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Joe Greenwood-Hau," Capital, Privilege and Political Participation" (Liverpool UP, 2025)
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Marshall Po
Hello everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this podcast on the New Books Network, I bet you like to read. I know that I do. That's why I founded the New Books Network. So as readers, we need to know what to read. And I have a podcast to recommend for you. That being the Proofread podcast. Do you have a goal to read more this year? How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread Podcast is here to help you. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They have 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. They offer a brief synopsis, there's fun and witty commentary and there are no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. Life's too short to read a bad book, so subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming soon. This episode is brought to you by Ovid tv. Where do savvy minds go to find masterful documentaries and hard to find films from across the globe? Try a free month long trial at Ovid and go beyond the mainstream. Indiewire says Ovid is unafraid to program films that matter. And the New York Times calls Ovid a terrific streamer for independent film fans. A boutique hand curated streaming service. Yet now with over 2,400 titles, Ovid is the home to films by auteurs from Chantal AK to Chris Marker to Wang Bing and has the richest collection of probing, avant garde and provocative films anywhere. Ovid offers many things except conformity. Try Ovid today and get your first month free. Use promo code N B N O V I D. That's Ovid tv. Promo code N B N O V.
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Joe Greenwood Howe (Author/Guest)
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Marshall Po
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Welcome to New Books in Critical Theory. It's a podcast that's part of the New Books Network. On this episode I'm talking to Joe Greenwood. Howe, about capital, privilege and political participation. So welcome to the podcast.
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Joe Greenwood Howe (Author/Guest)
Thank you very much.
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
This is a great book. I mean, it couldn't be more kind of relevant and of the moment in terms of thinking about who is involved in politics and maybe who is kind of excluded and how those two groups might be different. But at the same time, I think it offers something more than just a kind of hot take on political participation and has got some lessons and ideas, I think, that really speak way beyond, I guess, kind of syphology, political science, or even political sociology. And I'm intrigued really, as to where you got the idea to write about political participation. Why were you interested in kind of why people participate in politics and maybe kind of which different groups might be participating too?
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Joe Greenwood Howe (Author/Guest)
Okay, that's a really good question. So I think the first thing to say is it's really important to situate myself personally in this. So one of the reasons that I was interested in this is because I was brought up in a deeply political environment by two very politically active parents. And so sort of my first interaction with politics was sort of, it felt like natural or the norm. And so I ended up working in campaigning organizations. And one of the crucial questions that came up in one of those contexts was why are we only getting certain sorts of people coming to volunteer to support our campaigns or working on our campaigns? And no one in the campaigning space had time to answer that question, right, because they're focusing on doing the campaigns or getting funding or whatever the daily demands of a usually under resourced organization are. But it's something that really spoke to me because I think there's issues about how democracy and politics works here, right? If there are certain groups of people who are just not getting involved in politics, and especially if they're being excluded. And so I wanted the space to sort of try and find an answer to this or at least test some answers to this. And so that was the very personal reason was that politics was something I was brought up with. But then I ended up in a context where people were wondering, well, why are some groups doing this and other groups not? And there didn't seem to be an easy obvious answer to that. So I guess that was the very personal reason. And then as a consequence of that, I ended up doing a master's in political behavior. And then from that came this idea of, well, there's this unanswered question, why are some people doing it? And why are people doing it in different ways and to different extents? And I wanted to try and be as encompassing as possible in answering that. So then that sort of led to the research agenda that resulted in the book.
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
I mean, the. It is really important because you take, I guess, a kind of broad view of political participation. You know, you definitely don't just mean voting. It's a much kind of wider lens and I'm intrigued, I guess. Is there a sort of definition you'd give around political participation? You know, it's a kind of contested concept, isn't it? So it'd be useful, I guess, to kind of anchor the listeners in your understanding of that term.
