Introduction
Low turnout at the 2024 General Election and rising levels of political distrust are raising concerns about political engagement in the UK. As Prime Minister Keir Starmer declared shortly after Labour’s election victory, “the fight for trust is the battle that defines our political era”. Data from the Institute for Public Policy Research illustrates the problem starkly: only three in five registered voters turned out for the 2024 general election. When including eligible but unregistered individuals, this falls to just one in two—a record low since the introduction of universal suffrage. At the same time, the two main parties received their lowest combined vote share since the Second World War.
Low participation disproportionately affects certain groups in society. As the IPPR reported, turnout in 2024 was 7 per cent lower in constituencies with the highest proportion of people from minority ethnic backgrounds, when compared with constituencies with the lowest proportion. Their analysis of voter turnout in the four general elections since 2015 exposed consistent voting inequalities across age and income, with a significant widening of the turnout gap between graduates and non-graduates, and between homeowners and renters. These disparities highlight a growing divide in political engagement, with more affluent and educated individuals more likely to vote, potentially skewing democratic representation.
This disengagement is part of a wider context of political disaffection. IPPR’s research shows that dissatisfaction with the workings of democracy in the UK has been growing steadily for over a decade; IPSOS-Mori’s polling puts trust in politicians at its lowest in 40 years; and the British Social Attitudes Survey demonstrates that public confidence in Britain’s system of government has reached an all-time low:
- A record high of 45% now say they ‘almost never’ trust governments of any party to place the needs of the nation above the interests of their own political party (up 22 points from 2020).
- A record high of 58% say they ‘almost never’ trust ‘politicians of any party in Britain to tell the truth when they are in a tight corner’ (up 19 points from 2020).
- 79% say the system of governing Britain could be improved ‘quite a lot’ or ‘a great deal’ (up 18 points from 2020; now matching the record high during the parliamentary stalemate over Brexit in 2019).
Distrust in politicians is now widely shared across social groups and is increasingly seen as a critical issue.
These issues also represent a major concern for campaign groups. In 2024, the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust issued an open letter to the new government calling for an automated voter registration system on the grounds that ‘under participation in elections has been stubbornly high for decades: millions do not have any say over who represents them or the consequent decisions and policies that shape their lives’. Unlock Democracy’s white paper on democratic integrity argues that: ‘steps are needed to restore trust in politics which is running at record low levels and reverse democratic backsliding and the decline to “elective dictatorship”’. Dr Parth Patel, IPPR associate director of democracy and politics, agrees: “We are close to the tipping point at which elections begin to lose legitimacy because the majority do not take part. That should be ringing more alarm bells than it is… The government may overlook non-voters, but populists don’t. Government can and should look to bring people back into democracy.’ This is about more than avoiding disaster. There are also benefits to be gained. As Involve argue, being able to influence policy making on issues that affect us contributes to “people’s sense self efficacy and political efficacy, influencing individuals’ subjective well-being and their life satisfaction.”
To summarise, low participation at the most recent election and low levels of trust in political institutions have led to concerns about unequal representation in political decision making, democratic backsliding and populism. But to what extent are these concerns new?
How should we understand the present moment?
Public trust in politics is widely seen to be in crisis — but this sense of decline can be misleading. Historical studies of popular politics and political engagement in post-war Britain show there has never been a golden age of political trust and engagement. Even in 1944, 35% of respondents to a Gallup poll saw politicians as only out for themselves. So, the idea that political trust has collapsed from a high point in the past doesn’t hold up to historical scrutiny.
At the same time, today’s political disaffection is not simply more of the same — it is broader in scope and stronger in intensity. When Nick Clarke and colleagues analysed historical opinion polling alongside qualitative evidence from Mass Observation across the twentieth century, they found that citizens now express a wider range of grievances, and with greater vehemence. This shift reflects both rising expectations and shrinking opportunities: people have developed more demanding standards for politicians, but the spaces in which they interact with political elites have narrowed. The result is a deeper and more widespread frustration across all demographics.
