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Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016
UK right-wing t abloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De Cesare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
1
Little old UK voting Brexit and some Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the
2016 UK right-wing tabloid discourse
Pascual Pérez-Paredes
University of Cambridge
So it no longer matters what Hollande or Merkel say any more. It’s what the
people say that matters. And this revolution is all down to the little old UK
voting Brexit. EU could collapse long before Brexit process is finished THE
Brexit vote in June was an earth-shattering political event. EU could collapse
long before Brexit process is finished.
Stephen Pollard. The Daily Express, 2 December 2016.
1. Introduction
2016 was full of shocking events in the old continent. On 22 March, 32 people were
killed in attacks at Brussels airport and Maalbeek underground station. On 18 April, over
400 migrants and refugees died in the Mediterranean Sea trying to make it into Italy
from Egypt. In Austria, a gunman killed 2 and wounded 11 people in an open-air concert.
On 23 June 2016, the UK voted to leave the European Union (EU). Jo Cox Labour MP had
been shot dead a few days earlier. On 22 July a gunman killed 9 and injured 27 in a
shopping mall in Munich. On 4 December, Alexander Van der Bellen, supported by the
Green Party, won the Austrian presidential election in a re-run of the second round. He
defeated right-wing Austrian Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs, FPÖ)
candidate Norbert Hofer. On 5 December, Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi resigned
after losing the constitutional reform referendum.
Different authors (Corbett, 2016; Schmidt, 2017) have researched the political reactions
and the media discourse around these events, before and after 2016, in the light of
populism. Bonikowski (2016) claims that it is difficult to study populism on the European
radical right as scholars have used interchangeably terms such as nationalism,
Euroscepticism or the far right “when labelling a set of specific parties” (p.18). This
author suggests that populist discourse has been successful due to both “a potent mix
of populist and ethno-nationalist discourse, and […] a confluence of contextual factors
that makes such anti-elite, anti-foreigner, and anti-minority arguments resonant” (p.21).
Some of the events described in the first paragraph (terrorist attacks, immigration, anti
EU vote) create the backdrop against which radical right narratives emerge in the EU.
Bonikowski (2016:21) suggests that such narratives “[…] can be easily exploited by anti-
establishment” parties.
Rhetorical strategies have reshaped the political landscape by using new and old media
that exploit the anger and the fear of an important part of the population in Western
societies. Schmidt (2017) has argued that the ideational root causes behind Brexit and
Trump´s victory are:
Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016
UK right-wing t abloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De Cesare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
2
(1) neoliberal economic ideas leading to the 21st century financial crisis, and to
“the worsening of [middle class people] life chances due to stagnant wages,
growing inequality and the increasing difficulty for the young to get a foot on the
real estate ladder, or a steady well-paying job” (p.255);
(2) a discourse on culture and identity, in particular against cross-border mobility
and immigration (p.256);
(3) a political discourse against the establishment, and “[…] against citizens’
growing sense of loss of control as a result of the removal of more and more
decisions from the national to supranational level […] because of increasing
Europeanization in the case of the UK” (p.258).
The day after the Austrian elections, Julia Ebner wrote in The Guardian an article with
the following title: “Austria defeated the far-right Norbert Hofer – finally, some hope for
Europe”.
1
The author stated the following:
Unlike the Brexit referendum and the US elections, this vote was not just a choice
between the status quo and change, or the establishment and the fringes.
Mainstream politicians had already been eliminated in the first round, leaving
only outsiders in the game: a xenophobic gun enthusiast and a green party-
backed professor. It was a runoff between greed and solidarity, hatred and
empathy, and, potentially war and peace.
Julia Ebner described the FPÖ as “partly founded by Nazis with a record of antisemitism
and an agenda of anti-Muslim bigotry”. She stated that Norbert Hofer sparked an
aggressive campaign that fuelled political violence and hate speech, and “increasingly
hijacked religion as a populist mobilisation tool”. Wodak (2015) describes right-wing
populism as showing, among others, a focus on EU-skepticism, and maintains that UKIP
and FPÖ have developed a “broader integrative identity concept related to nativist body
politics” (p. 41). Both parties thrived on the idea that the European identity is an
invention of the elites, a top-down construction where the community of “us” is an
imaginary one. Despite his defeat on 4 December 2016, Hofer was backed by 46% of the
voters.