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Joe Greenwood Howe (Author/Guest)
Absolutely. And you're right, it is contested and I think it's kind of on some level unresolved. Although one of the things I observed in the book is that in the way the public talk about politics and political participation, there's quite an intuitive sort of classic understanding that distinction between capital P partisan politics that goes on at Holyrood or Westminster or versus small P community grassroots based politics which might not be thought of as politics. So in terms of actually having a practical, workable definition, I think that's actually a pretty good stepping off point. I had a really, really broad, encompassing definition that was in a draft of the book but was roundly critiqued by colleagues and reviewers as so broad as to be meaningless. Which my definition was sort of any attempt by an individ in interaction with an institution or organization to change or conserve an element of society at some level. And friends and colleagues were saying, well then, what isn't politics by that definition? To which I couldn't really give a convincing answer. So I ended up with this much more, in my view, less satisfying but workable definition based on the empirics in the book, which is about different types of political act that people can undertake, which I split into sort of six categories. So based on previous typologies, so there's sort of like individualized acts, contacting acts, collective acts, charitable volunteering, donating and voting. So I don't exclude voting, but I'm absolutely, as you suggested, interested in much more than just voting. And so broadly speaking, if I try to fit all of that together, it's basically about the various things that people can do to try and bring about political change. That's what I'm interested in. And that might be through an organisation or independently, just by doing something like signing a petition. Right. And so I'm trying to be as encompassing as possible, but in a way that's workable, I suppose.
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
And we might sort of get in to the question of like, well, who does what differently a bit later on. But one of the things that the book kind of does quite early on is says that engagement, that participation, is really kind of like differentiated according to. There are various kind of terms you use. You talk about structural privileges, you talk about capital. If people are unfamiliar with these terms, maybe something like social resources might be another way of thinking about this. And I'm sort of intrigued as to the idea of structural privilege, of the different kind of resources people have. What are some of, I guess, the kind of examples of different structural privilege positions, different capitals people have, before we get into asking about the consequences of those things for participation?
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Joe Greenwood Howe (Author/Guest)
Yeah, so this is one of the things that I tried to do, sort of theoretically, in the book, is reconcile the idea of capital, which, as you say, you can definitely describe capital as resources. I think that's a good way of thinking about it, and try to reconcile that with this idea of privilege. So, starting with structural privilege, it's worth stressing that what I'm interested in is unearned privilege. There's this distinction between earned and unearned privilege, and earned might be something that you get by dint of holding a particular occupation. And we might. There are narratives that say that, well, you can get to a particular occupation through merit and that therefore you've earned an occupational position and the rewards that go with it. Whereas what I've interested in is sort of unearned structural privilege, which is about people, broadly speaking, being born into particular social positions that are defined in part by the sort of classic cleavages in society, social cleavages. So the ones that have been very extensively studied are things like social class, gender, ethnicity, disability, sexuality. Right. Things where there have historically been groups which have been marginalised and other groups which have been advantaged. And it's that distinction between the advantaged and the marginalized that is privilege. Right. That's the functioning of privilege. You can't have privilege for some without others being excluded from it. So that's my understanding of privilege. And then my argument is that these. These capitals, these stocks of resources that people can hold, they both reflect potentially the privilege that they have, but they also act as a mechanism that reproduces privilege. So capital holding, for instance, economic capital, so, you know, income, wealth, assets that can ensure that you have a particular social position and also help you to sustain and potentially reproduce that social position for other people who are close to you, often family, family members and next generation. So I'm trying to say that capital, these stocks of capital, these stocks of resources, are something that function Both as a result and also a cause of this structural privilege that I'm interested in.
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
I guess the sort of next question that comes from that is, so what's the difference then? Because one of the things that runs throughout the book is the sense that these structural privileges really heavily impact who participates and who doesn't. And I suppose in order to dig into that, there's the question of what actually are the differences? What does someone who's a political participant look like and what does someone who's a kind of non participant look like? What are the differences between those two groups? And indeed, actually, you know, where are the grades, the shades, the kind of. The blurring of those boundaries too?