It is also important not to confuse political disaffection with apathy. Adrian Bingham’s recent study of everyday politics demonstrates many people care deeply about political issues but feel alienated from formal political processes. This is especially true for women, young people, and minoritised groups, who often feel excluded from the elite language of politics or have experienced having their views dismissed. What looks like disengagement can in fact be the result of accumulated disappointment and a sense of political powerlessness.
When people do engage with politics, this tends to be in informal and episodic ways, rather than through traditional markers like voting or party affiliation. People often become engaged in response to specific, local, or personal events. Their involvement may not be consistent over time, but it is nevertheless serious and meaningful. Conventional measures of political participation tend to overlook this kind of everyday engagement.
What has changed most is not the level of public interest in politics, but the way political leaders respond to it. Increasingly, politicians have sought to exploit disaffection rather than address it. Social media has accelerated this shift, making it easier to amplify grievances, foster division, and mobilise support through outrage rather than trust.
Understanding the present moment means recognising that political disaffection is not new — but it is changing. It is no longer enough to lament a decline or blame citizens for switching off. The real challenge is to build political institutions that match the seriousness with which many people approach political questions in their everyday lives — and to create channels that allow those concerns to be heard, not just harvested.
The Problem with Existing Data
While the existence of widespread mistrust in modern Britain is clear, its roots and implications are less well understood. A 2024 report by the UK Parliament acknowledged declining trust as a long-term challenge, but also highlighted the limitations of current survey methods, which often fail to distinguish between citizens’ attitudes toward individual MPs, political parties, and the political system as a whole.
Not only do existing research methods fail to capture this nuance, but it is also clear that they are no longer doing their job. In the 2024 general election, all 17 final polls overestimated Labour’s vote share by an average of 4.2 points—the largest such miss since at least 1979. While some polling error is expected, the consistent overstatement pointed to an industry-wide issue. Possible factors, identified by British Polling Council members include a “late swing”, voters making up their minds in the last days of the campaign, low turnout, underrepresentation of older and Muslim voters, and a possible resurgence of “shy Tories.” The episode highlights deeper challenges facing pollsters, including declining response rates and skewed samples. In response, the British Polling Council recently called for greater methodological pluralism and the use of more mixed-methods approaches to better understand Britain’s political culture.
This reflects conversations within academia. Political scientist Ben Seyd argues that most existing studies of political trust rely on “top-down or deductive exercises” that focus on general categories like institutional trust, without examining how ordinary people actually experience and express trust in their everyday lives — which can only be understood through qualitative research. Similarly, Matthew Flinders suggests that political science has been insufficiently attentive to the emotional and affective dimensions of political disaffection, which are rarely addressed in standard survey instruments.
Stephen Coleman also draws attention to this emotional undercurrent. He writes that “in every election campaign, there is a contrast between the incessantly reinforced narratives of political leaders and the media, and the popular mood that simmers below the surface.” In 2024, this disconnect defined the election. Voters were driven not only by issues or ideologies but by “a nagging, niggling sense of complaint” that remained largely on the margins of formal political debate. According to Coleman, democracy is facing “a perfect storm” of anxiety and disaffection, because, as he warns, “a moody electorate is volatile, not least because it has its own pressing stories to tell—many of which are simply not being heard.” To begin addressing this disconnect, Coleman advocates for methodologies that enable “deep listening to people’s stories,” and that are “sensitive to place and context, and capable of accepting ambivalence and inconsistency”.
As pollsters and political scientists attest, we need to develop richer, more nuanced understandings of political feeling—that go beyond what polls and turnout figures can capture.
