‘Politicians Don’t Understand People Like Me’: A Qualitative Analysis of a Lament

ABSTRACT

Citizens want politicians to demonstrate that they ‘understand people like them’. Yet many citizens believe politicians fail to do this when they communicate and that this signals what appears to be a broken relationship between them and their elected representatives. Through four focus groups with voters in the UK reporting low interest in politics, this article explores what people mean when they state that politicians do not understand them or people like them. Interpreting our findings in relation to political theories of recognition and respect, we suggest that failures of trust in politicians arise from lack of clarity about what democratic representation entails. Repairing this communicative relationship depends upon the nurturance of public respect towards the role that political representatives perform. By respect we do not mean deference or submission, but a capacity to appraise role performance in terms of clear expectations.

KEYWORDS:

• Political communication
• recognition
• representation
• respect

Introduction

Citizens want politicians to demonstrate that they ‘understand people like them’. Yet many citizens believe politicians fail to do this, signalling what appears to be a broken relationship between citizens and elected representatives. This relationship is vulnerable to a rhetoric of blame in which citizens accuse professional politicians of being detached from the people they represent, while politicians worry that citizens are politically disengaged and easily susceptible to the simplistic (mis)representation of populism. We argue that the expectations underlying democratic communication are a main source of disappointment in this unsatisfactory principal-agent relationship.

This article sets out to explore what people mean when they state that politicians do not understand them or people like them. Specifically, we ask What are citizens claiming when they state that politicians do not understand people like them? We then go on to ask how far the widely-discussed concepts of Recognition and Respect are implicated in this sense of being misunderstood.

We were prompted to investigate these questions after conducting a two-wave nationally-representative survey of voters before and after Prime Minister Theresa May and the leader of the Labour Party, Jeremy Corbyn, took part in a BBC Question Time special programme. (Coleman Moss and Martinez--Perez, 2018) Our post-viewing survey found that a majority of debate viewers lacked confidence in politicians to ‘understand people like them’. We were struck by the fact that viewers’ confidence in feeling understood by the leaders not only did not improve as a result of watching the politicians in action, but in fact became more negative. Questioned shortly before watching Question Time, 53% of respondents stated that they did not expect the leaders to understand people like them; after witnessing the politicians in action the figure increased to 59%. Those who were most likely to feel that political leaders did not understand people like them tended to report having low or no ‘interest in politics’ and low degrees of trust in politicians. We concluded our 2017 study by stressing the importance of voters feeling understood by politicians and observed that ‘the extent to which political leaders appeared to demonstrate that they “understand people like me” was central to overcoming – or reinforcing – the tendency of voters to feel estranged from the political class’ (author publication 2). Our findings from the 2017 survey were consistent with other studies in which citizens’ feeling of being badly represented were explained in terms of not being understood by professional representatives (Walkerdine, 2020; Sullivan, 2021; Droste, 2021).

In the next section we outline our research method. We then go on to consider what ‘not feeling understood’ signifies, relating this conceptualisation to two rather different themes within political theory. The first focuses upon the notion of recognition, the absence of which appears to be a key reason for representative failure. The second focuses upon the concept of political respect, which we argue should be distinguished from recognition. We conclude by suggesting that failures of trust in politicians arise from lack of clarity about what democratic representation entails. Repairing this communicative relationship, we argue in the final section, depends upon the nurturance of public respect towards the nature of the democratic representative relationship. By respect we do not mean deference or submission, but a capacity to appraise role performance in terms of clear expectations.

Method

We conducted qualitative research with voters from the Leeds city region, a post-industrial area in which traditional patterns of community and collective consciousness have given way to social fragmentation characteristic of a service-based economy. Leeds is a diverse part of the UK which was divided in relation to the EU referendum (Leeds voted very narrowly to remain). All our participants were selected on the basis of reporting to have little interest in politics and a low level of trust in politicians. We conducted four focus groups with 32 participants in total, each comprising eight people recruited to fit the above-mentioned characteristics.

In the focus groups, participants were invited in an open-ended fashion to reflect upon their experiences and perceptions of politicians. We asked participants about any contacts with individual politicians as well as their impressions of politicians in general, and the extent to which politicians understood them and people like them and how this could be improved. Given our theoretical interest in recognition and respect, we also included some specific questions about respect, where we asked to participants to compare their relationships with politicians to other social actors (doctors, employers, and neighbours).

