LONDON, The numbers looked historic. Britain changed government in 2024, and the United States chose its president in the same year, two of the world’s oldest democracies renewing their mandates in the space of a few months. On paper, it was democracy doing exactly what it is supposed to do.
Yet in both countries, many people describe feeling oddly detached. The U.K. general election recorded turnout of about 60%, the lowest since 2001 and a steep fall from 67.5% in 2019, according to data from Statista.
It was a low participation election and estimates were that only about one in five eligible voters backed the party that went on to win a commanding majority
In the United States, roughly 154 million Americans voted in the 2024 general election, about 65% of the eligible voting population (Ballotpedia).
For many, these headline numbers conceal a deeper unease, not just about who won, but about whether the political system still listens and engages people at all.
Growing Distrust
In Britain, long‑running survey work suggests the mood has changed. The latest British Social Attitudes report found trust in politicians at record lows, with four in five people dissatisfied with how they are governed after years of scandals and strained public services.
A separate poll reported that nearly eight in ten adults do not trust Members of Parliament to tell the truth and that a majority would trust a citizens’ assembly more than MPs to make decisions in the public interest.
The frustration is not just about which party holds power, but about the sense that whole communities are structurally unheard.
In the United States, trust has also eroded; a 2025 Gallup survey found that confidence in the federal government remains at a near-historic low.
In the last half a century, trust in government among Republicans and independents has fallen by about 30 points, while Democrats’ trust has stayed closer to levels seen in the 1970s
Those contrasts go to the heart of a quieter crisis that cuts across borders: trust. The question is no longer only who wins and loses elections, but whether people believe the system belongs to them at all.
When Victory Feels Hollow
In the U.K., the 2024 election was sold to voters as a reset after 14 years of Conservative rule, deliverance from chaos and an opportunity to “get Britain back on track.” Labour’s victory was decisive in parliamentary terms: it secured 412 of 650 seats on 33.7% of the vote, while the Conservatives fell to 121 seats on 23.7%, according to the official results.
Smaller parties such as the Greens and Reform UK gained millions of votes but relatively few seats, illustrating how UK’s ‘first past the post’ system translates support into power unevenly
For many voters in places far from London, the numbers told a story about who counts. Some did not vote at all. Others felt that, once in power, parties of all stripes would default to the same “strongman” instincts, toughness on immigration, toughness on crime, toughness on anyone who looked like they were falling behind.
The language of politics still revolves around strength and control. Some citizens have turned to experiments that sit outside Westminster’s comfort zone, including citizens’ juries, local assemblies and new digital platforms that ask for their views more often than once every five years.
This is one of the reasons I built a civic polling platform, Suffrago, to give people constituency‑level data and a say to their local MPs.
For some users, being able to say “this policy will price me out of my neighborhood” and then see that concern shared by their neighbors feels more tangible than posting on an X (Twitter) feed and it going into the void.
Masculinity and the Politics of Fear
In the United States, the conversation looks different but has many of the same themes. The last decade has been shaped by a style of politics that critics describe as a performance of “toxic masculinity”: brashness, bullying, disdain for expertise and a celebration of domination over compromise, a pattern reflected in many essays and analyses of Donald Trump’s rise and return to the presidency
Polls suggest that beneath the noise, people hold more complex views than the national shouting matches would indicate. For example, a poll commissioned by gun safety advocates in early 2025 found that large majorities of Americans, including many Trump voters, support specific gun safety measures, such as universal background checks, reporting of lost and stolen firearms, and crisis intervention laws.
At the same time, Gallup data shows that trust in the federal government has tumbled among those who do not share the president’s party, while remaining higher among those who do, creating an environment in which millions of Americans feel permanently shut out
Many men find their political identity squeezed between two caricatures: the strong, angry defender of a threatened order or the supposedly weak, overly sensitive liberal who is told he is ruining the country by caring too much.
The Importance of Listening
There are also stories of people trying to rewrite the script. In the U.K., pilots of citizens’ assemblies on climate policy and constitutional questions have shown that diverse groups of ordinary residents can absorb complex evidence and recommend balanced, long-term measures, challenging the notion that only “strong” leaders can handle tough trade-offs
Similar processes in the U.S., from local participatory budgeting to city-level police oversight boards, have given residents a direct say in how resources and power are used, as documented in various municipal reports and academic studies on deliberative democracy
Instead of chasing viral outrage, democracy platforms such as Suffrago surface where agreement already exists, for example, on the need for fairer housing policy or better mental health services, and to give lawmakers a daily, anonymized readout of what quieter majorities think.
Technology is not a cure-all. It raises hard questions about data privacy, representation and who controls the questions being asked, concerns that echo wider debates about digital democracy and the power of such platforms to engage voters.
But the approach provides for a different kind of masculinity in politics, one that is less about projecting certainty and more about having the courage to listen, change course and admit when you are wrong
A Different Measure of Power
In both the U.K. and the U.S., many citizens now judge their leaders not only by big promises, but by whether they feel seen between elections, whether their lived realities show up in debates about budgets, borders or the climate. Surveys on trust and participation show people are more willing to engage when they believe their input can shape outcomes, not just ratify decisions made elsewhere.
For a young worker in Manchester, England, power would look like being able to afford rent, walk to a decent job and have a say in what is built on his street.
For a father in Ohio, this could mean sending his child to school without having to think about active shooter drill rehearsals, and knowing that his doubts about what it means to be a “good man” in politics are shared, not shamed, in a country where most people see gun violence as a major problem and favor stronger protections.
The common thread is not left or right, nor even Britain versus America. It is whether systems reward performances of dominance or acts of listening. The experiments, from citizens’ assemblies and local deliberative processes to civic polling platforms that try to give everyone a quick, easy way to be heard, suggest that when people are given a real voice, they use it thoughtfully.
The real test of this political moment is whether those who hold power are willing to give some of it back to the people.
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