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Joe Greenwood Howe (Author/Guest)
Okay, so this is a really good question. And the way I've approached the answer to it in the book is one that is exactly as you say, about grades. So it's about relationships between things. So I don't sort of really starkly define groups who are participants and aren't. And that's because I actually think there's a really important argument about these things being spectral. So you can be more or less politically active rather than necessarily being a participant or not. Right. And so what I look at in the book is the relationship between these things. And what I'm particularly interested in is the relationship between the types of capital that I'm interested in, which is economic capital, social capital, and cultural capital. And specifically in terms of cultural capital, people's informal cultural capital. So that's their pastimes, their tastes, the things they do in their spare time that they like. And I'm interested in whether the capital that they hold is related to their participation. And to answer your question, what I find is that there are some kinds of participation that are related to some kinds of capital. So a good example is a very unsurprising one, which has been shown before, but the book affirms it, which is that people who have stocks of economic capital so either have high income or wealth, they are more likely to donate to causes that they support, and they're more likely to donate larger amounts when they do so. So that's a very sort of, as I say, an unsurprising finding. But what I also find is that on the. The social capital front, what really, really matters, there are other things that matter, and these are complex and in my view, multifaceted concepts. But the thing that really, social capital is, again, something that's been shown in the past is that is whether or not you're asked. So in other words, do you inhabit a Social network in which people say to you, hey, come and support this cause, come and get involved in this, come and do this political act. And if you inhabit networks where that happens, you are more likely to end up being active. There are big questions around which way round that relationship goes, which I'm very happy to talk about. But there's a very strong relationship there and that's been shown time and again. But then what I also add that's new in my view is this relationship with cultural capital. And here it's worth unpicking also another distinction in cultural capital between sort of, broadly speaking, popular and legitimate. These are potentially problematic terms, but I use them because they're quite well established and legitimate cultural capital is something that is sort of valorized by society. It seemed, seemed to be sort of worthwhile or to have value. Classic examples here are classical music, opera, you know, the high arts, basically these sorts of things. And what I find is that there are some forms of participation in which people with stocks of this kind of legitimate cultural capital are more likely to participate. So particularly individualized political participation, things like signing petitions and posting things online. And also collective participation, which is that really active. Getting together with other people, organising, going on protests. If people. People with stocks of legitimate cultural capital are more likely to do those sorts of things. By contrast, people with popular cultural capital, this very widespread, and how I get at that in the book is it's consumption based capital. So things that are about basically going out and having fun, right? You know, going and having drinks and food with friends, shopping for pleasure, those sorts of things, those are negatively associated with some forms of political participation. And so what this shows us overall is that is politics is what I describe as a distinguished activity to some extent. I don't want to overstate the case, but it is a domain in which people are more likely to hold stocks of particular kinds of capital. And so that's kind of the way I would characterize it.
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
You mentioned the kind of, the new angle or element is that link with culture. But I think there's actually an additional kind of new element in the book which is you're really interested in interrogating, I guess, people's kind of self perceptions. The book is quite, you know, kind of reflexive often. And this, you know, I'm sure political science listeners are going to be deeply unhappy with this probably mischaracterization of their field, but often poli sci will have a kind of. Here are a set of, you know, fairly kind of objective factors we can read off, you know, Maybe demographics, education levels, etc. And we can map this against, you know, as you've described, various kind of forms of political activity. But also you're interested in what people say about this, what people think about this, because one of the arguments in the book is that the kind of perceptions people have are really closely related to their activities. And I'm intrigued by what people kind of think of these capitals, how they kind of perceive, talk about things like economic, social and cultural capital.
