These four eras – mass politics, post-politics, antipolitics and hyperpolitics – “are not just concepts,” Jäger says, “they have some empirical data behind them. ‘How institutionalised is society?’ is basically a question of, how does civil society look? How are membership organisations looking? What are the affiliations, what are the types of bonds that people have? That’s not very difficult to quantify. You can look at union membership, you can look at church attendance, you can look at less overtly political forms of belonging. The political axis is more difficult to measure, but not impossible – namely, how many people attend elections, how many people strike, how many people engage in political violence, how many people engage in political communication, write letters to editors or now post online?”