Report

Talking politics: Building support for democratic reform

Think tank: IPPR

Author(s): Dr Parth Patel; Ryan Swift; Harry Quilter-Pinner

June 24, 2023

This report from UK think tank IPPR looks at the effectiveness of different rhetorical approaches to framing democratic reform.

Dissatisfaction with how democracy works has been rising for more than a decade. For the first time since the mid-1970s, a clear majority of people in Britain are dissatisfied with democracy, and recent scandals in British politics such as the ‘partygate’ affair have added further strain. There is considerable public appetite for an ambitious programme of ‘democratic renewal’. But desire alone is not enough: it needs to be mobilised into political action. This requires effective framing and politicisation. In this report, working with Focaldata, we ran a survey experiment to assess the effectiveness of different rhetorical approaches to framing democratic reform.