skip to main content
10.1145/3657054.3657269acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication Pagesdg-oConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article
Open access

Brexit on Twitter: Unraveling the Dynamics of Polarization Over Time

Published: 11 June 2024 Publication History

Abstract

This paper uses a mixed-methods approach to examine the evolving dynamics of polarization amongst Twitter users who discussed the UK’s withdrawal from the EU from February 2016 to February 2020. Unlike previous research that mainly focused on specific time-frames, this study investigates the longitudinal changes in the network structure and the affective polarization of Twitter users before and after the referendum, reflecting a critical time of intense political debate about the UK’s future in the EU. We challenge the conventional belief that Leave supporters were more polarized than Remain supporters over time and show that, to some degree, the opposite was true after the referendum. We also provide empirical evidence of increasing out-group hostility and ideological extremity among both groups over time.

References

[1]
Koen Abts and Stefan Rummens. 2007. Populism versus Democracy. Political Studies 55, 2 (June 2007), 405–24. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9248.2007.00657.x
[2]
Pertti Ahonen. 2018. Of Walls and Fences: Brexit and the History of Cross-Border Migration. Contemporary European History 28, 1 (2018), 42–45. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777318000760
[3]
Lorenza Antonucci. 2017. The Revolt of the “Squeezed Middle”: Why New Cross-Society Coalitions in British Politics Are Now Possible. Renewal 25, 3-4 (2017), 16–27. https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/renewal/25-3-4/cross-society-coalition-labour-brexit
[4]
Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing, and Lada A Adamic. 2015. Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook. Science 348, 6239 (2015), 1130–1132.
[5]
Amy Binns, Martin Bateman, and John Mair. 2018. The Remoaner Queen under Attack: The Trolling of Gina Miller. In Anti-Social Media?: The Impact on Journalism and Society, John Mair, Tor Clark, Neil Fowler, and Raymond Snoddy (Eds.). Abramis, UK, 10–16. http://www.abramis.co.uk/books/bookdetails.php?id=184549729
[6]
Catherine Bouko and David Garcia. 2020. Patterns of Emotional Tweets: The Case of Brexit After the Referendum Results. In Twitter, the Public Sphere, and the Chaos of Online Deliberation, Gwen Bouvier and Judith E. Rosenbaum (Eds.). Springer International Publishing, UK, 175–203. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41421-4_8
[7]
Gwen Bouvier and Judith E. Rosenbaum. 2020. Communication in the Age of Twitter: The Nature of Online Deliberation. In Twitter, the Public Sphere, and the Chaos of Online Deliberation. Springer International Publishing, UK, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41421-4_1
[8]
Richard E Boyatzis. 1998. Transforming qualitative information: Thematic analysis and code development. sage, USA.
[9]
Thomas Carothers and Andrew O’Donohue (Eds.). 2019. Democracies Divided: The Global Challenge of Political Polarization. Brookings Institution Press, Washington, D.C.
[10]
D. Chernobrov. 2018. Who Is the Modern “Traitor”? “Fifth Column” Accusations in US and UK Politics and Media. Political Studies Association 103, 39 (2018), 347 – 362. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0263395718776215
[11]
Elanor Colleoni, Alessandro Rozza, and Adam Arvidsson. 2014. Echo Chamber or Public Sphere? Predicting Political Orientation and Measuring Political Homophily in Twitter Using Big Data. Journal of Communication 64, 2 (2014), 317–332. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcom.12084
[12]
Colin Copus. 2018. The Brexit Referendum: Testing the Support of Elites and Their Allies for Democracy; or, Racists, Bigots and Xenophobes, Oh My!British Politics 13, 1 (2018), 90–104. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-018-0070-3
[13]
John Curtis. 2019. Do Voters Support a No-Deal Brexit?BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-49551893 Section: UK Politics.
[14]
