Reflections on John Boswell's How Citizens Encounter the Democratic State

SUMMARY

• In How Citizens Encounter the Democratic State, John Boswell understood that the ‘meek’—the socioeconomically disadvantaged—have multiple experiences of the state.
• People can and do mobilise and participate effectively when local government plans affect them negatively.
• Boswell's interpretation of populism as disengagement is challenged by the increase in voter turnout encouraged by populist parties: a mundane indication of democratic renewal.
• The challenge is to understand the appeal of Reform UK better and extract the positive lessons for democratic politics.

I was inspired by John Boswell and others at Southampton University to do ethnographic political research. In How Citizens Encounter the Democratic State, Boswell understood that the ‘meek’—the socioeconomically disadvantaged—have multiple experiences of the state. Across the three faces of the state—carceral, austere and neoliberal—Boswell argues the ‘meek’ adopt a trilogy of strategies: they dissent, dissociate or personalise. 

Boswell is looking for positive signs that any of the meek's strategies build on or encourage collective action. However, he finds much evidence of a kind of survival politics that often diminishes people in the long run. For instance, someone might ‘personalise’ their interactions with a probation worker, but, in the long run, that worker will just apply the rules and the individual will not have gained from the attempt to forge a relationship.

Boswell hopes that, compared with encounters with the carceral, austere and neoliberal state, the meek's encounters with the more benign participative state will involve them being able to exercise greater ‘bottom-up’ agency. However, depressingly, the meek use the same strategies in participative settings, where Boswell finds their strategies are fruitless there, too. 

For Boswell, the ‘participative state’ is about ‘public encounters’: relatively drawn-out, face-to-face encounters that are likely to be quite tightly controlled or at least have the potential for officials to control them. He excludes short, sharp participative acts like voting or posting online comments. 

The local recycling centre

However, it goes without saying that participating on social media can be powerful. My own small town of around 15,000 residents has a ‘Banter’ forum of ‘news and views’ on Facebook with a membership of approximately 7,000. In pubs or supermarket queues you might overhear people saying, ‘Have you seen X on Banter?’

The town also has a beautiful and much-loved recycling centre. When the council decided, for cost-cutting reasons, to introduce a phone booking system, they did not undertake any preliminary public consultation. There was widespread uproar, particularly due to concern about access for our older residents. 

We could argue that, in Boswell's terms, they were resisting digitalisation and depersonalisation. While this was expressed in articles and letters in the town's one local newspaper, it was also a theme of several posts on Banter, some generating up to seventy comments. There was a lot of anger at ‘the council’ with nuanced comments about blanket implementation that did not take account of individual towns. This was expressed, as far as I could tell, by both meek and not meek. Local councillors became concerned about the political fallout and the scheme was dropped for our town. 

Social media had worked as a ‘public encounter’ even though it was not part of a formal consultation procedure. An alternative, ‘formal’ consultation, more akin to Boswell's public encounters, had been far less effective in mobilising the meek. 

My recycling case study shows that, first, maybe primarily when part of a big local mass, the meek can be proactive before officialdom has even got to design a process and, second, that they may be less inhibited or forced into the dissociative, dissenting and personalising strategies when on online Banter-style forums. It would be worth testing this out to get a comparison with the formal consultation procedures.

Democratic renewal

Boswell turns, first, to two pessimistic conclusions from mainstream literature that explain declining voter turnout and the flight to populism as owing either to apathy or to alienation. He believes the dissociative behaviour of some of the meek in the ethnographic studies, which, at first sight, looks like apathy, was more consciously a survival strategy. It is also not true that the meek are apathetic in the complacent sense.

Drawing from mainstream literature, Boswell finds alienation a more convincing explanation for declining voter turnout and the flight to populism. In my work on perceptions of the economy around the time of Brexit, I also concluded the reason for non-engagement with ‘mainstream’ politics was alienation. I had characterised the alienation of the meek as based on a sense of distance from the ‘official’ economy of political discourse: ‘it's not my GDP’. Boswell adds that there is also a painful proximity because the meek feel at the same time distant and too near to the state, which has such control over their carceral, welfare and consumer lives.

However, Boswell’s conclusion for how we should democratically renew to counter this alienation is counterintuitive in part. He argues, first, for a more effective approach to civic education, rethinking civic education so that it is more practical for ‘mundane matters’. I agree that makes sense. 

Nevertheless, his second strand is to personalise the state, giving it the human touch. He argues that insights gained from mundane practices show that effective infrapolitics only takes place when there are helpers and mediators such as legal aid, mutual beneficiaries, neighbourhood officers and community groups. 

To renew democracy, these mediators also need to be able to bend the rules: examples here include amnesty and sanctuary, such as resetting library fines, and, more generally, ‘treating people as people’. The argument for treating people as people is compelling, amnesty and sanctuary less so. Do not people need to believe rules exist and are followed fairly so the authorities can push back with some credibility against claims like ‘all asylum seekers get social housing’? And would not amnesty and sanctuary encourage the meek to focus even more on the diminishing strategy of personalising than before?

And Boswell categorises populism, as so many do, as ‘disengagement’. Yet I think that is simplistic. When I was doing my research on Brexit voters, I think that I did not want to acknowledge how many of the meek who were alienated from the economy were engaged enough to be cheering Brexit on and talking to their friends about it even if, in the end, they did not bother to turn out and vote for it. Why do so many political scientists interpret support for Brexit or more recently Reform as a sign of political disengagement?

Why voting still matters

Boswell assumes ‘top-down’ measures relating to, for example, voting Reform will not make a difference. But I offer one small example from my town that shows that, alongside drawn-out participative encounters, voting still matters.

Traditionally, the town has around 35-per-cent turnout in council elections. In the 2024 local elections, Reform did not field a candidate. Then, in 2026, there was a by-election where a local Reform candidate achieved 20 per cent of the vote with a far higher overall turnout. Of course, not all of Reform’s voters were the meek in the same way that supporters of Brexit were not all ‘left behind’. But, when it comes to democratic renewal, should we not celebrate increased turnout for whatever reason? 

We need a companion ethnographic study that sits alongside Boswell's longer participation encounters to understand fully how the meek feel about politics, including interactions on social media, online polls, and the act of voting.