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Political scientists who have written about party decline (the ‘crisis of parties’) fall into two broad categories: one group includes those who focus their analysis on the organizational structures, functions and membership of parties, and their performance in government and in representative institutions; a second group has been more concerned with citizens’ attitudes towards political parties, although their empirical studies have rarely focused on the question of the decline in public support for parties, and have instead been primarily concerned with themes such as the evolution of party identification, electoral participation, and the traditional social ties linking parties to citizens. Despite widespread interest in this theme, there have been surprisingly few empirical studies of the extent and possible origins of anti‐party attitudes. Aims to fill this gap in the literature by systematically exploring the hypothesis of the ‘decline of parties’ from the standpoint of citizen support for these key institutions in four Southern European democracies, although the existing literature on the topic has produced contradictory findings. Has four complementary objectives: (1) to develop and discuss attitudinal indicators that can serve as adequate measures of anti‐party sentiments; (2) to observe the evolution of these indicators over time in a variety of contexts; (3) to discuss their relationship with other aspects of political behaviour; and (4) to speculate about the origins of anti‐party sentiments. While most of the analysis focuses on Spain, similar attitudes are also explored in Portugal, Italy, and Greece, in an effort to determine the extent to which an increase in anti‐party sentiments represents a general feature of contemporary West European democracies, and to what extent it maybe linked to a broader concept of political disaffection; also examined are some of the consequences of this phenomenon with regard to electoral behaviour, to psychological identification of citizens with parties, and to the overall level of involvement of citizens in public life.

Power makes for a regional structure of places. This “structure of places” is made up of a set of loci for cultural interaction, and a set of ideologies about relative positions. “Places” are therefore both objective and subjective situations. “Culture” can be felt with conviction, or it can be played from an emotional distance. The spatial structures of cultural production that have been investigated reveal a kind of system to these processes of disaffection and conviction. Octavio Paz saw “masks” as reflections of solitude—as reflections of a personal and collective concealment because of their insecurity vis-à-vis others. He was probably right about the transition that Mexican culture was going through when he wrote The Labyrinth of Solitude. Paz also claimed that Mexican history was the history of a man looking for his filiation.

Over the years, the GDR has gained a reputation (especially in West Germany) as a cranky and unremitting ‘complainer culture.’ Yet the perception of the GDR as a veritable ‘grumble Gesellschaft’ was actually homegrown in East Germany. This chapter sets out to recall the special place of the famed citizen petitions, or Eingaben, within East German life. What makes these citizen communications particularly interesting is the way that they straddled the line between public and private. They show how GDR citizens presented their anger, frustration and desires, and in so doing revealed remarkable ‘patterns of individualization’ in an otherwise highly-regulated society. For this reason, they furnish some of the most revealing everyday texts of East German history, casting a good deal of light on popular perceptions of the state and socialist justice.

This chapter studies the popularity of the coming-of-age genre in the United States. It shows that this genre is partly a symptom of the abiding fascination of the Americans with the idea of innocence, and allows writers to study the historical circumstances that have separated their protagonists from a mythical, imaginary, or nostalgic innocence. This chapter concludes that the coming-of-age genre will always be used by American authors who are searching for a narrative voice that can be used as a vehicle to express social disaffection and to offer critiques of various forms of American socialisation.

After a brief survey of the sources available for the assessment of popular opinion under the regime, the chapter examines the growing divide which developed during the 1930s between the regime and a large part of the population. This is related in the text to the image of the PNF at local level and to the arrogant and corrupt behaviour of many of the local fascist leaders. The chapter looks at the responses of the population to the invasion and conquest of Ethiopia in 1935-6 and concludes that, contrary to general opinion, the acquisition of Empire did not substantially repair the growing disaffection with the regime or heal the rift between the fascist party and the people.

The chapter examines the popular reactions to the many kinds of abuse of power within the provincial fascist organisations during the 1930s and seeks to illustrate the diverse expressions of political disaffection in a context of increasing apathy. It argues that the discontent with the functioning of the fascist party was also evident among fascists themselves, as is made clear by the open criticisms of the malfunctioning of the local federations and the arguments about the direction Fascism should take in the future. The chapter also looks at the role of the so-called ‘second generation’ of young fascists and examines their attitudes towards the regime.