Kevin Durrheim, Mukadder Okuyan, Michelle Sinayobye Twali, Efraín García‐Sánchez, Adrienne Pereira, Jennie Sofia Portice, Tamar Gur, Ori Wiener‐Blotner, and Tina F. Keil. 2018. How Racism Discourse Can Mobilize Right‐wing Populism: The Construction of Identity and Alliance in Reactions to UKIP’s Brexit “Breaking Point” Campaign. Journal of Community & Applied Social Psychology 28, 6 (2018), 385–405. https://doi.org/10.1002/casp.2347
[15]
Robert M Entman. 1993. Framing: Toward clarification of a fractured paradigm. Journal of communication 43, 4 (1993), 51–58.
[16]
European Council. 2024. The EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement. https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/policies/eu-relations-with-the-united-kingdom/the-eu-uk-withdrawal-agreement/timeline-eu-uk-withdrawal-agreement/. Accessed: 25-Jan-2024.
[17]
Magne Flemmen and Mike Savage. 2017. The Politics of Nationalism and White Racism in the UK. The British Journal of Sociology 68, S1 (2017), S233–S264. https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12311
[18]
Matthew Goodwin and Caitlin Milazzo. 2017. Taking Back Control? Investigating the Role of Immigration in the 2016 Vote for Brexit. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 19, 3 (2017), 450–464. https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148117710799
[19]
Miha Grčar, Darko Cherepnalkoski, Igor Mozetič, and Petra Kralj Novak. 2017. Stance and Influence of Twitter Users Regarding the Brexit Referendum. Computational Social Networks 4, 1 (2017), 6. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40649-017-0042-6
[20]
Lei Guo, Jacob A. Rohde, and H. Denis Wu. 2020. Who Is Responsible for Twitter’s Echo Chamber Problem? Evidence from 2016 U.S. Election Networks. Information, Communication & Society 23, 2 (2020), 234–251. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1499793
[21]
Itai Himelboim, Stephen McCreery, and Marc Smith. 2013. Birds of a Feather Tweet Together: Integrating Network and Content Analyses to Examine Cross-Ideology Exposure on Twitter. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 18, 2 (2013), 40–60. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12001
[22]
Sara B Hobolt, Thomas J Leeper, and James Tilley. 2018. Divided by the Vote: Affective Polarization in the Wake of Brexit. Cambridge University Press 34 (2018), 1476 – 1493.
[23]
Shanto Iyengar and Sean J. Westwood. 2015. Fear and Loathing across Party Lines: New Evidence on Group Polarization. American Journal of Political Science 59, 3 (2015), 690–707. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajps.12152
[24]
Laura Kemmer, Christian Helge Peters, Vanessa Weber, Ben Anderson, and Rainer Mühlhoff. 2019. On Right-Wing Movements, Spheres, and Resonances: An Interview with Ben Anderson and Rainer Mühlhoff. Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 20, 1 (2019), 25–41. https://doi.org/10.1080/1600910X.2018.1544577
[25]
Ian Manners. 2018. Political Psychology of European Integration: The (Re)Production of Identity and Difference in the Brexit Debate. Political Psychology 39, 6 (2018), 1213–1232. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12545
[26]
Nolan M. McCarty. 2019. Polarization: What Everyone Needs to Know. Oxford University Press, New York, NY.
[27]
Maxwell E McCombs and Donald L Shaw. 1972. The agenda-setting function of mass media. Public opinion quarterly 36, 2 (1972), 176–187.
[28]
Lien Michiels, Jens Leysen, Annelien Smets, and Bart Goethals. 2022. What are filter bubbles really? a review of the conceptual and empirical work. In Adjunct proceedings of the 30th ACM conference on user modeling, adaptation and personalization. ACM, New York, NY, 274–279.
[29]
Marçal Mora-Cantallops, Salvador Sánchez-Alonso, and Anna Visvizi. 2019. The Influence of External Political Events on Social Networks: The Case of the Brexit Twitter Network. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing 4, 12 (2019), 4363–4375. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12652-019-01273-7
[30]
Chantal Mouffe. 2013. Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically. Verso Books, UK.
[31]
Kimberly A. Neuendorf. 2017. The Content Analysis Guidebook (second ed.). SAGE, Los Angeles.
