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Finding Britishness
All too often in the social sciences, national identity is approached via positivist methods.
Scholars come up with a list of national identities they expect to find in a community and then 
they proceed to look for them via public opinion surveys, for example. The interpretivist goal, in 
contrast, is to allow the subjects to speak for themselves as opposed to having the analyst speak 
for them. We see this sensibility at work in a number of recent studies of British political culture 
and citizen understandings of politics. Nick Clarke, Will Jennings, Jonathan Moss, and Gerry 
Stoker (2018) mix textual data from Mass-Observation studies – that unique archive of British 
everyday life – with a quantitative analysis of responses to public opinion surveys to examine 
repertoires of cultural resources that defined British “anti-politics” in the postwar period. 
Matthew Jones (2018) looks at what Mass-Observation reports said about the nation’s wars in 
the Falklands, the Gulf, Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Thomas Colley (2019) relies on 
interviews to examine how ordinary British citizens narrate stories of Britain’s role in war and 
Britain’s identity more generally.
I reconstruct the content, contestation, and evolution of post-1945 Britishness using 
inductive discourse-analytic research that my collaborators and I conducted under the auspices of 

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Making Identity Count (MIC), a project to assemble the first constructivist database of national 
identities for use in IR and in social sciences and humanities more generally.
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The analysis is 
based on an archive of textual artefacts sampled in six ten-year intervals: 1950, 1960, 1970, 
1980, 1990, and 2000. The texts are drawn from an assortment of everyday experiences and 
institutional centres in the UK, with one eye on different forms, modes, and media of elite versus 
mass communication. Leadership speeches; newspaper editorials, op-eds, and columns; and 
secondary school history textbooks were taken to be sources of elite discourse, in contrast to 
more mass-oriented letters to the editor to said newspapers, novels, and commercial feature 
films. Table 1 is a summary of the documents used, with further details in Appendix A.
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