Alex Prior (University of East Anglia) and Cristina Leston-Bandeira (Leeds) discuss the potential for parliamentary story-telling to reach new audiences and to promote wider public engagement.
Introduction
Recent decades have witnessed an increase of public distrust in politics, particularly towards core political institutions such as parliaments (Dalton 2017; Norris 2011; Hay 2007; Stoker 2006; Dalton 2004). In this context, parliaments have invested in the expansion of public engagement activities (Leston-Bandeira 2013). This is particularly evident within the UK Parliament since 2005 (Leston-Bandeira 2016), a time period that constitutes the focus of this article. Initiatives have been developed in numerous areas, from the creation of the Centre for Education in 2015 to the introduction of digital debates (also in 2015). There has been considerable experimentation with new initiatives and the way they relate to parliamentary business, or the extent to which they are developed in parallel with business. Storytelling is one of these new approaches, constituting a new means for engagement which aims to represent Parliament as relatable and relevant to citizens.
Conceptualising parliamentary engagement and storytelling
Humans tell stories ‘to explain themselves to themselves and to others’ (Kearney 2002, p.3). Stories allude to, and construct, a form of social knowledge based on subjective experience and tradition (Young 2000; Langellier 1999; Lyotard 1984). Storytellers thereby engage in a dynamic with an ‘audience, whose members can complete the outline based on their own fantasies, emotional circumstances, and ideologies’ (Bennett and Edelman 1985, p.164). This type of dynamic is essential to engagement and identification with Parliament, through which citizens ‘not only understand the parliament, but can also see its relevance and are able to link parliamentary activity to their own lives and experiences’ (Leston-Bandeira 2014, p.418). Within political science, discussions of stories as political tools are fairly recent (Coleman 2015; Escobar 2011), yet they provide insight into ‘what is being communicated to citizens about parliaments and…the nature of the parliamentary institutions that citizens are expected to engage with’; a question that Judge and Leston-Bandeira (2018, p.155) describe as an academic lacuna.
Parliamentary storytelling as representation
Recent parliamentary select committee inquiries have called for ‘public stories’ (e.g. the Petitions Committee’s inquiries on high heels and workplace dress codes, and on brain tumour research), while elements of parliamentary history and heritage are now presented as (and through) stories. These constitute new attempts to represent Parliament as relatable and relevant, which we examine as ‘representative claims’, by which ‘[a] maker of representations (M) puts forward a subject (S) which stands for an object (O) which is related to a referent (R) and is offered to an audience (A)’ (Saward 2006, p.302). Our initial focus is Your Story, Our History; a series of YouTube films commissioned by Parliament, in which citizens discuss the personal impact of legislation. In one example, Shango Baku describes his experience of racial persecution before and after the Race Relations Act.
We focus on Your Story, Our History because of its continued use since 2016. The centenary of the Representation of the People Act 1918 was publicised under the Your Story, Our History banner; more recently, Lesbian Visibility Day 2019 was publicised on Twitter via @YourUKParliament, with a website link to a 2017 Your Story, Our History film discussing the effects of parliamentary legislation on Queer Women of Colour.
There are numerous types of audience for these stories. One is a ‘definite’ audience, ‘the kind of public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation’ (Warner 2002, p.66). There are also instances in which ‘a concrete audience…understands itself as standing in for a more indefinite audience…’ (Warner 2002, p.66). Langellier similarly describes both ‘empirically present listeners’ and ‘absent or “ghostly audiences”’ for a ‘narrative performance’ (1999, p.127). We thereby identify two ‘audiences’ for Your Story, Our History:
- A definite audience following @YourUKParliament and/or with a pre-existing interest in parliament/legislation
- An indefinite audience relating to the experience of the storyteller
The story, as a representative claim, is what brings these audiences into being. The nature of these audiences (and their prospective size and diversity) will be the basis for examining the relatability and relevance of these initiatives.