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Joe Greenwood Howe (Author/Guest)
Okay. Yeah. So there's a lot going on with perception of capital. And you're right that I thought this was really interesting and important to measure because I think that people's perceptions can be quite distinct from what you describe as these sort of objective factors. Right. So two people with what might be measured as very similar social statuses by some metric might nonetheless have very different perceptions of their place in society. The reasons why people have different places in society and as you say, might perceive the importance of capital quite differently. And so one of the things that I did in the research for the book was talk to different groups of people about what it meant to be privileged, what privilege is, or even just what is the concept of privilege. And I was interested to observe the extent to which they brought up the kinds of capital that I'm interested in. So my approach was to try not to. To plant the idea of capital with them, but to see if they considered it to be part of privilege if I asked them about that idea. And what I found was that people were very comfortable or quite naturally talked about the economic components of privilege. So about economic capital. And specifically what they talked about was things to do with work and home ownership. So sort of classic metrics of economic capital or things that are very strongly related to economic capital. And if I are, and they would less frequently talk about social and cultural capital, but when they did, social capital was quite importantly related to sort of educational contexts. So connections that people might have due to educational contexts. And here, obviously, the subject of things like private education and university education, where important social networks can be forged, came up. But what's also really important to emphasize is that people talked about social capital, but in an exceptionally sort of personal way. So often if they mentioned relationships and the importance of relationships in their lives and how social connections have shaped them, it was about someone they knew who helped them or loved them or supported them. You know, it was which. Which is kind of the bread and butter of social capital on some level, but it wasn't in terms of that sort of like very cold dispassionate you know, it's who you know, whose hand have you shaken in a smoky back room? It wasn't that sort of social capital. It was the. Well, you know, it was my mum. My mum helped me, or my siblings or my good friend from school or something like that. And that people saw that form of social capital as a real privilege in intrinsically so to have love and support and a family that you cared about. And some people described having family who were well as being a privilege. So that was quite a different perspective than the sort of theoretical perspective on social capital that I went into the interviews with. And then finally, on the. The cultural capital front, they would. They overwhelmingly talked about education, which is. Which is in the sort of framework that I utilize, which comes from Pierre Bourdieu. That's formal cultural capital. So educational qualifications, the kind of institutionalized way of imbuing people with cultural capital. Whereas what I was interested in is the informal stuff that I've already talked about. But when people brought up formal cultural capital, they would again talk quite extensively and without prompting about private education and university education as key contexts in which people are imbued with this kind of advantageous capital. That said, final point on this, there was a subset of people who did talk about informal cultural capital. And when people did talk about informal cultural capital, they quite readily made that distinction between legitimate and popular cultural capital, if not explicitly, implicitly, in the tone and the way they talked about it. Like, a really good example of this is like, one of the interviewees talked about the idea of sort of slouching on the sofa, watching telly and then getting to the end of the weekend and feeling like you'd wasted your weekend because you could have gone to a gallery, you know, and the gallery, therefore, is seen as this productive, worthwhile thing, whereas the sitting on the sofa is not. And so even though they weren't using the language of legitimate cultural capital and popular cultural capital, they were talking about informal cultural capital in those terms. But as I say, that was not the main story in relation to cultural capital. It was very much refracted through formal educational cultural capital. Extra value meals are back. That means tender juicy McNuggets and medium fries and a drink are just $8.
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Marshall Po
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- [24:16]
Joe Greenwood Howe (Author/Guest)
Ryan, real United Airlines customers.
- [24:18]
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- [24:24]
Joe Greenwood Howe (Author/Guest)
I got to sit in the driver's seat. I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age. That's Andrew, a real United pilot. These small interactions can shape a kid's future. It felt like I was the captain.
- [24:38]
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- [24:41]
Joe Greenwood Howe (Author/Guest)
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
Sort of hinted a bit an answer to the next question I was going to ask you, which is around that same sense of kind of perception of privilege. And again throughout the book you're sort of really well engaged with the sense of obviously yeah, there are these markers of things like wealth or income. But it's also important to understand how people both respond to as a kind of way of talking about themselves and their sense of identity, but also how they view these things in a social context. And I'm intrigued to hear some of those narratives really partially because they're kind of really important in the context of thinking about who participates and who doesn't. But also because there are some in that kind of classic, it's not uniquely kind of British, but there is particularly because of the class stuff, there's some very British distances between a sense of self and a sense of social kind of distributions of privilege. And I wonder if you could give any examples of of those Kind of stories that people had about privacy.