While our 2017 survey had provided a macroscopic picture of people’s concerns about political communication and not feeling understood by politicians, the focus groups allowed us to investigate these findings in greater qualitative depth. What do citizens actually mean when they say that politicians do not understand people like them? What is their evidence for claiming to be misunderstood? What would representatives need to do to demonstrate such understanding? (Our question themes are listed in the Appendix). Rather than being limited by a single, pre-determined survey question and response, participants in the focus groups could tell us what they thought in their own words. The flexible, open-ended nature of the focus groups enabled discussion to go in unforeseen directions. We were also able to explore the meaning of the idea of not being understood by politicians further by considering its relationship to broader questions of recognition and respect. Finally, the focus groups gave participants some space to deliberate and reflect in a way that is not typical in a survey. In a study of public perceptions of politicians, which draws on Kahneman’s (2011) distinction between ‘fast’ and ‘slow thinking’, Stoker, Hay, and Barr (2016) find that people’s views of politicians tend to be more negative when they respond in an intuitive, fast-thinking mode. However, they find that perceptions are more generous with deliberative, slow-thinking, which they argue can be created through focus groups as a research method. Might the same thing be true of our research participants? Conducting focus groups allowed us to explore this possibility.

All the focus group discussions were recorded and transcribed. Data analysis was conducted through a close reading of the transcripts and thematic analysis in which we identified key themes in the data and relate them to our research questions. While we were very much open to new inductive insights arising from the focus groups, we were also interested in exploring how far the data supported our theoretical assumptions around recognition and respect, as we will discuss further below.

On Not Feeling Understood: ‘Well, We Don’t Have a Relationship with Them, Do We? That’s the Thing’ (FG2, R7)

What do citizens mean when they say that they do not feel understood by the politicians who represent them? What appears to be a faulty, if not broken relationship between politicians and citizens has been the focus of much recent scholarship. Clarke, Jennings, Moss, and Stoker (2018, p. 218) argue that as politics has become professionalised, political representatives are perceived to be ‘a relatively homogeneous class, seemingly detached from the rest of society’. Allen (2018) explains this apparent detachment in terms of a failure of ‘the political class’ to reflect the diversity of the people who are affected by their decisions. Because ‘individuals bearing characteristics of various kinds appear to be systematically excluded from political office’ (Allen, 2018, p. 9), there is inevitably waning confidence in the capacity of politicians to speak for those who are excluded from the political elite. Fawcett, Flinders, Hay, and Wood (2017) argue that complex forms of contemporary governance have diminished collective agency and squeezed citizens out from most forms of political deliberation. All of these studies, and more (Hay, 2007; Tormey, 2015; Vines & Marsh, 2018; Flinders, 2020), offer valuable insights into the nature and cause of the failed relationship between citizens and politicians. While most of the scholars we have cited see the structure and style of governance and the cultural unrepresentativeness of the political class as the central malady, others point to changes within the public, which has become less deferential, more volatile, disillusioned by technocratic managerialism and prone to populism (Mudde, 2004; Van Hauwaert & Van Kessel, 2018; Urbinati, 2019; Schulz, Wirth, & Müller, 2020).

While such accounts identify important trends, they tend to overlook the importance of the communicative relationship between politicians and citizens. Perhaps, like most troubled relationships, this relational pathology emanates from the communicative space between citizens and their representatives rather than from the singular deficiencies of either side. At stake here are relations of recognition through which people come to be valued, heard and included by their fellows.

Political theorists have argued that recognition is a critical feature of all social relationships, but especially democratic ones (Honneth, 1996, 2007; Thompson, 2006, Thomassen, 2011; Dobson, 2014). By a demand for recognition we are referring to a response to an injury that is distinct from more commonly discussed injustices resulting from structural inequality, such as unfair access to social goods and services or exclusion from socio-economic opportunities. Nancy Fraser (2000, p. 75) refers to misrecognition as symbolic injustice, ‘rooted in social patterns of representation, interpretation, and communication’. Charles Taylor (1997, p. 25) characterises this focus upon recognition most clearly when he states that

… our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.

If a person, group or community are represented by someone who seems to regard them as lacking significance, dignity or capacity to understand what is in their own interest, they are entitled to feel misrecognised, even if their basic material needs are being looked after. Their wish to be recognised is less a demand for a greater share of wealth or provision than for the right to be counted as human beings whose lives, tastes, aspirations, worries and forms of expression have value and therefore should be taken into political account. In order to be seen to recognise the people they represent, politicians need to show that they understand them, if not in the strong sense of having an intimate knowledge of their experiences and thoughts, in the broad sense of not being physically, cognitively or emotionally detached from the lives of the represented.