Examining parliamentary storytelling as engagement via the ‘constructivist turn’
We now compare Your Story, Our History with The Story of Parliament. The latter discusses parliamentary history, and provides contact details for further information. Both initiatives were published in 2016, purporting to tell a story through (and about) Parliament. Both employ recognisable narrative devices: for example, presenting events sequentially (Abbott 2008; Barthes 1975), using past tense (Abbott 2008).
Our comparison draws upon Saward’s ‘Maker-Subject-Object-Referent-Audience’ framework, acknowledging ‘representative claims only work, or even exist, if ‘audiences’ acknowledge them in some way, and are able to absorb or reject or accept them or otherwise engage with them’ (2006, p.303). The ‘audience(s)’ in question are created by these initiatives, reflecting Warner’s contention that an audience ‘exists by virtue of being addressed’ (2002, p.67). The table below compares parliamentary storytelling initiatives as representative claims and stories, since both concepts succeed or fail (i.e. exist / do not exist) through the audience(s) they create, who then may or may not subsequently relate to and engage with the initiative.
Table 1 shows two crucial differences between these initiatives. Firstly, in The Story of Parliament, the Subject (S) is parliamentary democracy. ‘Self-representation’ is allowed for in Saward’s concept of the representative claim, through which ‘the maker-subject [i.e. Parliament] constructs a new view of itself’ (2006, p.305). However, through a narrative lens, we see a privileged position adopted by Parliament in The Story of Parliament (alluded to by its very title): that of the narrator, ‘the most privileged position in the storytelling event’ since they are ‘aware how it will turn out’ (Bauman 1986, p.38). Thus, the title of The Story of Parliament is entirely apt; it is a story about, and owned by, Parliament.
By contrast, in Your Story, Our History the stories are lived, told and owned by the ‘citizen storytellers’ on screen. The citizens, and their experiences, are the Subject. What connects them is Parliament, which thereby claims relevance through efficacy: the enactment of legislation to effect change. It also claims relatability as a reference point for the ‘citizen storytellers’ who relate to Parliament as the source of legislation that changed their lives. This instance of storytelling therefore invites citizens to ‘complete the outline’ of what Parliament means, subjectively, to them. Crucially, this indefinite audience (in the case of Your Story, Our History) could be anyone with a shared experience, or even the ability to sympathise with this experience.
The second crucial difference is the Audiences (A) that these stories create. Acknowledging that an audience ‘exists by virtue of being addressed’, we see that both initiatives attempt to bring an audience into existence through a personal address:
- The Story of Parliament: ‘Contact us if you have a question about the work or membership of the House of Commons or House of Lords’
- Your Story, Our History: ‘Wherever you live, no matter who you are or your background, the laws that the UK Parliament passes affect and shape all areas of your life’
In The Story of Parliament, this audience is an already-interested audience; there is no appeal to interest, but rather an assumption of interest. In Your Story, Our History, meanwhile, there is an appeal beyond a closed loop of existing interest, to an indefinite audience; one for whom Parliament is perhaps not an existing interest, but instead a common denominator of relatable stories. Here we reiterate that there is no ‘public’, no audience, for parliamentary storytelling, outside of who is being told the story. An indefinite audience constitutes the maximum ‘reach’ of a parliamentary storytelling initiative. Moreover, we contend that the size of an (indefinite) audience who can speak or relate to the life experiences described in Your Story, Our History is substantially greater than those who are already sufficiently interested in Parliament (and/or its history) to get in touch for further details.
Conclusions
Storytelling constitutes a new means of parliamentary engagement; one which not only ‘disseminates material’ but facilitates connection to that material. As such, it merits scholarly examination within discussions of representation, parliamentary engagement, and political engagement more broadly; it also merits attention from Parliament. Our examination of Your Story, Our History and The Story of Parliament – two contemporaneous initiatives – demonstrates inconsistency in seeking and constructing an audience. This implies a lack of institutional understanding of storytelling (as theory), and how it can be applied (as practice). Having already shown a capacity for storytelling as a mode of engagement, it is vital for Parliament to understand its value within a broadening portfolio of engagement techniques and initiatives.
Alex Prior is a lecturer in politics at the University of East Anglia
Cristina Leston-Bandeira is a professor in politics at the University of Leeds