Abstract
Keywords
Introduction
In
To pick one illustrative example, on June 12th 2019, in the middle of the Conservative leadership contest, journalist Marie le Conte tweeted: ‘so this is my first proper leadership contest as an actual Westminster person and honestly it’s such a hoot, someone clicks their fingers and suddenly all your pals are sorted into different teams and fighting each other while you drink with them all, huge fan of the drama’
She is a ‘huge fan of the drama’ 1 – but where is the drama? Is the drama a group of people in London, all of whom earn multiple times the national median wage, passing comment on one another in the presence of journalists? Or is the drama, say, at the UK border, as scared and tired refugees are told they must return to the place they have just fled or at the food bank where the unemployed father of three relies on the charity of strangers to feed his family? In the context of an ‘anti-politics mood’ gripping democratic politics, such a framing of what politics is about is likely to exacerbate the sense of distance people feel from those making decisions about their lives.
This contradiction between what le Conte – a self-defined ‘actual Westminster person’ – wants to get out of her experience of politics and what politics actually produces in broader material outcomes is the focus of this paper’s analysis. This gulf underpins our identification of a danger in treating politics from a ‘fannish’ perspective. To be clear, in making this point we are not setting up another iteration of the by now familiar attack upon the merging of politics and entertainment in the style of Postman’s (1985)
One response might be that politics is quite clearly a form of entertainment since it ‘can provide gratification and enjoyment’ (Van Zoonen, 2005: 10). But our argument is not that there is no happiness to be found in politics. Nor do we ignore the reality that engaging the interest of average citizens requires forms of communication that draw upon dramatic, story-telling processes (ibid.). Neither do we dismiss or criticise the phenomenon of ‘fan-based citizenship’, in which fans of particular popular culture products turn their resources towards political campaigning, such as the Harry Potter Alliance campaigning for fair trade chocolate in Potterverse products (Ninck, 2019). Rather, we argue against a form of political engagement that treats politics as an object of fandom. This form of engagement fixes a dynamic by bounding and locating politics so as to facilitate a relationship with it based on reading, interpretation and literacy (cf. Duffett, 2013: 54), and that privileges drama, storylines and personalities.
Politics is the activity through which power and resources are allocated across society. Politics, and what it does to all of our lives, is consequential. Despite this, many of those who pay the most attention to politics do so from the position of a fan, engaging with it in the way that others engage with traditional entertainment forms like comic books and films. Previous studies have paid attention to the fandoms and anti-fandoms that develop around individual politicians and movements, maintaining a focus on the behaviours and actions of identified fans of politics. By contrast, in this article we explore the construction and treatment of politics
Like interpretations of the rules of baseball and the idea of what constitutes ‘good’ art, politics is socially constructed and is an activity that can be shaped and construed by different actors to serve some purpose. As a result, who does the constructing and how they do this affects what it becomes. We argue that, while entirely appropriate for a plethora of other socio-cultural phenomena, from the fields of fashion to literary fiction, when politics is engaged with via a fannish relationship by the people whose job it is to inform citizens about contemporary politics, it essentially estranges us from the processes of power and secures its attendant inequalities. Our overarching claim is thus that constructing politics as an object of fandom (aka ‘the drama’) affects the conduct of politics itself.
The paper proceeds by defining politics before introducing the concepts of fandom and politics fandom. The rest of the paper illustrates the phenomenon we describe (and its impact) using the example of the UK. Our line of argument, in brief, is as follows. Politics, like the rest of the social world, can be defined in different ways and different definitions place emphasis on, and draw focus to, different elements of a given phenomenon in such a way that affects what that thing is taken
What is politics?
Politics is a complex and multifaceted thing and different conceptualisations emphasise different aspects of it. For example, politics can be about expression, with individuals and groups articulating how they think things should go. Politics can be about institutions, about places where actors participating in activities that we call ‘politics’ happens, and it can be about material outcomes, a process that ends with the distribution of resources of various kinds across society. The personal can also be political. To some extent,
Much of the existing literature frames the consideration of this question through the further question of how individuals engage with politics (Ekman and Amnå, 2012). At the heart of this literature is a distinction between formal and informal political engagement. 2 Formal political engagement focuses on established political institutions, namely, legislatures of various kinds. Accounts or definitions of this kind see politics as activities that are directed towards these institutions. Primarily, this includes elections of various kinds (whereby citizens decide on the composition of the legislative body) but can also include the holding of attitudes about elected politicians or indeed seeking to become an elected politician oneself (Lawless and Fox, 2005).