When focus group participants spoke about not feeling understood by politicians, they seemed to be registering the existence of a broken relationship. People spoke of politicians as being ‘out of touch’ with them in ways that are incompatible with effective representation. The underlying assumption was that representing people entails certain qualities of communicative connection that are currently somehow deficient or absent. What are these qualities?

The first is approachability. Our focus group participants said that they wanted to be able to have access to their political representatives so that they and their experiences could become more known to them. Only through meeting and talking could representatives obtain a real sense of who they were representing. But many focus-group participants took the view that politicians did not want to meet or hear from them:

When I went to go and meet with her when she was doing one of her face-to-faces she wasn’t very interested. You could tell she was quite aloof from it all. She probably had far more important or better things to do, so I left quite irritated myself. (FG2, R1)

I think they’d find that making themselves available in their own area more often, rather than sitting in the Houses of Parliament going ‘yeah, yeah, yeah’ and doing all that rubbish, and be more available so people could get to know them, or they could get to know their constituents … . (FG3, R6)

People reported feeling both physically and emotionally estranged from their representatives. To feel distanced from someone is to perceive that they are beyond your reach and you are beyond theirs. One way of overcoming such distance is to approach politicians through letters or email, but for participants in our focus groups even such technical efforts to close the communication gap were to no avail:

Ignored. Sent correspondence and not heard anything back … A letter, or one was an email and then they replied saying ‘are you a constituent?’ so ‘yes I am’, replied and not heard a thing back and I was just like ‘oh great, thank you’. (FG2, R3)

If I emailed you after this session, if you gave me your email address and I emailed you and said ‘Oh, I’ve thought of this’, do you think you’d respond to me? Right. So why didn’t [named MP] respond to me when I emailed him? (FG1, R7)

In contrast, friends and neighbours were valued because they were approachable:

We all respect our neighbours because they’re there. You can talk to them … on a frequent basis, whereas your MP … it’s just he’s down in London or wherever. (FG1, R6)

Of course, politicians cannot possibly be on close, sociable terms with all their constituents. Their role is to represent, not to provide personal companionship. But many focus group participants believed that politicians were positively unfriendly and unwelcoming: that they actively avoided having contact with people like them:

They just hide. They don’t answer any questions, so I think that was the whole issue: no-one actually knows what it means and what’s going to happen. (FG2, R4)

They can’t be bothered. They don’t want to know. (FG1, R7)

Participants provided limited evidence for their widespread belief that politicians were avoiding and even hiding from them. In some cases, people stated that it was they who felt unwilling to be in contact with their elected representatives because they believed that most of them came from social backgrounds that would make it almost impossible to arrive at mutual understanding:

Yeah, they feel a little bit unapproachable in a way. You know, if they came in here … I don’t think I’d know what to say. I’d feel a bit … I don’t know. Probably because of their sort of status, you think that they maybe are sort of like a bit above. (FG1, R7)

I suppose it’s being a bit stereotypical, but a lot of the politicians you see, they’re very upper middle-class, from wealthy backgrounds and they went to private school, and to Eton and Oxford, that kind of thing. (FG4, R7)

It is hard to feel connected to people who seem distant, aloof or unapproachable. But even when people were able to recall occasions on which they were able to access their political representatives, such accounts were commonly followed by stories of not being listened to. Several people spoke about taking part in official consultations designed to allow them to have their say on local or national policy issues. One might hope that these would have been ideal opportunities to tell politicians what really matters to the citizens they represent. But trust in such institutional listening exercises was universally low:

To be honest, I wouldn’t be really interested in anything because I think they’re all fake. I think they ask the public what they think about things and we’re going to take this into consideration, and I don’t think they consider anything, I think it’s all cut and dried and they’ve made their mind up before. It’s just a show to make it look like they’re asking us. (FG1, R1)

Well, even when they do consult you, they don’t follow it through though, do they? I mean, Brexit, that’s got to be the primary example, hasn’t it? You know, you have a vote and what do they do? They still argue about it. They still don’t want to … Just carry it through. The people have voted on it. You won the majority. Get on with it. But they won’t. (FG1, R5)

Widespread belief that the political elite has failed to take the Brexit mandate seriously exacerbated this sense of suspicion. (The withdrawal agreement had still not been accepted by Parliament at the time that our focus groups were conducted). There was almost a consensus amongst participants that politicians only listen to citizens’ input when it suits them to do so. Much of the vexation voiced about not being heard was redolent of the language of relationship counselling in which people express feelings of deep frustration in the face of an absence of reciprocal communication:

I think it’s feeling helpless, that nobody’s listening … . (FG2, R3)

Yeah, I feel a bit similar, that you’ve got no voice and they’re not listening. I mean I’m part of Neighbourhood Watch and we do have a local MP there and she does come, but she does rather like the sound of her own voice. She does get some things done but she does like to waffle on and on and on, and everybody’s fed up and she wears you down. (FG1, R2&5)

Well, perhaps we do have freedom of speech but then nobody takes any notice. (FG3, R4)

When asked what politicians would need to do to prove that they were paying attention to them, participants turned repeatedly to the terminology of ‘real listening’, clearly meaning by this something rather more than mere auditory registration. In one of the groups, in response to the question ‘How could politicians show that they understand you?’ the following responses were instant, accompanied by a good deal of background vocal agreement:

R3: Listen to you.