The defining feature of English national identity for many decades was its absence in politics. This has changed with the mobilisation of a particular strain of English national identity. It was not the only factor influencing choices in the 2016 EU referendum, but it was an important one. All of the concerns that are most intensely expressed by English identifiers—opposition to immigration, social and cultural conservatism, political disaffection and support for separate English political institutions—were associated with higher support for Brexit. Brexit, however, is not the end of the story. The referendum provoked intense political mobilisation by the English identifiers, but the election of June 2017 has sparked a similarly intense reaction from the British identifiers, denying the pro-Brexit Government their majority. The two votes just a year apart have highlighted how deep the identity divides in England have become.

This chapter discusses the central focus of this book, the nature of intermediation in a variety of democratic systems, and the implications of differing patterns of intermediation for the nature of politics and the quality of democracy in the countries in the study. It sheds light on the attitudinal factors of the democratic systems in Southern and Eastern Europe, and in Latin America. It examines the relationships between intermediation, attitudes towards democracy, and political behaviour by discussing the ‘social capital’ hypothesis, the behavioural consequence of discontent, support for democracy, intermediation, and the behavioural consequences of disaffection. The findings indicate that fundamental support for democracy, satisfaction with the performance of the system, and attitudes reflecting disaffection from politics are distinct from one another.

Chapter 4 enters directly into the heart of the book. First, it provides a summary of the theoretical framework and outlines our major research hypotheses. Second, it describes the Italian political system of the 1990s and highlights its most salient characteristics, thus setting the basis for our classification of Italian citizens. Finally, it describes the classification criteria used to assign respondents to different voting categories. The first type, utilius, understands politics using the ideological categories of “left” and “right” and defines his own voting preference following a principle of spatial proximity. The second type of voter, amicus, conceives of politics as a dichotomy; she tends to reduce reality to a dualism: the competition between party coalitions (and between their leaders). A third type, aliens, is driven by an active rejection of politics and is unwilling or unable to represent the political debate through traditional ideological categories. The last type, medians, constitutes a residual category, including all those cases that do not belong to the previous categories. The analysis is based on two public opinion surveys carried out by the Itanes (Italian National Election Studies) research group.

Chapter 6 examines the effectiveness of the cognitive shortcuts and the consistency of their use, and shows that the judgment strategies used by utilius, amicus, and aliens are deployed not just in determining their voting behavior but also in other decision-making tasks they undertake. In particular, we show that utilius voters rely on the left-right ideological dimension even when they judge policy issues, or their future voting preferences, and that amicus voters use their simplified vision of politics in which the political competition is limited to the two major coalitions both in their judgment of political leaders and the performance of the government. The effectiveness of these heuristics is proved by the fact that utilius and amicus voters show levels of coherence in the organization of their opinions that are higher than those of the most interested and educated individuals. On the contrary, the aliens type, who does not follow the decision-making mechanisms employed by utilius and amicus, is much less capable of using the left-right dimension to manage the organization of the parties and his issue opinions even compared to the least educated and interested voters. However, even the aliens voter is not without an organizing principle. Indeed, he is guided by a cynic realism, or pessimism, that leads to systematically negative evaluations of every party, coalition, and political leader.

Chapter 8 summarizes the various findings and discusses them in relation to the debate over the measurement of political sophistication and the more general issue of the low political literacy of citizens in democratic societies. In general, the Italian population is described as divided between citizens who are highly capable of handling the political debate either through classical ideological categories—the utilius—or through an effective simplification of the political competition—the amicus—and citizens who are peripheral to politics, and do not possess the instruments necessary for making sense of it—the aliens. The strategy used to build the typology of voting heuristics is offered as a general interpretive framework for analyzing decision-making strategies in political environments characterized by a multiplicity of parties and a mixed electoral system. This approach offers new bases for estimating levels of political competence, and for measuring the political sophistication of the mass public. Finally, a number of ideas are put forward as to how experimental research might advance the study of cognitive processes.

