An exploration of the roles of political influencers and right-wing populist politicians: Contrasting discourses and communications styles in Twitter during Brexit

The effects of social media on contemporary political life can be addressed by examining the roles and behaviours of a key type of actor: the political influencer (PI). These actors absorb emotions, discourses, and attitudes propagated in social media, while simultaneously operationalising them to maximise their appeal and popularity. Through the cultures and architectures of social media, PI effectively exploit the eclectic interstices of politics, media, and popular culture. Crucially, PI and social media politics have gradually affected how more traditional politicians perform their roles, self-represent in a highly-eclectic media environment, and enact politics in politically-polarised environments. In the context of the Brexit referendum, social media were critical platforms, actors, and technologies that increased the degree of political polarisation in the UK. An understudied characteristic of this process is that of the decentralising role that PI acquired, and its effects on traditional political actors, practices, and cultures. Studies relating political communications to social media have addressed network dynamics, followership patterns, and influence dynamics between major stakeholders in traditional media frameworks. However, not much has been said on how non-traditional political actors (i.e., PI) relate in their discursive development and communication styles with more traditional politicians in a media system that intertwines “old” and “new” media logics of political communications. To address this gap, this study focuses on how discourses embedded in tweets were articulated during the height of the Brexit referendum (2016), and how these relate to rhetorical styles in the contemporary political communications environment. Specifically, we explore how narratives and communications styles wielded by high-profile political actors compare to that of their counterparts. This exploration aims at revealing i) the similarities and differences in discursive approaches and rhetorical styles regarding Brexit, and ii) the relation of these discourses and styles with PI culture and characteristics. Empirically, we address the content relationships between three groups of right-wing political actors – traditional politicians (Conservative party), populist politicians (UKIP), and media pundits (online commentators) via a mixed-methods analysis of their tweets. This approach is a qualitatively-driven exploratory sequential design, combining Qualitative Text Analysis as the core component, with Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) as the supplemental quantitative component. Preliminary results show that the interrelation between discourses and communication styles appears to be largely heterogeneous among the actors – i.e., the right-wing spectrum of UK politics appears to still be discursively and rhetorically diverse. However, deeper analyses show that there is a considerable convergence towards more aggressive and negative communications styles as the discourses touch upon more contextually-polarising themes. In this line, traditional right-wing political actors increasingly adopt the (negative) emotional language, strategies, and communication styles performed by political influencers as political crises intensify.