This blog will look at political engagement to identify specific behaviours and attitudes towards politics in the UK. individuals and groups may be not positively engaged in politics, this is shown through their attitudes and behaviours towards the topic. The needs of citizens are important within a democratic society, therefore if a certain group of people, in this case being working class are disengaged, a large population are losing their voice and opportunity to shape the laws, policies and institutions that govern them.
Disengagement of the working class is a real issue in contemporary society! In the UK we live in a political system that runs through democracy.
But what exactly is meant by a democracy? Well a democracy can directly be translated into “rule of the citizens” (Scott and Marshal, 2009). It is a process where groups in society seeks to act for themselves in pursuing common goals which are represented by political parties. (Jay Weinsten 1996:31). Democracy is supposed to represent all groups in society, but due to different factors such as in the last 50 years economic and political attitudes have drastically taken a turn due to labour and conservatives becoming similar and having more middle class focused manifestos (Eveans and Tilley, 2017). In the UK the labour and conservatives are the mainstream parties meaning they have the most votes and political engagement in the media and amongst household families, these two parties are more likely to have more general and basic knowledge. Now in today’s society the working class are now less likely to engage in voting, meaning there is an underlining issue here as to why the UK is fundamentally undermining representative democracy of the working class.
Unskilled and long term unemployment specifically are reported of having low levels of political knowledge, satisfaction with democracy and low levels of participation within political activities compared to people from higher occupational backgrounds. these unskilled and long termed unemployment groups of people are even less likely to be on the electoral resister and to vote. this could be due to a number of factors such as the working class interests not being represented within politics today, which may in fact be one of the causes of low levels of participation within political activities, this may in fact be due to the fact that their ideas, values or even simple things such as ways of living are not being represented within this democracy, the working classes interests not being discussed and seen as important as the middle class and higher educated groups.
For the use of this blog i will be specifically referring to socio-economic groups in society to help specify why the UK use of democracy is not prevailing.Political disengagement use the ‘social grade’ classification system that distinguishes between people on their occupation.
Political activity based on social grade in the UK
Political activity based on social grade (Dempsey and Johnston, 2018)
This chart shows how people from a lower social grade (grades D + E refer to table 1) are less likely to have participated in political activities or be prepared to participate in them. These clear differences of participation amongst different socioeconomic groups groups may be because grades D + E feel alienated from the system, which seems like a vicious cycle as the more active and vocal groups are, they will be heard by politics which will then be in their favour.
This political engagement of the unskilled and long term unemployed needs to change in order for a change to happen within society, if we as a society do not teach the younger voting generation to come, and even members of society now who have the opportunity to vote yet choose not to vote, to be more involved in politics. schools can have a big impact on the up coming generations political engagement through how they decide to engage pupils and teach them of the importance of being politically aware. children should be given an environment created at school which allows them to question each other and come up with their own political opinions, away from their homes where their ideas will be influenced by things such as family tradition, or being afraid to speak out and question family members if they do not have facts to back themselves up. the fear of looking uneducated may prevent people from speaking out in their family households, they would rather switch off from political discussions rather than have their own personal view based on political facts.
References:
Gottfried, G., Lodge, G. and Birch, S., 2013. Divided Democracy: Political Inequality In The UK And Why It Matters. [online] IPPR. Available at: <https://www.ippr.org/publications/divided-democracy-political-inequality-in-the-uk-and-why-it-matters> [Accessed 19 April 2020].
Uberoi, E. and Johnston, N., 2019. Political disengagement in the UK: who is disengaged?. House of Commons Library, pp.4, 22 – 26.
McDonnell, A. and Curtis, C., 2020. How Britain Voted In The 2019 General Election | Yougov. [online] Yougov.co.uk. Available at: <https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/12/17/how-britain-voted-2019-general-election> [Accessed 22 April 2020].
Evans, G. and Tilley, J., 2017. The New Politics Of Class. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford University Press.
Hoskins, B., Janmaat, J. and Melis, G., 2017. Tackling inequalities in political socialisation: A systematic analysis of access to and mitigation effects of learning citizenship at school. Social Science Research, 68, pp.88-101.