R2: Yeah, listen and respond to what you would like them to do.

R3: Well, to listen to what the majority of people want and put some actions into place instead of just saying they’re going to do things and then they don’t do it or you never hear of it again. (FG3)

Even when politicians were accessible and did appear to listen to what people were saying, a third obstacle to understanding was identified: a sense that politicians could not possibly really know the people they represent because they do not share their social realities. Being known in this sense is more than simple acknowledgement of one’s social existence as statistical data. It is a form of affinity that emanates from common experience. Without it, empathy is impossible and claims to understand a situation are often marred by what could turn out to be false insights.

A widespread belief that politicians do not inhabit the same experiential landscape as the people they speak for was captured by a repeatedly-used metaphor: the bubble. When people speak of politicians living in a bubble this summarises a complex amalgam of cultural, economic and ideological factors that work against understanding:

I think what annoys me more than anything in this country with the MPs is they live in a very sheltered little bubble … There’s no police on the streets, there’s knife crime soaring every single day, it’s not affecting their kids, it’s affecting mine though. And everybody else’s here. We’ve all got children or grandchildren. (FG1, R1)

I think some of them live in their own little bubble, in a vacuum … They just don’t live in the real world, do they, like when it comes to costings and budgeting and things, they just don’t know how to do it. (FG2, R1)

They live in their own little bubbles. (FG, R2)

Deciphering these references to bubbles points in two related directions. Firstly, there is a moral language of class distinction in play here (Sayer, 2005). Many people believe that only those who have suffered from economic deprivation and cultural exclusion can authentically speak for those who are currently in such positions. They are not convinced that remote concern is a sufficient basis for representing the experiences of others:

They’re just different to working class people, I think. Possibly they do come with the best intentions, when they’re promising all these things, ‘We’re going to do this, this and this’, but actually really understanding what the nitty-gritty is down at the coalface, I don’t think they’ve really got an idea. (FG4, R7)

If they want to understand what’s in this country, be part of this country, not part of the elite because they’re going to live the elite life and they’re going to make plans for the elite, not plans for normal people. (FG3, R6)

Well these very wealthy politicians, I don’t think they do know what’s going on. (FG1, R4)

If politicians do not understand ‘people like us’ because they are not part of ‘us’, a second thought commonly follows:

They need to come inside the communities more. More grassroots. Sit amongst the community, even once every two months. Go around and speak with the neighbours, the kids, and then they’ll get an idea as to how the people feel and what they’re thinking. But mostly we don’t see them. And I mean even councillors as well. You don’t really see the councillors either. (FG4, R6)

With all they hear from everyone they’d need to get themselves out there more and get into the nitty gritty of it. They can’t just take everybody’s word for it because if I did I’d be like ‘oh whatever’ all the time and ‘yeah yeah yeah’, ‘blah blah blah’, but if they actually experienced it and it hit them hard, then I think it’d give them a firework up the arse and give them more, you know. (FG2, R8)

Yeah, but I also think that they need to live like the general public live. They need to live like what we live. (FG2, R2)

This forceful narrative of a failed communicative relationship is impossible to miss. Its tone is angry and unforgiving. If the representative task of politicians entails speaking with and for represented citizens, participants in our focus groups considered that it was both unrealised and, within the terms of the present relationship, probably unrealisable. They did not feel understood.

Asked what they meant by not feeling understood, there were two answers that we might have expected to hear, but rarely did. Firstly, focus group participants tended not to speak directly about structural inequalities. Here was an opportunity for people to speak freely about their frustrations and sense of unfairness, but few ever referred explicitly to unjust distribution of social power or resources. There were a few references to perceived advantages available to immigrants and long-term welfare-dependents, and some allusions to ‘people like us’ being left out, but this was never followed up by any kind of criticism of the social structure as such. That seemed to be regarded as a more or less natural phenomenon.