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Joe Greenwood Howe (Author/Guest)
Yeah. So there's. Yes, definitely. And you're right that this does seem like quite a potent topic in the context of the uk. Right. And I think that there's some evidence that this reputation that the UK has for being a class obsessed society is there in the book. And so one of the things, there's sort of two approaches that I can talk about here. So for the research, I conducted a survey, but I also, as I mentioned, spoke to people quite extensively about this stuff. And those two approaches to the research give us slightly different perspectives that are complementary. Right. And so the survey research, one of the crucial things that it did was it asked people what the reasons are for inequality in society and what the reasons for people's own statuses are. So they were given the same set of possible explanations for why there's social inequality and why they have a particular social position within society. And what we see is that people are much more likely to attribute social inequality to background, which is, in my view, a structural explanation. It's basically saying you're born into a particular social position and that gives you advantage or disadvantage, that helps you or hinders you in obtaining social positions in society. But when, when people are asked, but what about your social position? You are where you are, why do you think you're there? People say, well, hard work and ambition, which are very individually orientated explanations for social position. So there's this potential contradiction between the explanation people have for social inequality in general and for their particular social status in society. And I think it's that I'm particularly keen to kind of stress, this is a kind of key takeaway from the book, is that these things are distinct and they're worth measuring separately. And it's quite easy to think of that which is like, you know, the idea of measuring these things separately came to me because it seemed perfectly possible that someone could sustain these, these different views, which is, you know, everyone else has had it easy, they get where they are because, you know, they had advantage and they had good backgrounds and I had to work hard to get where I am. Right. And those don't seem contradictory when you put it that way. But if everybody thinks that there's a kind of disjuncture, so that's what the, the survey component of it adds, and then complementing that is how people talk about their social position in the interviews in particular. And there's this kind of, this discomfort with recognizing privilege, which, like I say, I think complements the survey findings. So, so people will sort of modestly recognize that they have a sort of advantageous social position or that they've had advantages that have enabled them to get to their social position. But they're very keen to sort of caveat it or downplay it. So I sort of label this as characterizing themselves as being in the comfortable middle. You know, I'm fine, we're comfortable, we're doing okay, but we're not super rich. We're not in the top tax bracket. You know, we're not. You're not like that lot, you know, the incredibly privileged people. And so that fits with this desire to attribute their status to hard work as well, because they don't want to give this sense that they're in this very, very, very privileged position, even though they do recognize that they might have had some advantage. So people are playing quite a difficult balancing game, I think, here. And I think that it's really important to recognize that complexity and that nuance in how they think about this stuff, because they sort of came into interviews with me and. And they just sort of talked about this stuff off the cuff, right. You know, about privilege, which is quite an abstract concept. And they came out with quite nuanced, quite complex answers, but that nonetheless revealed, like I say, this sort of sense of discomfort with recognizing their privilege, I would say.
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Podcast Host (Interviewer)
And I mean, that could be so many different societies, even if it does have that kind of particularly British kind of flavor. Through the interviews, I'm intrigued, really, where this all kind of fits together. You're given this sense of the importance of these capitals. You've got a sense of the stories that people tell, both around kind of recognizing broader social patterning of capital distribution, privilege distribution, but a sense of their kind of cells. And you've also sort of pointed to ways in which capitals relate to participation or non participation. And towards the end of the book, you kind of pose the, I guess, kind of core research question, is participation a consequence or a component of privilege? And not to kind of just ask you that and say, we'll go on and answer it then, but it is, I guess, the kind of end of the mystery that the book is trying to solve. And I was obviously, you know, with so much kind of social science, it's a complicated story. And you know, you sort of mentioned the individual and the kind of broader social structural things going on here. But yeah, you know, what is the kind of story of consequential component for political participation?
