ABSTRACT
Discussions of participation in Britain usually begin with figures revealing a low level of involvement of citizens in political activities and end fairly quickly, largely because there is little information, with the conclusion that the British people are passive. Indeed, the large cross-national study of ‘civic culture’ in Britain and four other nations in the early 1960s by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba concluded that one of the secrets of Britain’s stable democracy was the passivity, or deference, of the people themselves.1 The most recent study of political activity, that by Geraint Parry and his colleagues in the 1980s, found that Britain’s national and local political elite of around 50,000 men and women could fit comfortably into Wembley Stadium. 650,000 ‘complete activists’ and a ‘relatively active’ quarter of the population was more than balanced by a ‘generally passive’ half of the population.2