For much of the twentieth century, political scientists saw formal engagement as the only game in town even to the extent that some dominant accounts saw citizens’ role purely as choosing between elites and no more (Schumpeter, 2013 [1942]). By the early 2000s, however, decreasing turnout at elections across advanced Western democracies called these dominant models of engagement into question (Mair, 2006) – if citizens weren’t engaging formally, did this mean they had disengaged from politics entirely or had they simply shifted to alternative modes of engagement? Broadly speaking, the literature, responding to this shift and to the relatively sudden prominence of the Internet in political life, adopted this two-track approach, acknowledging that citizens could be seen to be engaging in activities that counted as ‘politics’ outside of merely voting in elections or speaking to their elected representatives (Theocharis et al., 2021).
These alternative forms of participation are sometimes described as ‘expressive’ and this is the element of politics that, as individuals going about our lives, is perhaps the most familiar to the layperson, consisting of the holding and articulating of political opinions. It is notable, however, that this aspect of politics was identified as ‘the most important and politically significant feature of voting’ in Riker and Ordeshook’s classic paper on the calculus of voting (1968). As such, it is not unique to these newer forms of political participation, even if it plays a more prominent role in them.
Finally, politics can also be characterised by what it results in in material terms – the outcomes. Perhaps the most famous definition of politics in existence, offered by Lasswell (1936), focuses almost entirely on this, the title of his book being
To reiterate, our point here is that the emphasis one places on these different aspects of politics will affect the kind of thing that politics
Fandom
Before we outline what politics fandom is, we need to establish what fandom itself is. Widely studied, fandom is not a coherent object in itself; as Duffett (2013: 3) notes, for example, sports fandoms – often tribal and competitive – and media fandoms such as television series, books or board games, have been treated as very different objects of study. Nevertheless, in practical terms, fandoms commonly involve communities of enthusiasts or supporters intentionally formed around and engaging with specific media or cultural properties that become a shared ‘object of affection’ (Reinhard and Miller, 2020; cf. Andrews, 2020; 2021) – or ‘fan-object’ (Hinck, 2019: 9) – amongst them.
Obvious examples of such fan-objects include football teams, music groups, actors, film franchises and computer game series. But fandom can attach itself to any source material, not only those drawn from the spheres of popular and high culture. Specifically, what makes one a
Fans read books, buy merchandise and talk about these things with other fans. In doing so they develop familiarity with specialised, product-specific knowledge: pro-wrestling fans, for example, recognise and can name a vast array of wrestling manoeuvers – from ‘Irish Whips’ and ‘atomic drops’ to ‘tornado DDTs’ and ‘Boston crabs’ – and their signature utilisation by different performers, allowing them to interpret, from the application of particular moves in particular sequences, the likely predetermined outcome of matches (see Dell, 2006: 22). This knowledge extends beyond the purported object of fandom – for example, the fantastical stories contained between the covers of George R. R. Martin’s
Politics fandom
Traditionally, fandom has been seen as attached to ‘trivial’ and ‘unimportant’ things, such as television series or film franchises, linking into a stereotype of fans as immature and unserious (Duffet, 2013: 37). As a result, some individuals who perform ‘fannish actions’ will vehemently reject the label’s application to the particular thing
Recently, however, there has been a growing acknowledgement that the tools used to study fandom can be usefully applied to the study of politics. A recent special journal issue on ‘Fandom and Politics’ explores how different fandoms have engaged in politics while emphasising fandom’s value for recognising the role of emotions in politics generally (Reinhard and Miller, 2020). Scholars from within political studies such as Dean and Andrews (2021; Andrews, 2020; 2021) have also started drawing upon the field of fan studies, using it to investigate the phenomenon of fandom (and anti-fandom) of individual politicians such as Jeremy Corbyn, Ed Miliband, Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher. Unsurprisingly, given the above, such fans have faced criticism from fellow politics followers for their alleged lack of seriousness. As Andrews (2021: 256) notes, however: ‘a lot of the people making these criticisms are also fans of politics or a political party. They follow it so keenly that it is clearly a strong interest for them. They read articles, watch television and collect books and merchandise related to politics and discuss politics with friends they have made through their interest. For any other cultural property, this behaviour would be quickly read as fandom and not, as it is, denied and disparaged and put onto other people as an identity rather than the fans themselves’.
