REFLECTIONS ON GENERATIONAL ANALYSIS: IS THERE A SHARED POLITICAL PERSPECTIVE BETWEEN MEN AND WOMEN?

Abstract. Diachronic investigation of partisan choice and issue orientation by generational analysis is a popular method of contemporary political research. There is as well increased interest in the role played by women in politics. Yet studies of European politics have rarely explored the utility of analysis which assumes shared generational political perspectives in explaining differences in the political behaviour and orientations of men and women. This paper evaluates generational analysis as an explanation of differences in the issue orientations of British men and women during the 1970 electoral campaign.     

State of the field: What can political ethnography tell us about anti-politics and democratic disaffection?

This article adopts and reinvents the ethnographic approach to uncover what governing elites do, and how they respond to public disaffection. Although there is significant work on the citizens’ attitudes to the governing elite (the demand side) there is little work on how elites interpret and respond to public disaffection (the supply side). It is argued here that ethnography is the best available research method for collecting data on the supply side. The article tackles longstanding stereotypes in political science about the ethnographic method and what it is good for, and highlights how the innovative and varied practices of contemporary ethnography are ideally suited to shedding light into the ‘black box’ of elite politics. The potential pay-off is demonstrated with reference to important examples of elite ethnography from the margins of political science scholarship. The implications from these rich studies suggest a reorientation of how one understands the drivers of public disaffection and the role that political elites play in exacerbating cynicism and disappointment. The article concludes by pointing to the benefits to the discipline in embracing elite ethnography both to diversify the methodological toolkit in explaining the complex dynamics of disaffection, and to better enable engagement in renewed public debate about the political establishment.