This research seeks to understand how the UK right-wing tabloids construed Norbert
Hofer during 2016 and the themes that emerged in the articles where he was
mentioned. We will adopt a corpus-driven approach (Tognini-Bonelli, 2001; Baker, 2006)
where we will seek to expose how “the patterns in [our corpus and the reference
corpora] are noted as a way of expressing regularities (and exceptions) in language”
(Baker, 2006:16). We will try to answer the following research questions:
(1) How Norbert Hofer construed in the UK right-wing tabloid press during 2016?
(2) How were Norbert Hofer and the FPÖ used in the discussions that appear in the
UK right-wing tabloid press?
1
URL: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/dec/05/defeat-austria-far-right-norbert-
hofer-hope-europe
Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016
UK right-wing t abloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De Cesare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
3
Thus, we hope to gain a better understanding of how right-wing media, supposedly
populist and nationalist, use foreign politics in their discourse, and contribute to the
debate on the use of rhetorical strategies to promote the right-wing agenda in Europe
and beyond.
2. Methodology
Our research methodology is based on corpus-driven and corpus-based discourse
analysis (Tognini-Bonelli, 2001), where keywords and collocations (Baker et al, 2008;
Baker, Gabrielatos and McEnery, 2013a, 2013b; Pérez-Paredes, Aguado & Sánchez,
2017; Pérez-Paredes, 2018) help to how individuals and processes are discursively
constructed. In the following lines, we will discuss how the corpus was collected and the
different methods used in order to answer our research questions.
2.1 Corpus compilation and clean-up
We selected the UK conservative tabloid papers Daily Mail, Daily Express and The Sun,
and searched the Factiva platform
2
for news articles from 1/1/2016 to 3/12/2016
3
where the full name “Norbert Hofer” was mentioned. All information in Factiva is tagged
with a classification system allowing users to retrieve exact content from nearly 33,000
global sources, and “[…] eliminate the noise that comes with free text searching”
4
. While
this is mostly accurate, corpus linguists and discourse analysts need to refine the results.
The search returned 19 texts (Appendix 2). After examining each, one of the articles was
removed as “Norbert Hofer” was not part of the main body of the text but part of a
“Read More” section in the middle of the piece. 18 news items were retained and
cleaned up before carrying out POS tagging and applying corpus analysis methods. The
clean-up involved removing unnecessary sections such as metadata, Read more
sections, formatting code (h2, caption, etc.) and appeals to contribution, generally in
the final paragraph. In some of them, particularly in The Sun, it was decided to remove
sections that were not concerned with the main news item where Norbert Hofer was
alluded. That was the case of the column by Conservative Party supporter and journalist
5
“Tony Parsons: “Moronic Remain poster is offensive to both black AND white people”,
published in The Sun on 29 May 2016 .
6
After examining the item, it could be attested
that the piece was divided into different sections all written by Conservative Party
supporter and journalist Tony Parsons: “Moronic Remain poster is offensive to both
black AND white people”, “FACISM-I BLAME ANGELA MERKEL”, “Insane…..Sharon
Osbourne”, “HARRY STYLES IS A PLUCKY SOLDIER”, “MONEY-GRABBING WARMONGER’S
2
URL: https://global-factiva-com.proxy.jbs.cam.ac.uk/
3
The day before the presidential elections in Austria.
4
URL: https://www.dowjones.com/products/factiva/
5
URL: https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/tony-parsons/1222188/tony-parsons-moronic-remain-poster-
is-offensive-to-both-black-and-white-people/
6
URL: https://www.thesun.co.uk/archives/tony-parsons/1222188/tony-parsons-moronic-remain-poster-
is-offensive-to-both-black-and-white-people/
Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016
UK right-wing t abloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De Cesare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
4
LOOKING A BIT AGED” and “LUVVIES GO ACTING SUPERIOR” (Upper/lower case as in the
original).
All 18 articles comprising the 2016 Hofer UK Tabloid Corpus (HUKT Corpus) were
published across 11 different days, most of them in the months of May (4 articles) and
December 2016 (8 articles). Our corpus was uploaded to Sketch Engine where it was
POS-tagged using the English Tree Tagger tagset with Sketch Engine modifications. The
HUKT corpus contains 18,564 words and 4,316 types.