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Participants in politics fandom take on the characteristics of an epistemic community (Haas, 1992). First, they treat politics as akin to a sport, game or form of entertainment, with commentary offered on political events in much the same way that one would expect on a football match or television series. Second, they adopt a knowing stance in these discussions, with participants rarely explicitly expressing their own fealty to a set of ideologically-grounded political views. Instead, their views are purported to come from the position of an expert observer or from a hypothesised neutral political position. Third, these discussions often take on a tone of irony or ‘snark’, the assumption being that valid interlocutors in the debate will ‘get’ the message being conveyed while those who aren’t in the know will not. Overall, this is something like the inside baseball-ization of political discussion. The
Conversations amongst political pundits have ‘a distinct flavour: an interest in process over substance, a preference for certain kinds of knowledge (primarily statistics) and a mode of engagement that is at pains to assert its political objectivity’ (Allen, 2019: 75). Scholars of political communication refer to this discursive style as ‘strategic game framing’, with a focus on tactics and strategy, winners and losers (aka ‘horse-race coverage’ (Aalberg et al., 2011)), as opposed to ‘issue framing’ approaches that focus on the detail of political problems, proposed policy responses, and the consequent outcomes of different solutions (Young et al. 2019: 84). The result is commentary focused on interpreting the ‘message’ politicians seek to tactically convey by their messaging – for whom? To what end? – rather than any substantive ideological content of their statements.
Politics fans are continually learning the ‘rules of the game’. They then apply their understanding of these rules to interpret these political signals as an ‘insider’ would. As already noted above, this requires an ability to actively think like the writers, producers and actors of their particular fan-object – or, in this case, the politicos, wonks and lobby hacks who package and transmit politics. The implication is that, as fans of politics, the reception of any political information takes place inside this particular, narrow framework of ‘rules’ with an interpretive focus aimed at uncovering the strategic
Furthermore, treating politics as an object of fandom akin to a sport exacerbates the distinction of politics as a separate field from citizens. By bringing the ‘characters’ into sharp relief, with professional practitioners as the focus, other issues become peripheral (with attempts to bring them back in treated as indicative of a lack of political understanding: ‘that isn’t politics’). It also reproduces gatekeeping behaviours – in order to to ‘play along’ one needs to learn all of the complex terminology, cast of characters and history and one is thus incentivised to ensure that others do too. As Bourdieu puts it: ‘This means that the political field in fact produces an effect of censorship by limiting the universe of political discourse, and thereby the universe of what is politically thinkable, to the finite space of discourses capable of being produced or reproduced within the limits of the political
In other words, treating politics as a fan-object raises barriers to engagement by necessitating the mastering of a complex rulebook before one can play. ‘Bad fans’ must be policed and the closed shop of political discussion must be limited to those with specialist knowledge. Equally, in a context of high levels of political distrust (an ‘anti-politics’ mood (Clarke et al., 2018)), discussing politics in a way that emphasises how there will always be some secondary meaning to every utterance is only likely to reinforce the idea that politicians do not mean what they say.
The fans
Writing in 2005, political economist Michael Moran observed that ‘[T]here are perhaps no more than 100,000 really committed political activists in Britain – by which I mean people for whom, beyond work and the immediate demands of family life, politics is a really time-consuming activity’ (2005: 7). The group focused on here is a subset of this group, probably numbering a couple of thousand people at most, and we do so not owing to their number but their influence. As noted at the outset, rather than focussing on what might be thought of as ‘mass’ fandom at the level of the general public, we instead focus on a form of elite fandom held among those who work in or around British politics. This group might be described as the ‘intensely politically involved’ (Allen, 2019: 71): ‘a group of individuals who hold positions of social power that allow them to shape dominant conceptions of politics and political activity. These people make a lot of the proverbial political weather and are continually asked to comment on it in some sort of professional capacity. They include prominent members of the news media, notable academics or other leading political professionals, and former or current politicians who are especially influential or highly thought-of within the two previous groups’.