Secondly, it was very rare for people to speak about the kind of big policy issues that are typically associated with political discourse. (Even Brexit, which was widely mentioned, tended to be discussed in terms of undemocratic process rather than policy detail.) Perhaps because of the nature of the kind of questions we were asking participants to consider (which in turn reflected our research question), they mainly focused upon what might be referred to as relational problems. They were interested in evaluating the performance of politicians as representatives of their interests, values, feelings rather than wishing to offer partisan assessments of one party, policy or ideology as against another.

In theoretical terms, we might say that participants focused mainly on questions of recognition That is to say, they were interested in the extent to which they were valued as equals within the democratic polity. Unlike dissent against structural injustice, which is seen as being integral to radical social critique, vocabularies of complaint in response to misrecognition are more easily dismissed as the unfocused griping or emotional over-sensitivity of the habitually embittered (Kenny, 2012). In short, when people speak of their own misrecognition their very words and tone are commonly used as grounds for ignoring them. Responding to experiences of misrecognition is compounded by the fact that it is alleged lack of competency in the language of political articulacy that is commonly used to mark one as being unworthy of recognition.

When people say that politicians do not speak their language and therefore cannot understand them, they are also saying that politicians speak their own language, which is beyond comprehension. In short, not feeling understood is simultaneously a feeling of alienation from a code of official expression that, being indecipherable, is therefore highly suspect.

If it is the case that there is a chasm of incomprehension between politicians and citizens, the prospects for shared meaning are bound to be low. Might it be that the deficits of communicative connection to which focus-group participants alluded are, in fact, manifestations of this two-way incomprehension? When participants spoke of politicians as being inaccessible and unapproachable, might they be referring to a sense of tension and dissociation between the mundane cultural logic of the lifeworld and the abstract managerial rationality of the system world? Perhaps it is not that politicians do not want to be approached, but that there is an absence of common language through which meaningful communication can take place. Citizens do not want to abandon the argot of interpersonal micro-sociality, while politicians feel uncomfortable straying too far from the lexicon of bureaucratic macro-policy. Again, when focus-group participants complained that politicians rarely listened to them, perhaps they were referring to the ways in which politicians are bound to respond to aggregate input, constantly balancing between competing local demands, expert advice and partisan attachments. Citizens want their individual narratives to be registered, but political listening entails the creation of patchwork narratives derived from multiple sources. And when politicians are accused of living in bubbles, perhaps that is the fate of all institutional actors whose role is to address personal experience through inherently impersonal mechanisms.

None of the above is intended to suggest that people are mistaken in thinking that their relations with politicians are unsatisfactory; neither is it to imply that if only citizens could learn to think more like politicians they would be taken more seriously. Misrecognition is a subjective impression. The fact that the views expressed in our focus groups are consistent with a range of findings from other research suggests that there is a fundamental problem of political communication at stake here. But maybe the nature of that problem is not quite as simple as focus-group participants proposed when they were simply asked to express their frustrations. Axel Honneth (2007, p. 71) observes that

… it becomes constantly evident that the social protests of the lower classes [sic] are not motivated by positively formulated moral principles, but by the experience of having their intuitive notions of justice violated. The normative core of such notions of justice is always constituted by expectations of respect for one’s own dignity, honor or integrity.

The point here is not that participants in our focus groups were inarticulate, but that people’s sense of being misunderstood is often inarticulable insofar as it reflects latent feelings of personal value and hunches about the nebulous motives and presumptions of others. It is at the less choate, affective sub-surface beneath explicit speech that narratives of respect and disrespect come into play.

Showing Respect: ‘If They’re Representing People, They’re Our Voice’ (FG4, R7)

To be spoken for by another voice, such as a ventriloquist’s or a political representative’s, is an unnerving experience. Everything depends upon the credibility of the copy. If the revoicing is perfectly mimetic, then what is the point of the reproduction? If, however, it diverges from the intentions or qualities that characterise the original voice, it is vulnerable to being seen as a betrayal. Brimming with rage, one focus-group participant expressed his objection to being represented by a politician: ‘I don’t even know the man. He’s got no right to speak for me!’ (FG3, R6). Representative democracy is beset by two pressing questions: Who has the right to speak on behalf of citizens? What responsibility do citizens have for ensuring that they are spoken for in ways that acknowledge and value their experience? In order to earn democratic respect, politicians must demonstrate that they are acting in broad accordance with what citizens want them to do and citizens must show that they have made every effort to generate a feasible mandate. Political respect depends upon both of these responsibilities being undertaken in tandem.