2.2 Methods
Baker (2006:7) points out that “all methods of research have associated problems which
need to be addressed and are also limited in terms of what they can and cannot
achieve”. Following Baker (2004:357), we will carry out analyses of multi-word keywords
and “[…] supplementary concordance and collocational analyses [which] enable
researchers to obtain a more accurate picture of how keywords function in texts”. In
this research, we will triangulate results from three different methods that will explore
the corpus (as well as other reference corpora). By using a combination of approaches,
we aim (1) to provide richer results (2) derived from a variety of research methods that
(3) will contribute to discussing our initial research questions from multiple perspectives
and, to some extent, (4) reduce researcher´s bias (Baker, 2004; 2006). These methods
are keyword analysis, Word sketches and collocational analysis. Keyword analyses and
word sketches will be mined, that is, the resulting items will be the product of different
statistical tests. We will use collocation analysis to examine Norbert Hofer and related
terms. The difference between corpus-driven and corpus-based methods is that, in the
former, the keywords and sketches to examine will emerge from the statistical analyses
carried out; the latter have been selected a priori based on our interest in Norbert
Hofer’s role in British right-wing tabloids.
2.2.1 Keyword analyses
In cultural studies, keywords are seen as the body of meanings of the practices central
to our societies and institutions. In corpus-informed discourse analysis, however,
keywords are mined through statistical analysis. In corpus linguistics, the clustering of
lexical items reveals different co-textual environments built upon co-collocation and
colligation (Pace-Sigge 2013; Pérez-Paredes, 2017). These lexico-grammatical
environments built on repeated linguistic patterns are “[…] widely shared in a discourse
community” (Baker 2011: 13), and create the conditions for the identification of lexical
items characterizing a text or a whole corpus (Pérez-Paredes, 2018). Stubbs (2007: 130)
highlights that “[…] unique events can be described only against the background of what
is normal and expected”. It follows that “what is normal and expected” has to be
modelled, and hence the need for a reference corpus that can be contrasted with our
focus corpus. Following Baker’s (2004) methodological guidelines, in the following
paragraphs we intend to specify how keywords were mined.
Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016
UK right-wing t abloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De Cesare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
5
Single-word and multi-word extractions were performed using Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff,
2012). Table 1 summarises the criteria selected for keyword extraction:
Single word keywords reference corpus
enTenTen15
Multi-words reference corpus
BNC
Attribute for keywords
Lemma
Minimum frequency
3
Table 1. Criteria used for the extraction of single- and multiple-word keywords
For the single-word keyword extraction, we used the English Web Corpus (enTenTen) as
reference corpus. This is a crawled corpus (Kilgariff, 2012) made up of texts collected
from the Internet and part of the TenTen corpus family. The enTenTen English corpora
were tagged by TreeTagger using Penn TreeBank tagset with Sketch Engine
modifications. The English Web corpus 2015 (enTenTen15) contains 15 billion words.
The use of a recent, large reference corpus was deemed more appropriate for the
extraction of single words, while for the multi-word keyword extraction, the British
National Corpus (BNC) was chosen. Keyness is calculated using Simple maths, “a method
for identifying keywords of one corpus vs another […] and identify instantly what is
typical in language and what is rare, unusual or emerging usage […] The statistic […] for
keywords is a variant on “word W is so-and-so times more frequent in corpus X than
corpus Y”
7
. In our analysis, we only considered the top 100 keywords although for the
sake of space we report the top 50 in Tables 2 and 3. Some of the limitations of keyword
analysis pointed out by Baker (2004) have been met by exploring the actual concordance
lines and, particularly, by triangulating results with other methods (word sketches and
collocations). However, we could not measure keyword dispersion as this feature is not
offered on Sketch Engine. For the sake of analysis, keywords are grouped semantically
according to meaning.
2.2.2 Word sketches
Sketch Engine (Kilgariff, 2012) developed Word Sketch, a function that offers a “[…]
word’s collocates categorised by grammatical relations”.