As academic scholars of politics, the authors – and our disciplinary colleagues – fall into this category. However, perhaps the most socially (and politically) influential members of this group are political pundits and columnists, generally working in both print and broadcast legacy media outlets. As Jon Green writes regarding the US context, ‘[i]n their capacities as informal political elites who are extremely sophisticated relative to ordinary citizens and unencumbered by the electoral pressures that politicians face, pundits engage in wide-ranging discourse regarding how society is and ought to be ordered’ (2022: 2). Alastair S. Duff (2008: 230) argues that ‘political columnists are instrumental in the development of public knowledge and that they help to determine the ethical and political calibre of the societies in which we live’. Brian McNair concurs, writing of political pundits’ ‘ability to interpret complex reality in ways which contribute directly to their readers’ evaluation of political rhetoric and action’ (2000: 208).
The move away from news production focused on specific times or editions (e.g. evening news slots and first and second editions) has intensified since the late 1990s and the advent of 24-h cable news. In recent times, the perpetual news machine has operated out of, and through, Twitter. Mills et al. have noted that among British journalists Twitter is ‘widely used for a range of professional purposes including monitoring news, gauging opinion, identifying and fostering contacts and sources, publishing live reports and commentary, and promoting content’ (2021: 3). Social media is also where the breadth of individuals identified above – from political editors to political scientists working in academia – come together. Although it is likely their in-person social networks would have overlapped in the past, social media permits this to take place without the constraint of needing to be in the same physical space (Mills et al., 2021) and, on Twitter, interested members of the public can also bear witness to their interactions in real time.
This development has run alongside a ‘deep and continuing crisis’ for ‘UK local, regional and national news media’ (Williams et al., 2015: 681) wherein the economic model that historically sustained traditional media – one based on print sales and advertising revenue – has come under strain as Internet access has become widespread. This has, broadly speaking, led to the domination of the media sector by a smaller number of bigger players and, in turn, ‘[D]igital technology has recalibrated and become integrated with existing media institutions, practices and power structures’ (Mills et al., 2021: 1). The nature of the ‘media economy’ (Meyer, 2002: 35) means that the imperative to sell entertaining content in order to produce profit will survive any shifts in how that content is initially funded. For example, although it is difficult to establish the precise causal pathways, it appears to be the case that a lot of the contemporary discourse regarding politics and political events at the elite level is driven by social media. Previously, political participation involved physical involvement with groups such as trade unions, churches and political parties – institutions whose membership have declined, taking with them the social identifications and securities that came with them (Bauman, 2013). The development of networked technologies has been central to providing spaces for new collective communities to form across geographical distances – as it has been for other fandoms – and platforms to reiterate, daily, the discursive practices that sustain the community and the boundaries of its membership (Hinck, 2019: 13). In the context of a changing media economy, social media’s rise as a key form of news dissemination can thus be seen as a method by, and forum in which, political coverage can be served to more curated audiences in this more easily-consumed fan-object form.
As is true of essentially any position of power in the UK, journalism is composed of individuals from privileged backgrounds. Alan Milburn (2016) Social Mobility Commission report found that just 11 percent of journalists are from working class backgrounds (Milburn and 2016: xi). A more recent study by Gary James Merrill (2021) compares the socio-demographic profiles of senior BBC journalists with members of the cabinet and shadow cabinet, as they were comprised in 2019. Focussing on ‘11 presenters of BBC One TV news bulletins…; 23 journalists from BBC Radio 4…; 14 presenters of programmes devoted to political discussion and debate…; and 18 editors and specialist correspondents’, this BBC cohort is ‘a small proportion of the BBC’s news output and…journalistic workforce’ but, all the same, Merrill argues, ‘[T]hese are the people whom the public depend upon to explain and interpret important national and international events, and to hold powerful figures to account through their questioning’ (2021: 105). Although it is true that behind the scenes editorial decisions will drive the general thrust of BBC political news programming, there is equally little reason to assume that the socio-demographic profile of that group is drastically different to those who serve as the public face of that programming.
