Reading the Public: Political Action and Its Relationship to Constructions of Political Disagreement and Opinion Climate in the Context of Brexit

Abstract

This study applied a social representations approach to investigate the ways in which constructions of perceived political disagreement and the prevailing opinion climate were implicated in people's construals of political participation in the context of the United Kingdom European Union referendum of 2016. Interviews were conducted with 19 residents of the United Kingdom who voted to remain in the referendum, located in constituencies which represented diverse opinion climates in relation to the referendum. Thematic analysis of the data revealed that public opinion was a dilemmatic social representation; it was inscrutable and often ill‐informed but also volatile and disruptive, which left open the possibility of it moving towards a more pro‐EU position. Importantly, constructions of a polarized and dysfunctional political system worked to sustain a mode of political engagement which prioritized and positioned as efficacious individual rather than collective anti‐Brexit political behavior. This implies that people may prefer different types of political participation depending on the opinion climate which they occupy and the way in which they construe it. Findings are discussed in relation to previous work linking meta‐representations to political behavior and expression, and the implications of the findings for emergent forms such as Brexit are elaborated.

Dialogue with difference: Meta-representations in political dialogue and their role in constructing the ‘other’

“…These are 1) social representations are shared knowledge, 2) social representations are shaped by meta-representations, 3) social representations are enacted communication and 4) social representations are world-making assumptions. This framework allows us to more closely account for the relationship between identities and representations, as well as the role of communication in developing these relationships, making it suitable for research within social and political psychology (Howarth et al, 2014;O'Dwyer, 2020).…”

“…In simple terms, meta-representations are what we think other people think, about a particular event or object. 'Other people' here can refer to those individuals we consider part of our groups (and so what we believe the norm is for 'us'), those who we consider to sit outside of our groups, whose representations we interpret from the standpoint of various identities (Brasil & Cabecinhas, 2019) or to more abstracted notions of the general public (Mahendran, 2018;O'Dwyer, 2020). While shared knowledge binds individuals into communities as active members that co-construct meaning, which is essential for defining an 'us', meta-representations in turn allows 'us' to be situated in a broader world of multiple social categories (Duveen et al, 1990).…”

Populism versus the people: How citizen's social representations of home destabilize national populism's territorial vision

“…Use of European Social Survey, by Staerklé and Green using a social representation approach foregrounds the role of threat. Social representations theory (SRT) has since its inception concentrated on how the public use anchoring and objectification to develop a common‐sense through moving unfamiliar knowledge from reified worlds into consensual worlds (Mahendran, et al., 2019; Marková, 2003; Moscovici, 1984; O'Dwyer, 2020; Staerklé & Green, 2018). In this regard, it is ideally suited to national populism's use of threat/security and past/present/future when discussing home.…”

“…Such home‐based birther narratives percolate into the public sphere through narrative processes of emplotment where stories continually build around characters who are in the public eye. Correspondingly over time, they influence public opinion via the public's meta‐representational acceptance or rejection of what they imagine the rest of the public think (Mahendran, 2018; O'Dwyer, 2020). In 2009 public opinion revealed only a minority (25%) of U.S. citizens believed Obama was born outside the USA, by 2011, only a minority of U.S. citizens (38%) believed he was “definitely” born inside the USA (Hughey, 2012, p. 167).…”

“…Our theoretical approach to uncovering public dialogue on the dynamics of home uses the plasticity of the dialogical self (Hermans & Dimaggio, 2007; Kinnvall & Lindén, 2010; Marková, 2003; Nesbitt‐Larking, 2008; Zittoun, 2014) which approaches the self as engaged in self‐other dialogue via a variety of I ‐positions. This is combined with Social Representations Theory's (SRT) preoccupation with everyday thinking and common‐sense rationalities (Marková, 2003; Moscovici, 1984; Staerklé & Green, 2018) informed by meta‐representations of what the rest of the public think (Mahendran, 2018; O'Dwyer, 2020). Combining these two theories reveals the dynamic relational positionality in people's representations of home.…”