8
A word sketch is then a group
of collocations displayed according to grammatical relations, and sorted either by their
frequency or an association score. In the context of this research, logDice is used as
association score, and overall lexical word frequency in the corpus as the criterion to
choose which sketches to examine (Appendix 1).
2.2.3 Collocational analysis
In the context of this research, collocations are understood as “co-occurrence patterns
observed in corpus data” (McEnery and Hardie, 2011: 123) as calculated by Sketch
7
URL: https://www.sketchengine.eu/documentation/simple-maths/
8
URL: https://www.sketchengine.eu/user-guide/user-manual/word-sketch/
Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016
UK right-wing t abloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De Cesare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
6
Engine and which uses the logDice association measure based on the likelihood function
within a range of -5/+5 words. The significance cut off point was established at 6.63 (p
= 0.01). The words examined with this type of analysis (i.e. Norbert Hofer, Freedom
Party, Austria and Britain) were selected before carrying out the keyword and the word
sketch analyses. Given its prominence in the corpus, Italy was included at a later stage.
3. Results
3.1 Single-word keywords
Table 2 shows the top 50 single keywords in the HUKT corpus. 36% of them are countries
or nationalities (e.g. Italian, Europe, Britain, etc.); 24%, people (Hofer, Grillo, Merkel,
etc.); and 14%, politics-related lexical items (Party, Labour, Freedom, Star, etc.)
Rank
Item
Score
Freq
Rank
Item
Score
Freq
1
EU
7948.77
168
26
Sunday
757.93
16
2
Brexit
3076.03
65
27
Star
757.93
16
3
I
3028.72
64
28
No
757.93
16
4
Italian
2981.41
63
29
May
757.93
16
5
Italy
2886.8
61
30
Five
757.93
16
6
Europe
2792.18
59
31
Trump
710.62
15
7
Britain
2650.26
56
32
Pen
710.62
15
8
European
2366.41
50
33
Le
663.31
14
9
Renzi
1656.79
35
34
Greece
663.31
14
10
Mr
1372.94
29
35
Turkey
616.01
13
11
Party
1231.01
26
36
Movement
616.01
13
12
France
1231.01
26
37
What
568.7
12
13
Hofer
1183.7
25
38
Polish
568.7
12
14
Germany
1136.4
24
39
Marine
568.7
12
15
Austria
1136.4
24
40
Angela
568.7
12
16
Labour
1089.09
23
41
Mrs
521.39
11
17
UK
994.47
21
42
Eurosceptic
521.39
11
18
Minister
994.47
21
43
Dutch
521.39
11
19
Grillo
994.47
21
44
Spain
474.08
10
20
British
947.16
20
45
Saatchi
474.08
10
21
Prime
899.86
19
46
Remain
474.08
10
22
Merkel
899.86
19
47
Poland
474.08
10
23
Freedom
852.55
18
48
PM
474.08
10
24
Brussels
852.55
18
49
Matteo
474.08
10
25
Norbert
805.24
17
50
Juncker
474.08
10
Table 2. Top 50 Keywords extracted from the corpus
Titles are unsurprisingly significant (Mr, Ministers, Prime, Mrs, etc.), and while Brexit
and Remain make it into the top 50, Leave did not make it even in the top 100. EU
Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016
UK right-wing t abloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De Cesare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
7
(7948.77), Brexit (3076.03), Europe (2366.41), Britain (2650.26) and European (2366.41)
are in the top 8 of the extracted keywords; in other words, these lemmas are most
salient in the corpus under analysis when compared to enTenTen15. What is even more
interesting is that, if we used the enTenTen13 as the reference corpus instead of the
enTenTen15, the top 8 keywords would be Brexit, Renzi, Hofer, Grillo, referendum,
Norbert, Euroskeptic and Juncker, which reinforces the relevance of the keywords EU,
Europe, Britain and European. In short, in 2013/2014 our corpus would have been
characterized by a very strong presence of proper nouns such as Renzi or Grillo, whereas
in 2015/2016, it is the nations and the political structures that, based on our keyword
analysis, seem to dominate the debate in the right-wing press. Additionally, I stands out
as top 3 keyword as quoted speech is a trademark of tabloids according to Lefkowitz
(2018). In the corpus, I represents different speakers, columnists as well as politicians,
among whom we find Mr Hofer.
