I went to the launch event yesterday of a new ESRC-funded project, led by Nick Clarke at Southampton, exploring Popular Understandings of Politics in Britain 1937-2014. It’s an innovative project, combining quantitative and qualitative methods – but especially interesting in attempting to get at the ways in which politics has been ordinarily talked about over this period. An interesting challenge, no doubt, is for the project to not get overwhelmed by a rhetoric of decline; the promise of the project is to re-frame how questions about changing practices of political engagement are asked in the first place.