There is an important distinction, but also a close conceptual relationship, to be observed between recognition and respect. The former is a universal entitlement afforded as a matter of dignity to anyone who is regarded as an autonomous person. Respect, on the other hand, entails appraisal. When we say that we respect someone, this is typically in relation to a particular role performance. People are regularly engaged in appraising whether actors perform social roles (such as parent, teacher, team captain or politician) in accordance with normative expectations (Linton, 1936; Merton, 1957). Roles reveal ‘the mediations between the macroscopic universes of meaning objectivated in a society and the ways by which these universes are subjectively real to individuals’ (Berger & Luckman, 1967, p. 95). The normative assumptions upon which role appraisals are based are not natural or fixed but worked out through local and mediated interactions between appraisers and appraised. As Leifer (1988, p. 865) succinctly put it, ‘roles are not “givens” that constrain interaction, but something that actors must acquire through interaction’. When people try to determine whether a role performance is worthy of respect, they do so on the basis of their assumptions about how an actor or group of actors should behave and whatever evidence they can gather about how they do behave.

Respect between citizens and politicians depends upon how well each believes the other perform their democratic roles. This in turn depends upon what each believes the other’s role to be. Given that being understood entails work on the part of those wishing to be known as well as those charged with coming to know, how did our focus group members expect this task to be conducted?

In the focus groups we asked participants whether they had ever actually met a politician. Around half of them had and of these evaluations were fairly split. Some reported positive experiences, naming specific politicians, such as one who had ‘spent quite a lot of time talking and trying to understand everyone that was in the room, not just coming from his world’ (FG2, R7) and another who ‘came across at the time certainly as very genuine and she was giving the reasons for why she’d stood for the parliament’ (FG3, R3). Others reported more negative experiences, such as a participant who went to complain to her local councillor about local youths misbehaving in the street, only to be responded to ‘obnoxiously – well, it were just his attitude’ (FG3, R1) and another who had had several dealings with his local MP: ‘He knew my mother well actually, and while she was alive he was “I’ll do whatever I can for you” – never did a thing’ (FG3, R6). It was rare for people to generalise about politicians on the basis of these one-off interactions, but when they came to speak about politicians as a group the tone changed strikingly. There was a deeply negative consensus, much of it focused upon an assumption that there is a wilful refusal on the part of politicians to understand the experiences of the represented:

It’s not that they don’t understand, I don’t think they’re interested. (FG1, R3)

To me, it’s just literally in your face of how they don’t understand. (FG2, R7)

I don’t think they want to help, to be honest. (FG3, R2)

They’re bamboozling us. (FG3, R4)

The widespread expression of these assumptions, and the background chorus of affirmation when they were uttered, are examples of what Billig (2002, p. 41) refers to as ‘common-sense beliefs’: arguments stated as if they were ‘pieces of accepted common wisdom’. They are role-characterising claims that identify politicians as people whose task in life is to do something other than understand the people they purport to speak for. However, beneath these banal assertions is evidence of more discursively hesitant views how politicians perceive their role in relation to citizens and how citizens perform their role in relation to representative democracy.

Politicians are seen as having a public role to represent people, but also a more discreet, Machiavellian role in which they are committed to private agendas and engaged in a clever game that is shrouded in furtiveness:

I suppose there are lots of deals and things that go on behind closed doors. I think when there’s an election coming up, you get promised the moon, the stars and all the gold in the world. The second everybody’s in power, nothing materialises. (FG4, R7)

How do you get to find them because they’re always by their own parties. You cannot control anything they do, they do it all by their own little power in their own little groups, in their own little offices. (FG3, R6)

According to this theory, politicians do not want to be understood by citizens. They use opaque language as a way of distracting people from their real motives:

R1: They should speak our language.

R2: Yeah, they should be gemmed up enough to go to their constituents and say ‘Look, this is what it’s about’ and speaking idiot’s guide. I’m not saying we are … Yeah, you need it in black and white, don’t you?

R1: We don’t know ins and outs of accounts and everything else. We don’t know anything like that. We just want clear things saying ‘right, we’re going to do this, this, this, this and this’, and that’s it.

R2: To get from A to B to C we need to do this, that and the other. (FG3)

I’d just find it refreshing if somebody’d come out and was actually honest rather than being … they’re always fed the information, it’s quite contrived answers or avoiding the answers in the first place. Can they just be honest? (FG2, R2)

If you said to a politician ‘what day is it today?’ they’d probably say ‘Well, three days ago it was Sunday … ’ (FG2, R7)

All of this has important implications for respect. It is hard to respect people if one cannot be sure what their real role is. They appeal to you as representatives who will dedicate themselves to serving your interests, but when witnessed ‘in role’ in parliamentary chambers, party conferences and media interviews they appear to be doing something else – something that seemed to some participants ominously like the pursuit of a private agenda. Such paranoid theorising would seem pathological if applied to the motives of friends, enemies or commercial sellers, but has become perfectly normalised when applied to politicians. That these people are engaged in back-stage manoeuvres which are inconsistent with their front-stage performances is regarded as mundane insight rather than suspicious speculation.