3.1.2 Multi-word keywords
Table 3 offers the top 50 multi-word keywords in the HUKT corpus. In the top 10 we
find 4 noun phrases where the word crisis is a headword: migration crisis (284.85),
migrant crisis (142.92), banking crisis (130.29) and financial crisis (119.01). Eurozone
crisis is top 13 and next crisis is top 30.
Rank
Item
Score
Freq
Rank
Item
Score
Freq
1
migration crisis
284.85
6
26
real uncertainty
94.86
2
2
far-right leader
237.54
5
27
rising nationalism
94.02
2
3
european project
223.67
5
28
banking capital
93.19
2
4
youth
unemployment
150.53
5
29
speech today
92.38
2
5
constitutional
reform
146.2
7
30
next crisis
91.59
2
6
migrant crisis
142.92
3
31
refugee exodus
91.59
2
7
banking collapse
139.3
3
32
top job
91.09
3
8
banking crisis
130.29
3
33
polish community
89.28
2
9
financial crisis
119.01
5
34
political mood
89.28
2
10
presidential
election
115.41
7
35
referendum
campaign
87.16
2
11
far-right candidate
95.62
2
36
italian economy
87.16
2
12
populist candidate
95.62
2
37
referendum result
84.39
2
13
eurozone crisis
95.62
2
38
economic
uncertainty
84.39
2
14
dirty divorce
95.62
2
39
next president
83.07
2
15
popular fury
95.62
2
40
local bank
81.79
2
16
first far-right
leader
95.62
2
41
free movement
81.47
4
17
polish leader
95.62
2
42
political uncertainty
79.42
2
18
visa liberalisation
95.62
2
43
recent poll
78.83
2
19
italian referendum
95.62
2
44
political
establishment
78.25
2
20
puerile racist trash
95.62
2
45
open-door policy
77.67
2
Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016
UK right-wing t abloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De Cesare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
8
21
racist trash
95.62
2
46
political class
76.55
2
22
such puerile racist
trash
95.62
2
47
damage limitation
74.47
2
23
asian lady
94.86
2
48
fourth term
73.95
2
24
right politician
94.86
2
49
leading light
73.44
2
25
own referendum
94.86
2
50
upper house
61.21
3
Table 3. Top 50 multi-word keywords extracted from the corpus
A second group of keywords is made up of societal problems such as youth
unemployment (150.33), banking collapse (139.3), rising nationalism (94.02) or refugee
exodus (91.59). Youth unemployment is consistently mentioned together with the 37.1%
rate in the case of Italy and 11.7 % in the case of Austria. In every case, (the number of)
migrants in those countries appear in the vicinity:
1. With youth unemployment at 37.1 per cent and a record 171,000
migrants arriving this year from north Africa, the Italian Establishment is
terrified of Five Star. (Appendix 1, text id 13)
2. Youth unemployment of 11.7 per cent and 90,000 migrants last year –
one per cent of the population – mean he has a good chance. (Appendix
1, text id 13)
3. His opponent, a potty comedian, Beppe Grillo, above, is hostile to
immigration and, with youth unemployment at 37 per cent, on the
front foot. If Renzi is defeated it will trigger a financial crisis as the banks
are all skint. (Appendix 1, text id 15)
A third group of keywords has uncertainty as a headword in the noun phrase: real
uncertainty (94.86), economic uncertainty (84.39) and political uncertainty (79.42).
Uncertainty in these cases lies in the EU camp, and not in the UK. Economic
uncertainty, for example, is created in Europe as a result of the UK leaving the EU:
4. Voting Remain is a greater leap into the unknown than freeing ourselves
from the EU’s economic uncertainty. WE may not always like it but one
of the intractable realities of the human condition is that nothing ever
stays the same. (Appendix 1, text id 6)
Similarly, political uncertainty rests with the EU, not with the UK:
5. What has changed since then is the increasing political uncertainty in
several European countries, which is likely to further undermine any
Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016
UK right-wing t abloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De Cesare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
9
appetite the EU might have for a fight to the death with Britain.
