Andrew Mycock

• Lecturer at University of Huddersfield

This article utilises the developing research literatures on policy learning and memory, with particular focus on the interconnections between institutional amnesia and policy myopia, to analyse the lowering of the age of enfranchisement to 18 for all elections in the UK in 1969 and its resonance, or otherwise, in contemporary debates concerning ‘V...

The UK is now a multi-level polity with asymmetrical minimum ages of enfranchisement. The franchise was first extended to 16- and 17-year-olds in the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. The Scottish and Welsh governments now permit 16- and 17-year-olds to vote in elections to their devolved parliaments and local councils. The Northern Ireland Ex...

This series of articles examines aspects of the increasingly resonant and polarised debates across the UK about the lowering of the voting age to 16 years. The previous UK-wide extension of the age of franchise, from 21 to 18 years in 1969, attracted little partisanship or attention (Loughran et al., 2021). This was remarkable given the UK was the...

The debate in the United Kingdom over whether the voting age should be lowered to 16 has largely involved political elites demanding change. Public opinion, insofar as it has been tested at UK-wide level, has tended to oppose lowering the voting age for Westminster elections, but change has proceeded for non-Westminster elections in Scotland and Wa...

In 1969, the UK became the first country to lower its age of franchise to 18. Most other democracies soon followed. This article provides the first detailed examination of the debates and processes which contributed to the UK’s pioneering reform of the age of enfranchisement. It explores parliamentary and press debates during the 1960s, arguing tha...

A common feature of debates about lowering the voting age to 16 has been an absence of analytical research which might explain the historical or contemporary policy drivers for voting age reform or its potential effects. This chapter provides the first such attempt to fill this gap in the literature, establishing and then applying a thematic analyt...

This chapter examines commemoration across the Anglosphere of the centenary of the First World War, which has drawn attention to the critical ordering and articulation of shared transnational collective memories and historical narratives. Tensions between national and transnational manifestations of war commemoration reveal the legacies of the Brit...

This chapter maps out an agenda for those wishing to research the Anglosphere. It does so by examining the elements of political and ideational continuity between the present-day Anglosphere and its antecedents such as Greater Britain and the English-speaking peoples. It also analyses the dissonance within and amongst members of the Anglosphere and...

This volume provides the first detailed analyses of the ‘Anglosphere’ – a re-imagined transnational community of the English-speaking peoples – which came to international prominence in the wake of Brexit. It brings together leading international experts to examine the Anglosphere’s historical links to the British Empire. It interprets the shifting...

Mycock explores the politicisation of history education in former colonising states where the end of empire has necessitated the simultaneous revision of colonial citizenship and identity and also the historical narratives established that underpinned them. His chapter assesses the form and content of the politically fractious and divisive ‘history...

Party political interest in the so-called ‘English Question’ has grown in recent years, due to the enmeshing of constitutional issues with a growing political and public affiliation with and expression of English national identity and culture. More recently, attention has shifted to the decentralisation of government within England. The ‘English Qu...

This article explores the potential that ongoing regional devolution in England might transform the so-called ‘party politics of Englishness’, complicating and potentially compromising the emergence of a nascent English political nationalism. It provides a primary examination of the extent to which conceptual and normative intersections between nat...

Lowering the voting age would increase youth engagement in politics, says Jan Eichhorn. A compelling case for extending the franchise to 16 and 17 year olds has yet to be made, writes Andrew Mycock.

A central argument of this book is that the ongoing crisis of Britishness is fundamental to understanding contemporary Euroscepticism. In this chapter, we develop this theme by turning our attention to the idea of the UK as a contested multi-national polity and its co-deterministic relationship to Euroscepticism. If, as Ben Wellings has argued in C...

Research Highlights and Abstract provides one of the first assessments of how British multi-national and English political parties have responded to existing and emergent identity tensions in England whilst continuing to defend the concept of the post-devolution British union-state. extends debates about multi-level party political systems in multi...

Prime Minister David Cameron has called for ‘a truly national commemoration of the First World War’. This article shows this to be problematic, politicised and contested. This is in part due to the elision of English and British histories. Scottish, Welsh and Irish responses are noted, and the role and commemorations of ‘our friends in the Commonwe...

