The UK : Brexit and competing populism

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Oh, Dayei and Castrén, Oli; Herkman, Juha and Palonen, Emilia, eds. (2024) The UK : Brexit and competing populism. In: Populism, Twitter and the European Public Sphere. Palgrave Macmillan Cham, Cham, pp. 209-237. ISBN 9783031417375 (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41737-5_8)

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Abstract

The chapter discusses the political context and political communication environment in the UK during the 2019 EP election. Particular attention is given to the role of Twitter in the UK’s political communication and populism in the party field during the twenty-first century. The empirical Twitter analysis focuses on 7296 tweets sent from 966 Twitter accounts by various political actors in May 2019. The 2019 election was the UK’s last participation in the EP elections before the country left the EU following the 2016 Brexit referendum. As the two major political parties, Conservatives and Labour, refrained from the 2019 EP election debates, smaller Europhilic parties (e.g., Liberal Democrats, Change UK, SNP, Green, Cymru) and Eurosceptic parties (e.g., UKIP, Brexit Party) dominated the Twittersphere. Brexit and the EU were popular themes in the British tweets alongside tweets encouraging supporters to vote and attacking rival political parties. Topic modelling shows differences in the debates on the EU, Brexit, the populist construction of ‘the people’ and media, as well as economic and environmental issues between regions and across the Europhilic and Eurosceptic parties. Network analysis demonstrates that the British Twittersphere was clustered into two antagonistic camps divided by their stance on Brexit. In this, the UK represented a clear case of competing populism.

ORCID iDs

Oh, Dayei ORCID logoORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6574-8103 and Castrén, Oli; Herkman, Juha and Palonen, Emilia
CORE (COnnecting REpositories)