Resisting right-wing populism in Government: A comparative analysis of social movement communicative strategies in highly polarized society in the US and the UK

The United States and the United Kingdom have been witnessing a constant increase in right-wing populist actors and policies over the last few years. Both countries reached the peak of this escalation in 2016, when Mr Donald Trump was elected as the President of the United States and the referendum for the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union resulted in Brexit. Since then, the implementation of several policies resulted in augmenting the levels of political polarization in both US and UK society. Although several studies analyzed the consequences of right-wing populism in power and the effects of growing affective polarization, very few publications dealt with the civil society reaction to right-wing populism and more specifically on how this activism relates to affective polarization. Specifically, the innovative communicative strategies employed by civil society actors in their challenge to face right-wing populism in power remains marginal, whereas the role of communication in right-wing populism success is a growing subfield in communication and media studies. Filling this research gap is therefore the goal of the present paper. Through a comparative research design based on quantitative text analysis, this paper will analyze the social media strategies of selected movements in the two countries, so as to shed light on and explain similarities and differences in the two contexts. By combining unsupervised machine learning methods based on LDA algorithms with dictionary based content analysis, the paper will analyze the communication strategies of social movements in facing right-wing populism in power in the US and the UK. By implementing a theoretical framework that defines populism as an act of collective identity formation (political identification), the study reveals that the attempt of countering right-wing populism results in an effort of lowering affective polarization, because social movements are trying to build competitive and inclusive political identities, as opposed to the one built up by right-wing populism, by developing a more comprehensive and inclusive understanding of "the people" and citizenship. Nevertheless, the reactive nature of this activism and the conflict over the construction of competing political identities still makes these civil society actors polarizing actors by increasing the level of conflictuality in society The analysis reveals that the common aspects of the communication strategy in the two countries is that of constructing collective political identities that are opposing the ones constructed by right-wing populism. At the same time, the strategy has some contextual differences: while in the United Kingdom several movements differentiated their policy goals by concentrating on some specific policy issues, in the United States a more comprehensive hybrid strategy combined grassroot activism with electoral strategies to control the Congress. Overall, this study has the goal of unpacking the role of communication strategies of civil society by highlighting the specificities of civil society activism, its communicative dimension and its role in countering right-wing populism in a highly polarized context.