But this common-sense theory is not as confidently adopted as might seem to be the case when it is being uttered as a truism. Participants expressed doubts about their own role as citizens. If the role of politicians is to understand people, surely there is a democratic role for people to make themselves understood:

Maybe we need to take responsibility by being more vocal, because in all honesty I could say I don’t know my local MP. Even if I thought something it would be the last thing on my mind to maybe go to him or her and express that. (FG1, R2)

I don’t think we really know what we want anyway. (FG3, R1)

I think there are lots of things that you feel need to be done, but then it’s this old thing about ‘Well, I’m just one person and I can’t do anything on my own’ (FG4, R3)

There is an emerging picture here of a broken relationship in which role status is so unclear that appraisal-based respect is virtually unrealisable. The questions where we invited focus-group participants to talk about their respect for others with whom they had social relationships (doctors (GPs), employers and next-door neighbours) helped us to understand this further. Like politicians, these roles are typically appraised on the basis of normative expectations. For example, we might expect our doctor to be medically qualified and up to date, accessible, authoritative, and friendly and compassionate. In the absence of all or any of these qualities it is unlikely that we would respect her. In all three cases we heard examples of good and bad doctors, employers and neighbours, but there was one striking difference between these appraisals and those of politicians. There was little doubt or suspicion amongst participants about what they should expect from these roles. Indeed, there was a shared clarity of expectation, allowing people to easily empathise or build upon one another’s accounts. This was not the case with politicians. Whereas talk about neighbours never started with a debate about what the role of a good neighbour might be, talk about politicians was almost entirely focused upon uncertainty about role norms and attempts to clarify what should reasonably be expected.

If representative democracy depends upon a contract in which politicians and citizens understand each other’s roles and responsibilities, the evidence we have looked at suggests that this is a contract on which the ink has become smudged and there is a default assumption that it is too often honoured in the breach.

Conclusion: Addressing the Sources of Disrespect

We conducted this research in the hope of gaining a better comprehension of what people mean when they state that politicians do not understand people like them. It soon became clear that there is a relationship between such feelings and notions of withheld recognition. The latter has been widely discussed by democratic theorists who take the view that inequalities of status are no less unjust than inequalities of distribution (Fraser, 1995; Honneth, 1996; Taylor, 1997; Coleman, 2020). As we explored participants’ feelings of recognition within focus groups, it began to appear that what at first looked like misrecognition might more accurately be theorised as disrespect. The key distinction between the two concepts is that the former is a universal entitlement that is deserved by anyone who is an autonomous being, while the latter emerges from appraisal of role performance. Only when role responsibilities are clear and comprehensible can decisions about respect be made. In relationships between politicians and the people they represent, the role of neither of these two agents is clear to the other.

Disrespect stems from two separate, but related contexts. The first is the material transformation of socio-economic relations engendered by a post-industrial, globalised, neoliberal transformation that has overridden not only traditional social norms, but hitherto entrenched statuses and solidarities that had once provided a foundation for cultural security. As Pankaj Mishra (2017, pp. 13–14) observes,

… shocks of modernity were once absorbed by inherited social structures of family and community, and the state’s welfare cushions. Today’s individuals are directly exposed to them in an age of accelerating competition on uneven playing fields, where it is easy to feel that there is no such thing as either society or state, and that there is only a war of all against all.

In such circumstances, questions of social status and role accountability come to be entangled with seismic experiences of disruptive change. People have come to feel thrown around, unrooted and unsettled by the turbulence of out-of-control market forces. A mood of bewilderment in the face of uncontrollable social forces and resentment of those who seem able to survive them prevails (Sennett, 2007; Crary, 2013; Hall, Massey, & Rustin, 2015; Fukuyama, 2018; Hochschild, 2018; Cohen, 2019). The nature of this historical disruption is far too complex to explore at any length in this article, but it is only by keeping it central to our thoughts that the second source of disrespect that we have identified can be addressed.

