Following a public engagement workshop in June hosted by the Institute of Historical Research in Senate House which looked at how Mass Observation could be used to develop a better understanding of political engagement, Jonathan Moss and Emily Robinson have had a policy paper published by the network, History and Policy entitled ‘Mass Observation and Political Engagement in Britain’.

Following a record-low turnout at the 2024 general election, declining levels of political trust and efficacy, and calls from the British Polling Council for greater methodological pluralism and the use of more mixed-methods approaches to better understand Britain’s political culture, Moss and Robinson explore how political studies might develop new methods for understanding engagement.

Arguing that Mass Observation (MO) offers policymakers and campaigners a deeper understanding of the moods underlying political disaffection in the UK, Moss and Robinson propose that MO should be revived – and funded – as a public resource for democratic reflection. MO offers rich, qualitative material that helps illuminate the emotional and experiential dimensions of political life, providing a deeper understanding of the present moment.

The paper draws historical parallels between today and the 1930s, when MO was first established. Its founders were concerned about voter apathy and political disengagement, seeking to develop new ways for policymakers to understand public sentiment – whilst also raising political awareness among citizens in a time of polarisation and extremism.

There are clear echoes of that context today. The paper makes the case for reviving MO as a political resource, securing its long-term future, and funding it in a similar way to the British Social Attitudes survey.

This week, Nick Clarke is presenting a paper at the Royal Geographical Society’s annual conference with Khaleda Brophy-Harmer on Using Mass Observation for qualitative longitudinal research. Here’s the abstract:

Since 1981, Mass Observation has run a panel of writers who respond to ‘directives’ – sets of open-ended questions – every few months. If geographers have used this qualitative data recently, they have mostly done so by analysing a range of responses to a small number of directives on a particular topic e.g. Brexit (Clarke and Moss 2021); thrift (Ehgartner and Holmes 2022); time pressure (Holdsworth 2022); the Covid-19 pandemic (Clarke and Barnett 2023); bedrooms (Walsh 2024); drones (Jackman 2025). It is possible, however, to analyse the responses of certain panellists to multiple directives over multiple years. In this paper, we reflect on two studies using this longitudinal approach. One project on the performative production of whiteness followed a small number of panellists over time, tracking their mobile racial identities. A second project on political understandings is currently following a larger number of panellists, tracking development of understandings over the life course.

On Tuesday 17^th June, members of the team were involved in a workshop at the Institute for Historical Research exploring how Mass Observation could be used to develop a better understanding of political engagement in collaboration with History & Policy.

The workshop involved people from the Cabinet Office and various campaign groups, including Unlock Democracy, Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust UK Democracy Fund, and Involve, as well as academics from across the UK.

The workshop considered how MO can be used to explore the moods circulating behind low turnout figures at the 2024 General Election and high levels of political distrust recorded by recent opinion polls. The discussion highlighted both the challenges of working with this material and the unique insights it can offer—insights that may not be accessible through other sources. It also raised important questions about the types of research it could support and the methods it might adopt to be more useful to policymakers, campaigners, and others concerned with the future of British politics.

A recurring theme that emerged from the discussion was the potential value of analysing Mass Observation panellists’ writing longitudinally, and exploring how individual political engagement changed across the lifecourse, which clearly connects to the aim of our project.

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Members of the research team have been talking about Mass Observation and interdisciplinary connections between modern British history and political science over the last couple of months.

May 2025

Conference: British History Today, Queen Mary Centre for British Studies, London.

Presentation title: ‘Past Politics, Present Histories – Interdisciplinary Reflections’

Speaker: Jonathan Moss

Abstract: British political history has long been seen as in decline, although political topics flourish under other names. This panel looks outside internal dynamics within our field to consider: what does British history look like from the perspective of political studies? The four panellists are historians, currently working in Politics departments. They will draw on their own experiences to consider what political historians might learn from — and offer to — such an encounter. Modern British historians have recently explored the popular reach of sociology from the mid-twentieth century. The prominence of (flawed) categories like the ‘left-behind’ in contemporary public consciousness suggests that political science similarly shapes vernacular understandings of political events. Such explanations rely on interpretations of historical processes, such as globalisation, decolonisation, and educational expansion. But they do so in broad-brush terms, distinct from historians’ multivocal accounts of contingency and contestation. This leaves historians at a disadvantage in commanding public attention (and funding!). In 2016, Hugh Pemberton suggested that political historians had lost sight of the importance of elite actors and institutions, as well as the ‘big picture’. He argued historians should engage with political science, explore causal explanations, and tell bigger stories. Nearly a decade on, this panel will ask:

• Why have political scientists been so effective at shaping public understandings of the past?

• How might we learn from that in developing and presenting historical accounts of modern Britain?

• Would historians benefit from more explicit theorising and modelling, ‘big picture’ analyses, and focus on causal explanations, of the kind that characterise political science?

• What would be lost in doing so? Where might we want to push back? What important developments in our field have led us to be cautious of these approaches?

• What can a historian’s perspective, rather than just historical data or case studies, offer political scientists?

April 2025

Conference: Annual Conference of the British Sociological Association, Manchester.