- [31:36]
Joe Greenwood Howe (Author/Guest)
Okay, so this is essentially, I would say, something that I've attempted to tackle as Best I can in the book. But I'm sort of pretty open about the fact that this is really, really, really difficult to answer, I think, even with an incredibly well resourced research project. But I'll sort of explain why I think that is in a minute. But first I'll talk about, about sort of why attempt to do in the book. So there is essentially, there's lots of different perspectives, but the two perspectives I focus on in the book on this relationship, whether political participation is a consequence or a component of privilege, are one which I would characterize, hopefully not inaccurately, as the sort of Bordjerzian perspective, which is that these are things that, that go together, but one doesn't necessarily sort of cause the other. They are essentially all consequences of being in a particular social position. Right? So having particular stocks of economic, social and cultural capital are related to political participation because they reflect a particular place in society, a particular group position within society. So that's not a causal story, as political science would have it. Where political science is interested in does this thing lead to this thing which leads to this thing, which is a very sequential argument. And so that's the alternative perspective. And that's the perspective of something like there's a very famous model of political participation called the civic volunteerism model, which was getting at this question of, well, why did different social groups participate to different extents? And they essentially made the argument that it's because they have different politically relevant resources and characteristics and that that is in fact the reason they then participate to different extents. And I'm sort of building on that work in, in the book by saying, well, maybe what's going on here is people have different social positions due to things like their demographic characteristics, which would be that. That definition of structural privilege that I talked about earlier. So because of their class position or their ethnicity or their gender, they have a particular social position and then they have particular stocks of capital that are to an extent shaped by their social position. And because they have particular stocks of capital, those stocks of capital act as resources that enable them to participate in politics to different degrees or in different ways. So that's the kind of sequential argument. And in the book I kind of test both of those and find a sort of plausible argument, you know, a plausible set of results in favour of some of the sequential interpretation, which we essentially would be saying that political participation is a consequence of privilege. But this is not a slam dunk, this is not the end of the case because there's also evidence that's consistent with with the sort of these things are all bound up together side of the argument. And so I'll just sort of go back to what I started with it, which is the point about this being incredibly difficult to unpick. And I'll try and explain that with an example. Let's say that we think that being imbued with particular cultural tastes is something that enables you to participate in politics. Well, if we do a survey in which we ask people what are your cultural tastes? And they do you do any political participation stuff? We're asking them that stuff at the same time. And we can't tell whether they developed their cultural tastes or their political participation habits first. Right. So it's really difficult to unpack. We might be able to do it if we studied the same people over a really long period. Right. And we sort of observed whether their cultural tastes and habits emerge first and then their participation stems from that. Even that I don't think is a slam dunk, and we certainly can't do it. There's this tendency in political science at the moment towards experimental methods, survey experimental and field experimental methods, which I think can do a lot, but something like randomly varying people's cultural tastes and habits is not possible. So we can't experimentally observe whether that stuff causes political participation. Right. So I think this is an incredibly tough nut to crack. And I think I give evidence in the book that that kind of sequential argument that political participation is a consequence of privilege and stocks of capital is consistent with the evidence I have. But I put my hands up and say, but that is not the end of the case.
- [36:33]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
I mean, the other tough nut to crack is sort of why this matters and what we do about it. The uneven distribution of. Of privilege and capitals means that clearly there are some undesirable social consequences of divisions in political participation. But at the same time, the kind of questions of, well, what do we do about it? How do we solve it? Are probably just as tricky as how do we think socially, scientifically about what comes first, the privileges or the participation? And then do you have any. I mean, solutions is the sort of makes it seem like a kind of neat and tidy set of answers to these complicated social questions. But do you have any sort of suggestions, I guess, on interventions that might shift some of both the divisions in participation and maybe some of the uneven distributions of privilege and catalyst?
- [37:36]
Joe Greenwood Howe (Author/Guest)
Yes. So I think you're absolutely right to flag up that idea of solutions being a bit neat. And I use that word in, in the book for want of a. Of a Better word. But one of the things I do is talk about in the interviews and indeed in the focus groups, I asked people what they think might help here and they sort of list three things and I think it's really useful to reproduce these because I think they're kind of. Of plausible and viable ways that might help. I don't think they're the whole story, and I'll come on to that a bit later, but they, they talk first about outreach and engagement activities, both by elected representatives and political institutions. And one of the things they really stress is that these outreach activities need to meet people where they are. So they shouldn't be organised in a way that expects people to come to them. Instead, they should be going out into communities to places where people are and saying, here is, you know, big P, partisan politics, come and get involved, right? Obviously, if we focus. When. When I ask this question to people, they think in terms of Big P politics, because the small P politics that I talked about earlier is the community based grassroots stuff. So that's sort of intrinsically in those communities, right? So they very naturally answer this stuff. People seem to naturally