This second source of feelings of disrespect is the absence of a shared language for evaluating the performance of democracy. Politics has come to be assessed against a default backdrop of mistrust. Whether or not one subscribes to the expansive claims made by proponents of mediatisation theory (Esser & Strömbäck, 2014), it is clear that over the past half century journalists have assumed an increasing role as political critics whose task is to provide sceptical public judgements of politicians, parties and governments. The dominant tone of such evaluation is suspicious and cynical (Mancini, 1993; Cappella & Jamieson, 1996; Entman, 2010; Aharoni & Tenenboim-Weinblatt, 2019). Day after day people read accounts of politicians failing to represent their interests or values; of political hypocrisy, scandal, blunder and negligence, but hardly ever do journalists reflect upon what political representatives are supposed to be doing – less still, what the democratic responsibilities of citizens might be. It is as if these are well understood roles, so obvious to all concerned as to require no public comment or consideration.

But what if these roles are not at all obvious – if many citizens have come to come to believe that politicians are intentionally deaf to their voices, while many politicians have become so used to learning ‘what the public thinks’ through opinion polls that they have lost the art of dialogical communication? Of course, these are role perceptions rather than objective descriptions and do not apply to all politicians and citizens equally. However, for the 50–60% of respondents to our surveys who were persistent in claiming that politicians do not understand people like them, they appear to constitute the grounds of enduring injury. They find themselves locked into a pattern of expectation in which apprehensions of disappointment are routinely confirmed by experience of communicative frustration. The voices of both politicians and citizens have become somehow decoupled from normatively defined roles of democratic representation and citizenship respectively. Citizens have come to feel like consumers, their vocal demands are increasingly couched in terms of instant gratification and politicians respond to them with what the parties now explicitly refer to as ‘offers’. Politicians have come to be depicted as a pariah elite, their capacity to enter into free-flowing conversational intercourse with real people circumscribed by strategic contrivances. Democratic communication is blighted by role confusion and we are struck by Hartmut Rosa’s (2019, p. 216) observation that ‘The resonant wire between … politicians and citizens … turns out to be jammed from both ends, with each side influencing, impeding and manipulating but in general never actually reaching, touching or moving the other; the relationship of representation is rigid, hardened, and in almost no way fluid’. How might this pathology of perceived mutual indifference and disrespect be overcome?

Much greater clarity is needed about what democratic representation entails. This is most likely to be reached through open, honest discussion in which the moral equivalence of both politicians and citizens is genuinely acknowledged; the synergy in their political roles creatively explored; and their willingness to put themselves at one another’s disposal generously affirmed. In short, there is a pressing need to reflect imaginatively on the normative character of democratic relationships. Following Rosa (2019, p. 174), we are interested in generating resonant relationships in which both representatives and represented ‘speak in their own voice, while also remaining open enough to be affected or reached by each other’. Of course, the possibility for the kind of open discursive exchange that might clear the way for such resonant reciprocality is bound to be constrained by the very suspicions of disrespect that make it necessary. As with work on any broken relationship, this process cannot be completed by short-term gestures, campaigns or expressions of goodwill. Democratic talking therapy takes time. But, like any process of healing, it begins with an acknowledgement of the problem and a commitment to address it sincerely. This article contributes towards that first step.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stephen Coleman

Stephen Coleman is Professor of Political Communication in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. His books include How Voters Feel (CUP, 2013), Can the Internet Strengthen Democracy? (Polity, 2017) and How People Talk About Politics (Bloomsbury, 2020). Much of his research focuses upon civic agency and democracy. E-mail: [email protected]

Giles Moss

Giles Moss is Associate Professor in Media and Politics in the School of Media and Communication at the University of Leeds. He has published widely on the relationship between media and politics, focusing on media’s role in politics (political communication) and how politics shapes media (media policy). With Lee Edwards, he is working on an AHRC-funded project to examine how consultations surrounding copyright policy might be improved.

Appendix: Focus Group Question Structure

1. How many of you actually have met a politician? Have you met an MP, local councillor or whatever, and if you have, how did they strike you? What did you think of them?

2. Do you think they understand the big issues in your life, whatever they may be?

3. Have politicians ever asked you for your opinion?

4. Are politicians listening to you?

5. What would politicians need to do to show that they’re listening to you?

6. What would politicians need to do to show that they really understand people like you?

7. How can you make your voice heard so that politicians do listen and understand you?

8. Do you think that standards of respect have declined in contemporary Britain?

9. Do you feel respected by

 (i) your GP?

 (ii) your employer?

 (iii) your next-door neighbour?

10. What would help to create better democratic relationships between people and politicians?

11. Are we at all to blame as citizens? (Are we good at being democratic citizens?)

We then followed with some final scenarios in which we asked participants to assume the role of politicians faced with a policy dilemma. We do not report on these scenarios in this article.