Brexit: A Case Study of Populist and Personalized Politics

Populism is a concept that has been discussed a lot in the literature, both theoretically and ideologically. While attention to populism increased, the term continued to be contested. Using a qualitative content analysis method, this thesis looks at the Brexit referendum period in the UK to understand the nature and extent of populist discourses. The study covers the period of 1st of January 2014 to 31st of July 2016 and uses newspaper content from Daily Mail, Daily Mirror and The Times. The most recent populist trend that developed in Europe and the world started to strongly affect the United Kingdom with the Brexit referendum. In the 1980s, the fact that some political groups and actors in Britain began to take a negative attitude towards Europe with Euroscepticism directly impacted the referendum process, along with the populism movements in Europe and America during the referendum process. Most importantly, the Brexit referendum process illustrated that populism was coupled with another political trend: the personalization of politics. The prominence of individual political actors and the fact that populist discourse led by particular individuals such as Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson showed the emergence of this shift in cleavage structures in the UK besides the effects of populism. The study demonstrates that there is a significant level of personalisation of politics during the Brexit referendum. Keywords: Euroscepticism, populism, personalisation of politics, Brexit referendum, United Kingdom