(Appendix 1, text id 11)
A fourth group of two keywords expresses Europeans’ anger and frustration both at the
UK’s decision to leave the EU and at migrants in Austria: dirty divorce (95.62) and popular
fury (95.62). The former is allegedly used by the EU press to refer to the consequences
of Brexit, while the latter is used to, purportedly, describe Austrians’ concern with
migrants:
6. Thanks largely to popular fury at the migration crisis, the country’s far-
Right Freedom Party is now comfortably the most popular in the land.
(Appendix 1, text id 2)
7. Since Austria was famously the birthplace of Adolf Hitler, the prospect
of a far-Right government taking power in Vienna has a peculiarly
sinister resonance. But popular fury at the advent of 700,000 migrants
into a country of barely eight million people means it is probably
inevitable, turning Austria into a European pariah and inflaming
tensions with its neighbours. (Appendix 1, text id 2)
3.2 Word sketches
In the following lines, we will report how the grammatical relations found in the corpus
construct the following most frequent nouns in the corpus: EU, country, Brexit and
Italy. LogDice scores are provided in brackets.
3.2.1 The EU
While the most significant modifier of EU is punch-drunk (11.83), as a modifier, EU
presents a more neutral, less evaluative profile: membership (12.24), leader (10.82),
citizen (10.80), country (10.43) or state (10.24) are some of the top nouns modified by
EU. As an object, apart from leave (13.17), we find, among others, join (10.54), plunge
(9.67), cripple (9.67) or blame (9.67):
8. Voters in Austria and Italy go to the polls and could plunge the EU into a
political and economic crisis. (Appendix 1, text id 17).
9. People are turning against Brussels’ as Italy hits the polls it may well
cripple the EU and serve a boost to Brexit TOMORROW will be another
nervous day in the Chancelleries of Europe. (Appendix 1, text id 17).
10. But Italians are not the only people whose vote on Sunday could shatter
the EU. (Appendix 1, text id 2).
Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016
UK right-wing t abloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De Cesare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
10
When the EU takes an ´s genitive is in EU´s failings (12.19) and EU´S stalwart (12.19) in
the context of Italy or in economic uncertainty (12.19). The EU appear in coordinated
phrases and following Muslims (11.41), Ankara (11.41) or immigration (11.00).
3.2.2 Country
The noun country is used in the corpus to signify the idea of otherness. Using Sketch
Engine grammar, we find out that this lemma is preceded by other (11.70), European
(11.36), Eurosceptic (10.87), EU (10.43), angry (10.19) or Mediterranean (10.19). In
normal (10.19) country, we find an Italian citizen that complains that banks and
politicians scheme against citizens’ interests, so a normal country is one where all of
them would be in prison. The title of the article is “Will QUITaly sink the EU?”. In self-
satisfied (10.19) countries, we find a reflection on the resignation of Austrian Chancellor
Werner Faymann in May 2016 as a symptom of the dangers of the xenophobic far right:
“[…] thanks largely to popular fury at the migration crisis, the country´s far-Right
Freedom Party is now comfortably most popular in the land” (Appendix 1, text id 2).
Country is also the subject of copular be in the following:
11. To say the country is pessimistic is putting it lightly. With that mood
prevailing, Italians watched events in America – and saw a non-politician
wrest power from a cynical establishment figure. (Appendix 1, text id
13).
12. Some economists say the Italian story will be a much bigger version of
the Greek crisis, but with one crucial difference – the country is too
large to be rescued. (Appendix 1, text id 18)
3.2.3 Brexit
Modifiers of Brexit include Poland (11.99), UK (11.54) and Italian (9.64). Brexit is the
subject of trigger (11.54), give (10.91) and have (9.46), as shown in the next examples:
13. Brexit has also triggered concerns about what will happen to the peace
process. Italy Recent polls have revealed that 48 per cent of Italians
believe they would be better off out of the EU. (Appendix 1, text id 9)
14. As Brexit gives Europe’s far-right leaders cheer, it’s now clear punch-
drunk EU has over-extended itself. (Appendix 1, text id 9)
Brexit modifies vote (12.02), negotiation (11.41), talk (11.24) as well as bomb (10.54)
and gloom (10.35) in “Enough of all this Brexit gloom” (Appendix 1, text id 11).
Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016
UK right-wing t abloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De Cesare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
11
3.3 Collocations
As in 3.2, logDice scores are provided in brackets.
