Populists Talking to Each Other: Right Wing Party and Movement Supporters on Social Media in the UK

In recent years the radical right has been gaining increasing momentum in the United Kingdom, both with regards to mainstream political parties and protest movements. Although these groups have used similar populist discourses and have attempted to appeal to the same constituents, the relationship between movements and parties in this context is little understood. This paper focuses on a party, UKIP, and a movement, Britain First, to remedy this problem. Both groups frame immigration and the EU as a threat to national identity and sovereignty, and BF decries the purported rise of Islam in the West. Both groups deploy populist appeals and have managed to successfully concatenate these topics into a "chain of equivalence" with an array of social issues. We are interested in the association between their discourses and the way they resonate with their supporters. Social media technologies constitute a space where parties and movements promote their messages and potential participants are able to interact with them. They thus provide a window through which to observe these processes. Firstly, we use the comments made by supporters of both groups on their respective Facebook pages to study the thematic frames of each group and their emotional resonance. Secondly, we reconstruct a network to identify individuals who act as bridges between the two groups. This allows us to see the role that populist discourses and individual activists play in linking movements and parties together.