and offered more substantive content, but his presentation was widely seen as poor, failing to properly engage with the audience. Cameron was surprisingly nervous, failed to match Brown’s detail and substance and, crucially, seemed unable to deflect Clegg’s interpretation of the Conservatives as part of the old, failed politics. Given the enormous amount of discussion on how this would be the first British ‘Internet election’ where blogs, tweets and viral campaigns would dominate, it is ironic that it took just 90 minutes of good, old-fashioned television to transform the whole campaign. And with two more TV debates to come, there’s plenty of scope for more twists and turns yet. [Watch the first debate here.]

However, Clegg’s good performance only struck a chord due to the underlying fragility of voting intentions as reflected in the polls, and which can be attributed to continuing public outrage at revelations from the MPs expense claims debacle. The attitude of ‘a plague on all your houses’ has led to a softening of people’s commitment to the two main parties and a subsequent openness to alternative messages. In particular, Clegg was able to present himself as something new, a force for change, and that apparently rare thing, an ‘honest politician’ who tells it like it is. In part this was due to the fact that he had previously been quite invisible to most voters who wouldn’t even have recognized him as the leader of a major political party. To them, he really was a breath of fresh air, though whether he will still look that way on 6^th May is another matter. Apparently, 90 minutes is now a long time in British politics.

The main loser has been David Cameron’s Tories. Avoiding detailed policy announcements, talking in vague generalities and bashing Gordon Brown worked well initially and, in a two-party system, only the Conservatives could realistically suggest they could become the next government. But as the election got closer, this should have been bolstered with a raft of much more detailed policies to firm up the Tory message. That just didn’t happen. Hence, in the TV debate David was hopelessly outmanoeuvred by Clegg, who hammered home the message that he had no idea what the Conservatives stood for any more. Strategies that worked in a dyadic relationship (two parties) now look outmoded as we move into a genuinely triadic one (three parties). As Georg Simmel (one of the first German sociologists) observed, a three-party relationship offers possibilities for new alliances, shifting allegiances and a kind of fluidity that simply cannot exist within a dyad. For example, although they are bitter enemies, the dyad of Labour and Conservatives at Westminster also produces that place’s atmosphere of an ‘insiders only’ club, something that many blame for expenses claims abuses. Given the Lib Dem challenge to the Labour–Conservative dominance, we can now expect to see Labour and the Tories reframing their main messages as the campaign moves on.

This election, perhaps more than most, has focused on the very vague and, you may think, quite empty notion of ‘change’. The parties have clearly taken a leaf from Barack Obama’s campaign in the USA which used the slogan ‘change we can believe in’. The Conservatives’ slogan is ‘Vote for Change’; Clegg and the Lib Dems use ‘change that works for you’; whilst the incumbent Brown’s Labour Party has ‘a future fair for all’. Well, it makes little sense for the party that’s been in power for 13 years to campaign for change now does it? But what do such vacuous slogans mean? What change? Change of what, for what reason and how? [You can see a discussion here.]

The use of general notions of fairness, justice, progress or change in election campaigns aims to tap into what Vilfredo Pareto (a turn-of-the-century Italian economist and sociologist) called ‘residues’ – those stable and unchanging, deep-seated sentiments that lie beneath the surface of rational debate. Pareto calls the rational arguments and explanations ‘derivations’. Hence, in the struggle for political power in democracies, politicians create derivations (arguments about the need for change or stability, for example) which appeal to basic human residues or ‘instincts’ in order to attract mass support. In the present economic and political climate, therefore, it makes perfect sense to go on endlessly about the need for change even if you don’t explain in any detail what such change might amount to. And this is David’s new problem. Nick Clegg, not Cameron, is now seen as embodying this most important element of the campaign and, whilst that continues, we are heading for a hung or ‘balanced’ parliament and a period of triadic rather than dyadic politics.

Chapter 22 on politics contains much relevant material on elections and political parties and is the logical place to start, especially pp. 988-92. British party politics can be found on pp. 1003-6. Democracy and its spread cross the world are covered on pp. 992-9 along with a Box on the Internet as a democratizing force. The impact and use of media is then included on pp. 725-44.

Philip W. Sutton

It’s UK election time again and, yes, the media are still reproducing and circulating the same old entrenched ideas about the place of women in the political sphere. It hardly comes as a surprise, but that doesn’t make it any less depressing and the eagerness of political parties to play the game is dismal. Here’s Sarah Brown, dutiful and loving wife of the prime minister, posing for the cameras. And there’s Samantha Cameron, pounding the campaign trail with her opposition-leader husband. Pick up a copy of Hello! and see the happy couples smiling and holding hands. Read about Sarah’s polka-dot dress and Samantha wearing comfortable clothes now that she’s pregnant. It’s just one media event after another. Samantha on WebCameron at last, Sarah endlessly on Twitter.

But wait, surely someone’s missing? When the main political parties launched their campaigns in early April, the Lib Dem leader was accosted by reporters. Where was Miriam? Nick Clegg’s wife, Miriam González Durántez, was nowhere to be seen. How could this be? Because it was a weekday - she was at work. Not propping up her husband, just getting on with her own job. Well really!

None of this is ‘progressive’, as the main parties are claiming their policies are. None of it is even politics. In-depth reports about ‘the SamCam effect’ and endless discussion of ‘the Sarah Brown strategy’ are not signs of progress. In fact, in terms of female representation, it’s beginning to feel as if we’ve regressed to the 1950s and I’m heartily sick of it. The real line-up in the current election campaign is exclusively male. It’s almost as though the last 40 or 50 years never happened. The only visible, and occasionally audible, women are two US-style ‘first ladies’. These women’s participation in their spouses’ work is fine, of course, but they are not elected representatives and they have no political power in their own right. They are publicly displayed as decorative supports who add a humanizing, personalizing touch to their husbands’ political profiles. This not only diminishes women’s participation in politics, but also degrades our whole political process. An election is supposed to be about policies, not politicians’ wives. Now if we were seeing public displays of same-sex civil partners, now that would be some sort of political statement – a challenge to heteronormativity, at least.

The personal will always be political. But transforming politics into the personal? That’s just absurd.

Mary Talbot is Secretary of the International Gender and Language Association. This month sees the release of the second edition of her popular book Language and Gender, a clear and engaging overview of foundational research and current trends in the interdisciplinary study of language, gender, and sexuality, and ‘an essential guide for new generations of students’ (Mary Bucholtz, UCSB) .