The experiences of young people in developed societies such as Japan and the UK have undergone considerable change in the last 30 or so years. Our starting point is that such developments are associated with the globalization of institutions and an individualization of experience, which destabilizes life-course transitions and cultural transmission...

A report published by policy think-tank Demos in November 2011 suggested survey respondents in England were the most patriotically British across the United Kingdom (though Northern Ireland was overlooked). Although the report readily conflated English and British cultural and political institutions, symbols, and figures, the authors concluded that...

The Scottish National Party (SNP) has been strongly critical of attempts to resuscitate British national identity and has sought to present an alternative Scottish cultural and political identity that is projected as ‘wholly civic’. However, questions persist as to how the SNP understand concepts such as citizenship and nationality and the extent t...

Citizenship education has been a compulsory feature of the curriculum in secondary schools in England since 2002. However, its future may be uncertain amid inter-party disputes over the utility of such teaching. Moreover, there are substantial concerns over the breadth, aims and reach of the Citizenship curriculum. There is a lack of clarity over w...

Young people populate a uniquely strategic position within society in general and particularly in party political debate about the future development of citizenship and the national community. Political parties in the UK have however been historically reluctant to engage with young people or represent their interests in the formulation of policies,...

The proposed introduction of National Citizen Service (NCS) by the Conservative party survived the negotiations with the Liberal Democrats and forms part of the coalition's policy agenda. The idea forms part of the concern of Cameronian Conservatives to create a big society, based primarily upon volunteering and civil engagement. Drawing upon compa...

Organising an academic conference is an experience that many social science scholars will undertake during their careers. There is however a lack of a developed academic literature that provides some guidelines. This article draws on the experiences of the authors in organising an international interdisciplinary conference at the University of Hudd...

Perhaps the most visible expression of loyalism in Northern Ireland can be found in the Orange Order, especially through its set piece commemorations and in particular its parading tradition. Such parades give open and very public expression to notions of loyalty and identity (Bryan 2000). Within this, several writers have drawn attention to the ke...

Recent debates about “Britishness” have drawn increasing attention to the inculcation of national values within the school history curriculum. To date, however, few studies have explored young people’s attitudes towards history or how these are related to their sources of national pride and shame. This paper draws on a survey of over 400 undergradu...

GORDON BROWN'S tenure as prime minister has shown, among other things, his continued commitment to reviving Britishness as a shared civic identity. Brown's vision has been based on the belief that Britishness can be expressed as values such as fair play, tolerance and liberty and that these values form a ‘Golden Thread’ running through British hist...

The Labour government has acknowledged the 'enormous bonds of commonality' (T. Blair, speech to Commonwealth Heads of Government, 24 October 1997. http://www.thecommonwealth.org), but the former empire or the modern Commonwealth has remained largely absent in the re-articulation of Britishness. Although there has been little attempt to reform the i...

In 2008, the Labour government established the Youth Citizenship Commission (YCC). The (independent) Commission, staffed by individuals of varying backgrounds and serviced by the Ministry of Justice, was asked to examine how young people define citizenship and to explore how that citizenship might better be connected to political activity. Addition...

In the age of ‘high imperialism’ during the late nineteenth century, the size of the imperial state and its population were increasingly perceived as complementary to economic and military power in asserting status in world power politics. This, however, stimulated a range of critical challenges to imperial legitimacy and cohesion for most European...

Background: In England, the promotion of ‘national values’ within the history curriculum has become an increasingly topical issue in the wake of recent debates about ‘Britishness’ and community cohesion. However, despite the swathe of policy statements and pronouncements, there is little empirical evidence linking young people's identities and thei...

Recent calls for British values to be promoted in citizenship classes raise as many questions about civic and national identity in the UK as they purport to answer. In particular, to what extent is talk of promoting `Britishness' in schools any longer relevant in the post-devolution era? It is increasingly apparent that British values and culture h...

A sustained and systematic study of the construction, erosion and reconstruction of national histories across a wide variety of states is highly topical and extremely relevant in the context of the accelerating processes of Europeanization and globalization. However, as demonstrated in this volume, histories have not, of course, only been written b...

Teaching within Higher Education has traditionally been seen as a vital part of the professional apprenticeship of Politics postgraduates. Changes in UK Higher Education in the past twenty years have seen the numbers of postgraduates accepting some teaching duties while writing a Ph.D. grow. This article draws on the experience of the author and so...