BRITAIN FIRST AND THE UK INDEPENDENCE PARTY: SOCIAL MEDIA AND MOVEMENT-PARTY DYNAMICS*
Social movement scholars have recently turned their attention to the interactions between political parties and social movements, but little is known about how social media have impacted these relationships, despite widespread adoption of these technologies. We present a case study of the relationship between Britain First, a far-right anti-Muslim social movement, and the U.K. Independence Party, the Eurosceptic political party that spearheaded the Brexit campaign. The movement appeared marginal in the press but it dominated social media, using this presence to support to the party. We examine the dynamics of the relationship between these groups from 2013 until 2017, drawing upon data from social media, newspapers, and other online sources, and focusing on interactions between elites and rank-and-file supporters. Our findings illustrate how far-right groups have used new technologies to generate an unprecedented amount of popular support and to attempt to influence the political mainstream.
Contributor Notes
* We would like to thank Tim Bale, Kathleen Blee, Michael Macy, John McCarthy, Emily Parker, George Ross, Michael Schwartz, members of the Social Dynamics Lab at Cornell, and the three anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions. We also want to thank Dawit Mekonnen, Jiangjie Man, Jing Xia, Manuel Arturo Abreu, Ryan Enderby, and Weiran Song for their invaluable research assistance. Earlier versions of this work were presented at the 2016 Annual International Conference of Europeanists in Philadelphia, the 2017 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting in Montreal, and the 2018 Young Scholars in Social Movements Conference at the University of Notre Dame. All errors are our own.
† Thomas Davidson is a doctoral candidate and Mabel Berezin is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology at Cornell University.