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Part of
Imagining the Peoples of Europe: Populist discourses across the political spectrum
Edited by Jan Zienkowski and Ruth Breeze
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 83] 2019
► pp. 229–256

Chapter 9
Standing up for ‘real people’

UKIP, the Brexit, and discursive strategies on Twitter

Right wing populism has always been exclusionary in nature and relies on classic positive in-group/negative out-group constructions (van Dijk 1998). This chapter investigates how the UK Independence Party (UKIP) discursively constructed ‘the people’ during the 2016 ‘Brexit’ referendum campaign. It will be argued that ‘the people’ were defined in opposition to two key groups: Elite mainstream political actors and migrants. The consequence of this strategy has been the legitimisation of race hate crimes and a further conceptual separation of ‘the people’ from the political classes. Data is taken from the UKIP twitter account and I qualitatively analyse this by paying particular attention to topoi and to the discursive construction of ‘the people’ as a social actor.

Keywords: UKIP, Brexit, referendum, Twitter, social media, populism, critical discourse analysis, argumentation
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Populism
  • Twitter as a site of populist discourse (re)production: An alt-space for the alt-right
  • The awkward squad: A ‘mutiny within conservatism’ and UKIP’s rise to prominence
  • Methodology and data collection
    • ‘Concepts’ in discourse theory and CDA
    • Data collection and categories of analysis
  • Analysis
    • The people…
    • … vs the elites
    • … vs immigration (but not immigrants)
  • Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Published online: 13 August 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/dapsac.83.10ben
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