Reviving Mass Observation for Political Analysis
One method that offers this kind of depth is Mass Observation (MO). Founded in the late 1930s, MO was originally conceived as a political resource. Its emergence coincided almost exactly with the arrival of opinion polling in the United Kingdom. Henry Durant’s British Institute of Public Opinion (BIPO), the UK branch of George Gallup’s American organization, opened on 1 January 1937. Opinion polling framed itself as the neutral servant of democracy: as historian Joe Moran puts it, “a ‘scientific’ and ‘objective’ instrument [which] would tabulate and project the views of average men and women into the chambers of decision-makers, thus serving to reanimate public life.”
Mass-Observation, launched just weeks later, was, by contrast, conceived as a political resource—designed not just to measure opinion, but to understand and intervene in political behaviour and culture. From its beginnings in 1937, MO approached political culture both analytically and strategically. It wanted to understand the cultural and emotional limits on participation—but also to change them. Less than a decade after the achievement of universal suffrage, MO’s founders noted that no one seemed seriously invested in understanding the new electorate: “what happens in the political sphere obviously affects the sphere of home and work; equally obviously, political developments are affected by the reactions of ordinary people. But between the two there is a gulf – of understanding, of information, and of interest. This gulf is one of the biggest problems of our hugely organised civilisation”.
MO conducted some of the earliest private political research when it was commissioned by the Labour Party to inquire into apathy among the party’s core supporters by surveying constituents during the 1938 West Fulham by-election (which was also BIPO’s first political outing). Although Labour lacked the resources to commission further research, MO went on to study subsequent by-elections, the political crisis of May 1940, wartime attitudes, and public reaction to the Beveridge Report. It studied both formal politics and the politics of everyday life—tracing how forms of mass culture like newspaper astrology and football pools substituted for democratic participation. During the Second World War, MO’s work reached its peak, as the Ministry of Information and other state agencies tasked it with studying morale, war-work, propaganda, and the press. This period marked its most sustained influence on government policy.
MO’s work reflected growing concern about disillusionment with politics—particularly striking given universal suffrage. Non-voters were widely regarded as a threat to democracy. MO’s proposed book Politics and the Non-Voter was never published due to wartime demands, but the project marked a key departure from opinion polling and market research, which largely ignored the emotional force behind nonresponses or disengagement. MO’s approach insisted that political apathy was not a void, but a meaningful phenomenon: “The discrepancy between what people say they do and what they actually do, what leaders think people want and what people do want… finds a concrete and obvious expression in the non-voter—regarded by politicians as something outside their province.” As Claire Langhamer noted in 2024, “For mid-century Mass Observation, feeling was a form of individual and collective knowledge as well as a research methodology; an object of study and a way of understanding the world. It was, essentially, a useful category of analysis.” And as Nick Clarke has recently argued, MO was also committed to closing the gap between political elites and ordinary people not only by gathering facts about everyday life in Britain, but by publishing its findings for both policymakers and the public – principally through regular File Reports, which distilled its findings on key topics.
After the war, MO lost momentum, but Charles Harrison warned that opinion polling was not a sufficient substitute. While Gallup could accurately predict election results, it did little to capture the deeper emotional terrain of public life. As we noted above, his concerns have recently been echoed by pollsters and political scientists.
By revisiting the methods and early ethos of MO, we ask: can this approach help bridge the gap between political elites and public feeling? And might a renewal of MO’s original ambitions offer a way to respond to challenges facing British democracy today?
The original MO was wound up in the 1950s. But the project was revived in 1981. Today it works with around 600 self-selecting volunteer writers who anonymously respond to open-ended directives several times a year. These responses—personal, reflective, and unguarded—offer a unique view into how people experience and interpret politics. In recent years, MO has documented reactions to major events including general elections, the 2016 EU, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, it currently exists as an archival project, used mainly by academics, and limited by its funding model. We argue that it should be revived as a public resource for democratic reflection.
The Value of MO
Mass Observation has been used by academics to develop knowledge and understanding of Britain’s political culture, but we believe it has the capacity to provide new insights for policymakers and campaign organisations seeking to improve political engagement that are not available elsewhere.