3.3.1 Norbert Hofer, the Freedom Party and Austria
Most of the collocates of Norbert Hofer describe his status as candidate (12.80) or
presidential (11.77), as well as his political orientation as member of the Freedom
(11.83) Party and far-right (11.54) politician. The Freedom Party only collocates with
Hofer (11.76) or candidate (11.22), while Austria does not collocate with any lexical word
in the corpus.
3.3.2 Britain
Britain, on the other hand, offers quite a rich range of collocates: leave (11.73), if (10.98),
EU (10.93), deal (10.91), should (10.69), voted (10.60), Brexit (10.40), Europe (10.28) or
could (9.72). In the HUKT corpus, Britain is seen as a nation that, after the Brexit vote,
has left the EU in shock, although in two concordance lines we can read that (1)
Sweden’s finance Minister warns that it would be a mistake to chastise the UK, and (2)
the readers of Le Figaro thought Brexit was a good idea. Modal verbs should and could
are used to describe different scenarios that present a profound division in terms of
different unfolding events between the UK and the EU.
3.3.3 Italy
Italy collocates with euro (10.83), across (10.70), likely (10.35), referendum (10.32), polls
(10.20), France (10.15), may (10.14) and could (9.66). Most of these collocates are used
in the context of the constitutional reform referendum that was held on 4 December,
when 59.12% of the voters rejected the reform. That night, Matteo Renzi announced his
resignation as Prime Minister. Euro always appears in the corpus as a collocate of Italy
when discussing the hypothetical referendum the Five Star Movement would hold on
Italy´s Euro membership. Likely is used to hypothesize on the political future of both
Renzi and Italy if the voters rejected the constitutional reform, creating thus “a political
earthquake comparable to Brexit and the election in America of Donald Trump”
(Appendix 1, text id 13). The use of the preposition across is statistically significant. It is
complemented either by eurozone or Italy:
15. Experts are now fearful that uncertainty provoked by a political crisis in
Italy could spark panic across the eurozone, and Italy may even end up
leaving the euro and returning to the lira. (Appendix 1, text id 13)
16. So will there be an fresh earthquake right across Italy tomorrow night? I
expect a No vote. (Appendix 1, text id 18)
Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016
UK right-wing t abloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De Cesare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
12
As we can see in the above two articles published in the Daily Mail in early December
2016, panic and an earthquake are the likely results of a referendum on a constitutional
reform. Moreover, polls is used to convey the idea that “48 percent of Italians believe
they would be better off out of the EU” (Appendix 1, text id 8); that the referendum
“may well cripple the EU and serve a boost to Brexit” (Appendix 1, text id 17); and that
“Italy go to the polls and could plunge the EU into a political and economic crisis”
(Appendix 1, text id 17).
4. Discussion
Baker (2006: 18) points out that “corpus data does not interpret itself, it is up to the
researcher to make sense of the patterns of language which are found within a corpus,
postulating reasons for their existence or looking for further evidence to support
hypotheses”. In this section, we will interpret the results in the previous section by
examining how discourse is constructed around the keywords, word sketches and
collocations analysed. We will use Abts and Rummens (2007) right-wing populism
twofold vertical structure framework to discuss how the media analysed integrate
Norber Hofer, Austria and the Freedom Party as part of a rhetorical strategy to support
the ideological makeup of English nationalism as “[…] opposition to bureaucracy, open
borders and migration” (Wellings 2010: 498).
This paper examines how Norbert Hofer is construed in the UK right-wing tabloid press
during 2016 and how his party is portrayed in the discussions that appear in this type of
press. Our results show that the discourse involving Norbert Hofer in British right-wing
tabloids during 2016 is restricted to a limited set of keywords and themes that
characterize the HUKT corpus. The 18 texts present a marked interest in Brexit and its
consequences on international politics, and the negative impact of other political events
on the EU. The multi-word keyword analysis is particularly illuminating as it paints a
picture where numerous crises sweep away the EU and threaten to end the EU project
sooner than later, to the apparent satisfaction of the three papers under analysis. This
finding corroborates Leconte’s (2015) suggestion that the European project is under
attack from different right-wing actors across Europe.