This chapter focuses on the Liberal's defeat in 1874 and the disaffection of crucial sections of Liberal support. Nonconformists were opposed to the 1870 Education Act, the trade unions were hostile to the 1871 trade union legislation, and brewers and landlords were in uproar over the 1872 Licensing Act. In many ways this was closer to a later twentieth-century conception of politics as the reflection of the material interests of groups demanding favours from governments as the price of electoral support, than the more nuanced nature of mid-Victorian politics where the vote was not a bargaining chip but a badge of status, manhood, and independence. Disaffection rather than defections by organized labour accounted for the defeat of the Liberals, who actually managed to retain much of their strength in the Northern boroughs. It was not in the North, but in the southern shires and London that the Liberals lost the election.

To what extent does society need a 'second-wave' of writing on depoliticisation to correct the biases of the first and thereby to improve our capacity to gain analytical traction on the dynamic interplay between politicising and depoliticising tendencies in contemporary liberal democracies? This chapter welcomes the debate this special issue has opened, but defend the first wave against its critics. More specifically, it argues that the first wave literature provides ample analytical and theoretical resources to capture the dynamic interplay between depoliticising tendencies and politicising or repoliticising counter-tendencies which its critics rightly place at centre stage. Indeed, it goes further, suggesting that the more empirical contributions of the special issue, while bringing a series of new and important insights to the analysis of politicisation–depoliticisation dynamics, in fact do so by drawing extensively on first wave depoliticisation theory. Such work is very necessary and advances significantly our understanding of depoliticising, but it extends rather than challenges first wave perspectives and is ultimately better characterised as 'second generation' rather than 'second wave'.

This chapter focuses on the academically neglected area of miracles and their sustainability, not just because they characterize the effervescent qualities of Pentecostal conviction, but also because they illustrate its fragility. Using the research done on Kyrgyzstan's largest Pentecostal church, the Church of Jesus Christ, this chapter identifies the attractiveness of the Pentecostal message to those struggling with the vagaries of life in a former Soviet state. Miracles are central to this process, circulating through sermons and informal settings and allowing congregants to actively engage with questions of divine intervention and life transformation. However, they need to gain social and semiotic recognition as miracles first. Furthermore, the truth of miracles runs the risk of failure in those contexts where the miraculous is needed the most.

With reference to the latest data, the chapter provided a review on the educational attainment of children in the UK between 2005/06 and 2014/15. It covered pupil attainments in Key Stage 2 (age 11), 4 (age 15-16) and 5 (age 17-18) and examined how attainment varies by age, sex, ethnicity and free school meal eligibility. By referring to the latest PISA survey for evidence, it looked at how UK’s school leavers compared internationally regarding their ‘readiness’ to participate in the 21st century society. In addition to attainment, children’s views about their well-being at school are also considered by drawing on the findings from the PISA survey, the HBSC and the Good Childhood Report. Furthermore, data on truancy, school exclusion, special educational needs and young people not in education, employment or training are also discussed. Finally, some latest findings on educational inequality and social mobility are also reviewed.

Chapter 7 covers exit from schooling attendance. Viewed through lens of Hirschman’s Exit, Voice and Loyalty theoretical framework, “school exit” is seen as deliberate (elective or desperate) act. Exit is described as a response to harms for both children and parents when schooling fails people. The chapter describes mainstream schooling’s democratic deficit and the flight to an alternative with greater voice facility. It discusses the human right to discover EHE (and other alternatives to mainstream schooling), but no practice without concept is possible. Most people are blinded by schooling as education and there is no protected right to know about other pathways. “Mu education” is discussed as a useful form of knowing without given answers, relevant to alternatives. A foreclosing lineage of school attendance expectation can be derailed by discovering education without schools. There will be a technological future linked to the likely rise in school exit. Technology as facilitating discovery of education without schools. There is a need for discovery to not just occur via word of mouth or chance for democratic equity reasons: all should have the option of alternatives.