First, responses to MO provide us with evidence of what Alison Pugh describes as ‘meta-feelings’ – or feelings about feelings. In the words of Stephen Coleman, this helps us ‘situate emotions culturally giving a sense for how safe or free or proud (or ashamed or horrified) someone might be to claim a particular feeling, and thus to act upon it’.
Second, we get a sense of individual agency from this material. Focusing on individual stories shows that people don’t just passively internalise elite narratives and public discourse. Instead, they actively engage with these stories to make sense of their own experiences. MO allows us to trace the different cultural resources they draw on in doing so.
A third advantage of MO is it can be used longitudinally. Many writers began writing for MO in the late twentieth century and continue to this day. This means MO sources can be used to follow the political development of individuals and to track changes in public mood over time.
A final advantage is that we get a deeper insight into writers’ internalised views than we might expect from focus group or interview data. Whilst talk from a focus group is generated in public, writing for Mass Observation is completed anonymously in private. People may express ideas they would be reluctant to share in public or in one-to-one interviews. The anonymous, private, and reflective nature of writing for Mass Observation gives us access not only to the responses of individuals without social constraints but also their reflections on those constraints themselves. The sources are full of reported encounters, and the silences as well as the conversations they created.
Against this might be set the criticism that MO is not a representative sample of the population. Respondents are, by definition, more practised in expressing themselves in such terms than the ‘average’ person and more likely to be dutiful, engaged, reflexive, and critical. They are also disproportionately white, and older women from the south-east of England are over-represented in the panel, as are people of the Left.
This means that their responses cannot stand in for survey data. They cannot be read as representative of certain demographic categories. But they do offer something different and arguably richer. They can help us understand the common understandings, expectations, feelings, and judgements circulating in British society. They provide windows on to the cultural resources and everyday assumptions individuals use to make sense of the world and their place within it, resources which circulate within families, workplaces, neighbourhoods, and friendship groups throughout the UK.
Conclusion: A Case for Reviving Mass Observation as a Democratic Resource
Mass Observation could be used by policymakers and campaign groups to develop a better understanding of the moods underlying political disaffection in the UK. The 2024 general election, marked by low turnout, record levels of distrust, and an increasingly fragmented electorate showed that existing methods—particularly opinion polling and standard survey research—are no longer sufficient for understanding the nature and scale of political disaffection in Britain.
The problem is not merely technical but conceptual. These methods cannot reflect the reality that political engagement is often episodic, emotional, and shaped by personal experience. It does not always manifest as voting behaviour, party loyalty, or ideological consistency. As political scientists and pollsters have recently argued, we need methodologies that are capable of capturing ambivalence, contradiction, mood, and meaning.
Mass Observation’s legacy and ongoing work point to a path forward. By documenting how individuals narrate their experiences of politics—what they feel, avoid, critique, and care about—it provides a lens into the cultural and affective life of democracy, one largely missed by conventional surveys and polls.
We propose that Mass Observation should be renewed not only as an archival or academic project but as a public resource for democratic reflection. Specifically, we recommend reviving the File Report system that characterised MO’s early work in the 1940s. These reports—written summaries that distilled research findings on key topics—would function as annual public syntheses of qualitative political data.
Crucially, this should be funded through government contracts, like the work of the National Centre for Social Research, which produces the annual British Social Attitudes (BSA) survey. The publication of the BSA survey reports shapes media and political debate. Annual MO reports would do the same, offering the public, journalists, educators, and policymakers regular, accessible, insights into the lived experience of British politics. Much like the BSA, the longitudinal nature of MO means it can be used to track changes over time. Such reports would be especially valuable in today’s context. Importantly, they would recognise that feeling is not a distortion of political behaviour, but a central part of it.
To meet the democratic challenges of the present, we must better understand the emotional atmospheres in which politics is lived. Mass Observation offers both the ethos and the tools to do this. As its founders wrote in 1939, between public life and private feeling lies a gulf — “of understanding, of information, and of interest.” In 2024, that gulf remains. But it need not remain unexamined.