Presentation title: Four ways of working with Mass Observation

Speaker: Nick Clarke

Abstract: I discuss four ways of working with Mass Observation. The first reads MO writing for how people receive attempts to govern their conduct. The diary form allows writers to record such attempts, the dilemmas they presented, and how they responded. The directive form works to position writers in relation to current affairs, allowing researchers to analyse directive-responses for how people receive such positioning. The second way addresses the problem of representativeness. MO writing is read for the cultural resources used by writers to make sense of their lives and the world around them. If shared by differently situated writers, these cultural resources are inferred to be circulating widely in society at that particular historical moment. The third addresses the problem of representation. Can MO be used to give voice to ordinary people, without speaking for them, in a way that aligns with recent agendas of public, participatory social science? The original MO of the late 1930s published MO writing in edited form. This way of working with MO seeks to revive such a strategy: researchers as editors, publishing the writing of MO correspondents. The fourth is captured by an image from Jennings’ Pandaemonium. He describes a rope. One option is to cut the rope and study the multiple strands where it was cut. This represents the possibility of using particular MO directives for cross-sectional analysis. Another option is to follow one strand along the length of the rope. This represents the possibility of using particular MO panellists for longitudinal analysis.

We are looking to hire a postdoctoral researcher to work on the project. The project uses previously overlooked longitudinal qualitative data from the Mass Observation Archive (MOA) to answer a fundamental research question: how do political understandings develop over the life course? It follows various individuals who wrote for the Mass Observation Project from the early 1980s to the present day, tracing their political development – the development of their political understandings, interests, preferences, habits, and identities – and the role of events, material circumstances, and cultural frames in this development. In doing so, the project aims to contribute a fresh perspective on emerging age divisions and the development of ‘grey power’ in British politics. 

We are seeking a social scientist or historian: 

– To assist in managing the project. 

– To collect qualitative material from the Mass Observation Archive at the University of Sussex. 

– To assist in analysing this material using NVivo and biographical analysis. 

– To participate in dissemination of findings via academic conferences and journal papers. 

About You 

You will have or be about to obtain* a PhD in Politics, History, or a related subject (thesis must be completed before commencement of employment). You will have experience in qualitative research methods, as well as British politics and/or modern British history. You will have excellent communication skills and proven capacity to write and present research papers in various academic formats.  

Please contact Dr Jonathan Moss (j.moss@sussex.ac.uk) for informal enquiries. 

Applications should be accompanied by a full CV, a sample of writing, and the names of two academic references

Click here to apply.

Conference: RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, Birmingham, 26-29 August 2025

Session: Qualitative longitudinal methodologies in and beyond human geography

A recent Special Section of Area considered the uses and outcomes of qualitative longitudinal methodologies for researching crisis (Brickell et al 2024). This in-person paper session aims to continue that conversation and expand its scope. We invite considerations of qualitative longitudinal methodologies and related methodologies, including community, biographical, and life-course methodologies. We invite considerations of the methodological opportunities and challenges posed by such methodologies. We invite reports of research findings generated by such methodologies, from any research theme in human geography and related disciplines.

To express an interest in participating, please send proposed authors, affiliations, titles, and abstracts (150 words max.) to Khaleda Brophy-Harmer (University of Southampton, kbh1g13@soton.ac.uk) and Nick Clarke (University of Southampton, n.clarke@soton.ac.uk) by the deadline of 21 February.

Welcome to the website for The making of ‘grey power’: How political understandings develop over the life course project, led by Jonathan Moss and Nick Clarke. The project is funded by the the Leverhulme Trust Research Projects scheme, and will run from 2025 to 2027. The project will investigate how people’s political understandings developed as they grew older in Britain from the 1980s to the present.

Age has recently become the key dividing line in British politics and older people are the new driving force – what Chrisp and Pearce (2019) call ‘grey power’. Recent elections have seen unprecedented divisions in the electorate between older and younger voters, with those over 50 voting largely for the Conservative Party and smaller parties to the right, and those under 35 voting largely for the Labour Party and smaller parties to the left. Pronounced age divisions also marked voter preferences for Leave or Remain in the 2016 Brexit referendum: older voters delivered the narrow majority to ‘Leave’ the EU against the preference to ‘Remain’ of most younger voters.

Although rising electoral polarisation between older and younger voters has stimulated recent public interest in the politics of age, social scientists have a long-standing interest in the relationship between aging and voting behaviour. The popular wisdom that ‘if you are not a liberal when young, you have no heart; if you are not a conservative when old, you have no brain’(attributed to Winston Churchill) has been empirically tested by several studies looking at party preferences, vote choice, and attitudinal change over time, which have drawn few settled conclusions. This is an ongoing debate involving multiple positions and theories: cultural; economic; and psychological.

How do political understandings develop and change over the life course? This is the fundamental question underlying both new debates about emerging age divisions in British politics and enduring questions about the impact of aging on political engagement. Our project provides new insights into these debates by using previously overlooked biographical writing to explore the development of political understandings over the life course. It follows various individuals who wrote for the Mass Observation Project from the early 1980s to the present day, tracing their political development – the development of their political understandings, interests, preferences, habits, and identities – and the role of events, material circumstances, and cultural frames in this development.

We will post updates on the project on this site including regular blog posts discussing different aspects of the research.