Bread-and-butter politics: Democratic disenchantment and everyday politics on an English council estate

Abstract

Despite evidence of widespread disenchantment with formal politics among England's impoverished sectors, people on the margins continue to engage with elected representatives on their own terms. On English council estates (housing projects), residents mediate their experiences of an alien and distant political system by drawing local politicians into localized networks of support and care. While this allows residents to voice demands for “bread and butter,” personalized alliances with politicians rarely translate into collective action. The limits of one political party's bread‐and‐butter strategy highlight the precariousness of working‐class movements at a time when the political Left has largely been dismantled. They also demonstrate the need to account for the lived realities of social class in aspirational narratives for “alternative” democratic futures. [democratic crisis, neoliberalism, voting, working‐class movements, council estates, alternative democracies, United Kingdom]

To Brexit or not to Brexit: The roles of Islamophobia, conspiracist beliefs, and integrated threat in voting intentions for the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum

“…Other limitations of the present study include our focus on an identities approach to the exclusion of other factors that may have influenced voting intentions, including factors derived from a political approach (e.g., attitudes towards incumbent political parties) and a utilitarian approach (e.g., financial or job security). This is important because our work cannot speak to other issues that may have influence voting intentions in our sample; that is, we cannot draw any conclusions about other, unmeasured motivations of voting intentions (e.g., that citizens used the referendum to reject politics as they know it; Koch, ). Even from the point‐of‐view of an identities approach, there may have been other neglected variables that further mediated or even suppressed our effects.…”

Moving beyond punitivism: Punishment, state failure and democracy at the margins

“…Tony was working as a bus driver and he was also the councillor for a local independent party that had gathered much support by campaigning about crime and public safety issues (Koch 2016). One day, I walked across the estate with Alice, Linda's fourteen-year-old daughter, from their house to the bus stop.…”

“…Yet, there are reasons to caution against calls for 'professionalization'. In a situation where masses of people already feel removed from what they experience as a distant and hostile system, excluding these same people as populist from further from public debate is likely to increase deep-seated disenchantments with their elected representatives (Koch, 2016;Lerman and Weaver, 2014). Even worse, such a move would validate further shifts to technocratic and managerial modes of decision-making that, according to some scholars at least, have hollowed out democracy of its substantial meaning and resulted in a 'postdemocratic' state (Crouch, 2004;Ranciere, 1998).…”

When politicians fail: Zombie democracy and the anthropology of actually existing politics

“…But even within networks of friends and kin, moral evaluations were made. A friend or a kin member could be accused of being selfish and of abusing one's generosity and trust where they failed to live up to locally expected standards of sociality (Koch, 2016). This was particularly evident in situations of conflict where demands for loyalty and support came most acutely to the fore.…”