https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6847-1015
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ABSTRACT
The article focuses on the transformation of the UK Independence Party (UKIP) after the 2016 Brexit referendum. It describes how, after securing its chief political demand, UKIP opened up to grassroots far-right politics and assesses whether this strategy involved a concomitant shift towards a more radical discourse. Against a backdrop of organisational change, the findings refine the notion that a far-right turn within its ranks led to a significant shift in the (online) communication of the party towards issues like immigration, Islam, and gender. Indeed, these issues were mostly ‘outsourced’ to the cultural wing of the party, War Plan Purple. The article therefore critically links changes in UKIP’s organisation with shifts in online communication, adding new insights into the unorthodox politics and forms of mobilisation of the far right.
Acknowledgements
An earlier draft of this article was presented at the ‘Social Movements and Parties in a Fractured Media Landscape’ symposium held at the Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence, 1–2 July 2019, and at the XXXIII Meeting of the Italian Political Science Association (SISP), Lecce, 12–14 September 2019. We would like to thank the participants of both events as well as Dan Mercea, Lorenzo Mosca, and the anonymous reviewers for their thorough and constructive comments on our work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
2 Gerard Batten on BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, 14 April 2019.
5 The quote was retrieved from http://theliberalists.net/about in June 2019. The Liberalists now only have one registered domain (http://liberalists.org), which does not include an ‘About’ section.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Ofra Klein
Ofra Klein is a PhD researcher at the European University Institute (San Domenico di Fiesole), where she works on online political mobilisation and the radical right. She previously worked as a research assistant at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society [email: [email protected]].
Andrea L. P. Pirro
Andrea L. P. Pirro is assistant professor in the Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, Scuola Normale Superiore, Florence. He is editor of the journal East European Politics, editor of the Routledge Book Series in Extremism and Democracy, and steering committee chair of the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) Standing Group on Extremism and Democracy [email: [email protected]].