[32]
M. E. J. Newman. 2006. Modularity and Community Structure in Networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 103, 23 (2006), 8577–8582. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0601602103
[33]
Samantha North, Lukasz Piwek, and Adam Joinson. 2020. Battle for Britain: Analyzing Events as Drivers of Political Tribalism in Twitter Discussions of Brexit. Policy & Internet 13, 2 (2020), 185–208. https://doi.org/10.1002/poi3.247
[34]
Patrick O’Brien. 2017. “Enemies of the People”: Judges, the Media and the Mythic Lord Chancellor. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences and School of Law 1, 1 (2017), 15. https://radar.brookes.ac.uk/radar/items/a7666467-7a26-4600-89b5-da16ecda5055/1/
[35]
Geneviève Paicheler. 1979. Polarization of Attitudes in Homogeneous and Heterogeneous Groups. European Journal of Social Psychology 9, 1 (1979), 85–96. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.2420090107
[36]
Eli Pariser. 2011. The filter bubble: What the Internet is hiding from you. Penguin, UK.
[37]
Gabriel Popham. 2021. What’s the Problem with Brexit? Notes from the Middle of Britain’s Crisis. European Journal of English Studies 25, 1 (2 January 2021), 96–109. https://doi.org/10.1080/13825577.2021.1918845
[38]
Christopher Prosser. 2021. The end of the EU affair: the UK general election of 2019. West European Politics 44, 2 (2021), 450–461.
[39]
Lisa M. PytlikZillig, Myiah J. Hutchens, Peter Muhlberger, Frank J. Gonzalez, and Alan J. Tomkins. 2018. Attitude Change and Polarization. In Deliberative Public Engagement with Science: An Empirical Investigation. Springer International Publishing, Germany, 61–87. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78160-0_4
[40]
Raquel Recuero, Gabriela Zago, and Felipe Soares. 2019. Using social network analysis and social capital to identify user roles on polarized political conversations on Twitter. Social media+ society 5, 2 (2019), 2056305119848745.
[41]
Cass R. Sunstein. 2007. Republic.Com 2.0. Princeton University Press, USA. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt7tbsw
[42]
Jingrong Tong and Landong Zuo. 2021. BREXIT REFERENDUM ON TWITTER: A Mixed-Method Computational Analysis. EMERALD GROUP PUBL, UK.
[43]
Satnam Virdee and Brendan McGeever. 2018. Racism, Crisis, Brexit. Ethnic and Racial Studies 41, 10 (2018), 1802–1819. https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1361544
[44]
Nyasha Weinberg. 2017. Nastiness toward Leave Voters Isn’t Going to Reverse Brexit. Kennedy School Review; Cambridge 17 (2017), 95–96.
[45]
What UK Thinks. 2024. EURef2 Poll of Polls. https://www.whatukthinks.org/eu/opinion-polls/euref2-poll-of-polls-2/ Accessed: 2024-01-22.
[46]
Laurence Whitehead. 2020. The hard truths of Brexit. J. Democracy 31 (2020), 81.
[47]
Sarita Yardi and Danah Boyd. 2010. Dynamic Debates: An Analysis of Group Polarization Over Time on Twitter. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society 30, 5 (2010), 316–327. https://doi.org/10.1177/0270467610380011

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Other conferences
dg.o '24: Proceedings of the 25th Annual International Conference on Digital Government Research
June 2024
1089 pages
ISBN:9798400709883
DOI:10.1145/3657054
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 License.

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 11 June 2024

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. Brexit
  2. Twitter
  3. civic-debate
  4. homogeneity
  5. mixed-methods
  6. polarization
  7. social network analysis

Qualifiers

  • Research-article
  • Research
  • Refereed limited

Conference

dg.o 2024

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 150 of 271 submissions, 55%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • 0
    Total Citations
  • 887
    Total Downloads
  • Downloads (Last 12 months)887
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)300
Reflects downloads up to 17 Feb 2025

Other Metrics

Citations

View Options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

HTML Format

View this article in HTML Format.

HTML Format

Login options

Figures

Tables

Media

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media