Of the BBC cohort that Merrill studies, one in seven ‘grew up in households that might be deemed working class’ (2021: 106) and two-thirds were privately educated (‘almost ten times more likely than the average Briton to have gone to an independent school’ (2021: 107)). 90% attended Russell Group institutions for their higher education and 45% attended either Oxford or Cambridge (Merrill, 2021: 109). A final area that Merrill considers – one rarely addressed in existing work – is the occupation of the partners of senior BBC journalists. He finds that, ‘[O]f 31 journalists whose partner’s occupations are known, two-thirds work in the media or the arts’ (2021: 111). Merrill summarises that ‘[O]verall, senior BBC journalists have far more in common with the Conservative cabinet that the British public… both cohorts had relatively comfortable life experiences, and if the politicians’ previous careers and the occupations of the journalists’ partners are factored in, one can also imagine overlap in their social groups’ (2021: 111). The journalist and academic Gary Younge reflects: “In Britain, the percentage of columnists who went to private schools and Oxford or Cambridge is higher than it is in the House of Lords. Then you have this group of people who know each other, even if they don’t personally know each other…So when there are these ruptures – and this is as true for Trump as it was for Jeremy Corbyn in Britain – then they kind of band together, and the journalists become like political actors and as gatekeepers and they become affronted personally by the presence of these interlopers who have been selected by the great unwashed” (quoted in Srinivasan, 2020).
This group is in possession of material wealth, social status via their occupation, and the associated social capital in the form of educational advantage, social networks and other forms of habitus (Friedman and Laurison, 2020). Consequently, they engage with politics from a certain position in society and, owing to the nature of their occupation, in a certain way. For this group, ‘politics’ is elite, institutional politics conducted in formal political institutions and takes place among a group of politicians and advisors whom, in many cases, they know personally or expect to know personally over the course of their (hopefully lengthy) careers. And for most, given their backgrounds, politics is unlikely to be seen or felt as a fight over bleak material conditions – this group does not for the most part sit at the sharp end of policy decisions regarding welfare payments, for example. Our claim is that this status, and the embodied disposition to the world that comes with it, underpins the approach of the intensely politically involved to politics itself – politics fandom – and aligns with their use of social and traditional media platforms to construct politics in the way we describe: as an object of fandom, ripe for presentation in the sort of easily-consumed forms that sustain its audience’s attention. This in turn goes some way in explaining why this conception of politics is so attractive to the media companies who popularise and enrich those who articulate it.
The contours of politics as an object of fandom in contemporary Britain
A notable feature of politics fandom is a sort of sanitisation in which mentioning the actual material effects of politics becomes almost vulgar. In part, this is because the kind of politics fandom we are interested in treats politics as an aesthetic object, something that is meant to take a certain form within a delimited space without concern for material outcomes. Where outcomes or substance are discussed, they are suitably vague or generic as to not be sources of contention. That is, to say, on this view politics exists within a fairly limited ideological space that is dictated by the centre-right but includes aspects of social democratic and ‘third way’ policy platforms.
Drawing out the fandom aspects of this delimited political space, Mark Duffett’s concept of ‘imagined memories’ is helpful. As Hills (2013: viii) summarises: ‘These are memories of key events in the fan object’s history – the Beatles’ early performances, or the campaign to bring back
The version of British politics conjured by politics fandom bears some of these hallmarks. A key figure here is Tony Blair, the former Leader of the Labour Party and the Prime Minister between 1997 and 2007. Blair and the political project that he led, known as New Labour, brings together a number of the main preoccupations of the intensely politically involved. New Labour offered a self-consciously aesthetic kind of politics, focused on branding and political marketing in a way that was unprecedented in UK politics. At the same time, it also declared itself to be a political project that was largely uninterested in replicating traditional forms of political ideology. Now a quarter of a century since Blair first entered Downing Street as Prime Minister, the narrative that he was the best political operator since Margaret Thatcher and that his government achieved a significant amount of progressive political change has consolidated itself as something bordering on a shibboleth of mainstream, sensible politics. In this context, to question Blair’s acumen is to identify yourself as outside of the club and not in the know. Matthew d’Ancona, the centre-right journalist, speaking after interviewing Blair on his podcast in July 2022, noted that Blair was ‘articulate, thoughtful and confident; still, many would argue, head and shoulders above every other British politician more than 15 years after he left Number Ten’. 4 In this light, anyone questioning Blair’s achievements by, for example, raising the death toll associated with the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq, will elicit eye-rolling dismissal and accusations of ‘trolling’ (it is hard to uncomplicatedly enjoy something if you acknowledge that it produces dead bodies, which politics, of course, frequently does).