answer this stuff in relation to the national level partisan politics. So the second thing they suggest, therefore, is orientated towards that which is civic education. And there's a sort of real call for it, you know, and this has been affirmed by subsequent research in other contexts. There's kind of seems to be a reasonably broad consensus that some level of sort of structured civic education, higher than what we have and more consistent than what we have, would be a good idea. Because there were people who I spoke to who were admirably willing to talk about all the stuff they didn't know about how Big P politics functions in the uk. And they were some of the people who were saying, I wish that I had learned this stuff. Right? So that's the second thing. And then the third thing is about sort of open and sort of big caveat around this, but trustworthy information about politics, right? How you create trustworthy information, especially in an era of increasing political polarization, is a really difficult question to which I do not have the answer. But people wanted to be able to go to sources of information that they felt were trustworthy that sort of cut through the noise. So those were their three sort of suggestions. But what is. So there's two things. There's two. There's one sort of really positive thing about those three observations. And one thing I think that maybe we could be a little bit more critical about. The really positive thing is the that all of the groups I spoke to. So I spoke to MPs, I spoke to activists and volunteers, and I spoke to people with low levels of political participation because I wanted to get a variety of perspectives on all of the questions that I was interested in. And it's worth noting that all of those groups sort of agreed with each other independently about what might help people to get involved in politics and to break down inequalities in political participation. So they all spoke about these three the things that I've just suggested. So there's a sort of, possibly slightly sort of confidence boosting element there, which is that the MPs I spoke to, there might be selection bias because they agreed to be interviewed about this stuff, but they were quite willing to recognize and suggest the same things to solve political inequality that members of the public and volunteers and activists were. But then, like I say, the slightly more sort of critical perspective might say, but none of those things is sort of at least explicitly orientated towards tackling wider social inequality. Right. And obviously the purpose of the book on some level is to suggest that, well, social inequality translates into political inequality. If we have people with different levels of resources that stem to some extent from their background characteristics, that is likely to mean that they are more or less able to get involved in politics or more or less able to get involved in politics in particular ways. So I do think that there is a case to be made that, you know, these classic political debates about redistribution and public provision of cultural resources and social resources, that those might have an impact on the extent to which people can get involved in politics. So if you create a society in which there is is more economic equality and in which people have access to public social and cultural resources, that reduces inequality on multiple fronts and essentially potentially creates a flaw in which everyone has a certain level of these things and therefore everyone is able to some extent to get involved in politics on the basis of the resources that they have available to them. Them. And I said, in answer to your previous question about, well, is it a cause or a consequence that we don't really know? It's a really difficult question to answer. But one thing that does come across clearly in the book is that these inequalities in capital are related to some extent to inequalities in political participation. So the point at which we would need, in my view, we could stop worrying about this stuff would be if I'd done this research and we'd found, oh, you know, people have inequalities in economic, social and cultural capital. But they're completely unrelated. There is no relationship between that and inequalities in political participation. Then there might be less cause for concern, but these things are related. So I do think that there's a case to be made about wider interventions in inequality in society at large having the potential to translate into. To lower political inequality.
- [44:00]
Podcast Host (Interviewer)
I mean, on that you could really do several different research topics and then probably several different books, actually. And then there's also the kind of ongoing question about change over time as well. But often as you kind of wrap up a research project, there's a sense of, you know, well, I finished that I'd like to do something, you know, maybe kind of different. Maybe, you know, your ideas have come developed in a different direction. And I'm intrigued to know, I guess, kind of where you have or are kind of going after you finish this book.
- [44:35]
Joe Greenwood Howe (Author/Guest)
Great. Okay, thank you. So there's two directions I would say that I'm going in. One is that I'm now working on the big annual youth poll, which the place where I work, the John Smith Centre at the University of Glasgow, runs. And that's very clearly related to the topic of my book because it's about how young people see politics, how they engage with politics, you know, the extent to which they do or don't participate. And obviously that relates to the sort of inequality agenda that's in my book because it's very well established that historically speaking, young people have, at least in terms of voting, been less politically active. Right. I think that there's evidence that that's changing and that that definitely can change. But. But young people have been a politically marginalised group to some extent. And so I think that's a kind of continuation of that broad agenda around social marginalization and political participation and inequalities in political participation. So that's one. And the other sort of direction I'm going in is, again, very closely related to the book, but an extension of it. And a move in a new direction is about whether or not people's perceptions of politicians are shaped by the stocks of capital that those politicians hold. And I'm expanding that beyond the uk. So essentially I'm looking at whether or not people think that politicians with particular stocks of economic, social and cultural capital are more or less like them, are more or less competent, and are more or less sort of, of desirable in terms of willingness to vote for them. And I wanted to, like I say, expand that beyond the UK to see whether these things have effects in other contexts as well.