The preoccupation with Blair and New Labour is exemplary of a tacit acceptance of the idea that the practice of politics is subject to a series of rules that, if followed, will lead to (electoral) success and to failure if they are not. The contours of this particular set of rules was most clearly brought into focus when members of the intensely involved were overwhelmingly
Much of this attitude is packaged within a faux self-effacing tone. For example, the-then BBC Political Editor and now host of the main weekend political programme on the BBC, Laura Kuenssberg, would frequently discuss key political events with the caveat that they might only be of interest to ‘nerds’ like herself: Queen’s Speech day (‘yes I am that much of a nerd that this is an exciting day in my book’);
5
it is ‘a nerd point’ to see a politician call another politician a liar in the House of Commons;
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and her description of the events leading to the resignation of a government minister necessitated the deployment of a ‘nerd alert’.
7
In a similar way, the political commentator, comedian and former party activist, Matt Forde (2020: 1), opens his book ( My name is Matt Forde and I am a political obsessive. There, I’ve said it…I’m consumed by anything to do with politics and I am beyond help. I love every part of it – the ideas, the individuals, the debate, elections, committees, scandals, inquiries, budgets, mistakes, the lot. Every tedious element of it engages me…The political institutions enchant me; I love going to Parliament [sic] buildings and council chambers for the first time in the same way that I enjoy going to football stadiums for the first time.
So, if the nerds, the serious obsessives, are engaging with politics in this way – reportedly enchanted by pageantry and revelling in tedium – what are we to make of people who engage in different ways?
One of the hallmarks of Corbyn’s approach to the general election campaigns of 2017 and 2019 was the use of large-scale rallies that would see sometimes thousands of supporters gather to hear Corbyn, often alongside celebrities of varying levels of fame and notoriety, speak (Saunders, 2021). Largely held in safe Labour seats (those where the party was expected to perform well at the impending election), the rallies were criticised as ‘preaching to the converted’. Clare Saunders (2021) highlights how political science had largely ignored the rally as a form of political campaigning or participation and, among the intensely involved, rallies were not seen as something worthy of attention. It is possible to locate this lack of interest in a broader sweep of declining political participation across advanced democracies that has rendered the political sphere as a ‘void’ to use Peter Mair’s term (2006). Arguably this vacuity is a feature not a bug of politics when treated as an object of fandom. The absence of mass participation provides the intensely involved – those few who are left tending the void – with the ability to shape politics in their own image. The challenge that the apparent popularity of Corbyn’s rallies presented to this arrangement can be seen as prompting the negative response they received. Part of this is a sense that rallies were distasteful in some way, not part of the appropriate universe of potential political activities. Despite a long, essentially ancient, lineage as part of a ‘plebeian’ mode of democratic engagement (Green, 2022), such activities were apparently considered gauche.
This focus on the right kind of presentation necessitates that all of this be taken extremely seriously: although one can assume that veteran media figures are aware that presentation is often just that – a front – it is verboten to expose this. In other words, the acceptance and indeed promotion of the idea that presentation overrides content coexists with a defensive reverence for elite politics and its institutions. In the British case, this was highlighted by the response to comedian Joe Lycett’s autumn 2022 appearance on a Sunday morning political magazine show hosted by the aforementioned Laura Kuenssberg. Appearing on the first ever episode of
Conclusion
In her book
Like fans of television drama, the intensely involved are able to treat politics as not necessarily ‘real’ but still worthy of deep emotional investment. They follow it, discuss it, and speculate about it. But the way they do so makes politics itself into a particular version of itself: one focused on process and aesthetic over materiality and outcome, something undertaken by elites and an object to be revered. To some extent, we could see this as akin to a workplace culture; as
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
Funding
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