4. 1 Right-wing populism against the elites
Abts and Rummens (2007: 418) maintain that right-wing populism blames the
intellectual, economic and political elites for abusing their positions of power and
influence, and ignoring the people. The keyword analysis has shown that the main focus
of interest of the corpus rests with countries, European institutions and Brexit. Leconte
(2015: 258) describes populism as an anti-establishmentarian discourse that emphasizes
the people against the elites. The top 3 multi-word keywords are unequivocally
revealing: migration crisis, far-right leader and European project. While the second is
arguably the immediate result of our inquiry, migration crisis and European project
reveal themselves as relevant themes in our corpus. Let us focus on the latter now.
Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016
UK right-wing t abloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De Cesare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
13
The European project, that is, the EU, and Brexit are the top 2 most significant individual
keywords in the corpus. Brexit is seen as being damaging to punch-drunk EU and to the
interests of senior officials. The enemy in the corpus, according to the logic of identity,
is the EU, not the Europeans. The EU personifies the role the elites play in populist
discourse: “[…] all political forms and offices which institute mediated forms of
representative power will be targeted as inimical to the direct rule of the people” (Abts
and Rummens 2007: 418). The narrative in the corpus suggests that Britain has started
an earthquake that will be followed by other countries. In this context, Italy and Austria
are instrumental. They are the other European countries that will show how dissatisfied
the people are with the EU project and the “invented” European identity (Wodak,
2015:41).
The Italian vote against the constitutional reform is seen as a punishment against the
establishment, one that will extend panic across the eurozone and will cripple and
plunge the EU, that is, their remote elites. As a result, Brexit will be boosted. Corbett
(2016: 14) maintains that the populist media depiction of EU policy has “[…] promoted
an especially ‘right-wing Euroscepticism’, that is ‘regressive and conservative within the
British political culture, [whose] strength lies in its capacity to be populist and appear
contemporary and radical” (Gifford 2006: 857). The radical and populist Eurosceptic
elements are found in the HUKT corpus in the way in which the EU is seen as a scapegoat
of all major problems (unemployment, migration crisis, economic crisis), and in the
neutral treatment Norbert Hofer and his party are given in the corpus. Our word sketch
and multi-word keyword analyses reveal that the Austrian far-right is not explicitly
associated with collocates other than neutral descriptors. Unsurprisingly, when it comes
to the EU, the right-wing media show no hesitation in blaming the EU or Brussels
(Geddes, 2013) for many of the issues outlined in Table 3. An exploration of the
concordance lines of European suggests that this is often used to portray threats to the
common people’s values and the logic of identity pursued by populists as opposed to
the discourse of constitutional democracies as guarantors of individual freedoms and
“[…] constitutive conditions of the democratic process” (Abts and Rummens, 2007: 418).
The following are some examples of how European is consistently associated with some
obscure elites and the construction of the EU as a delegitimized idea:
17. Brutalised by recession, stricken by austerity and outraged by what they
see as the European elite’s callous indifference, thousands of Greeks
have been driven into the arms of the far Right and extreme Left.
(Appendix 1, text id 2)
18. Is it likely that an EU in such a weak and confused condition will come
together with the specific intention of punishing Britain? I don’t believe
so. Of course, some European politicians – especially in Brussels – like to
talk tough. (Appendix 1, text id 11)
19. This month, Austria’s new chancellor, Christian Kern, said that Brexit
could mean the "slow goodbye of the European idea" unless serious
reform is carried out. He claimed that Brexit would trigger "enormous
Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016
UK right-wing t abloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De Cesare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
14
economic upheaval and a shift in the continent’s political balance".
(Appendix 1, text id 8)
20. Plenty of experts think that a rejection of Renzi’s reforms will trigger a
crisis which could eventually bring down the entire European project –
the EU, the euro, the Brussels gravy train, Uncle Tom Juncker and all.
(Appendix 1, text id 18)
Abts and Rummens (2007: 419) maintain that political opponents can “[…] no longer
appear as legitimate representatives of the popular will”, which validates the exclusion
and lack of recognition of what is different, in this case, the EU as embodied by the
Brussels elites and politicians. The extract below showcases how the Brexit vote is
constructed as a reaction to the elites by the “ordinary voters”:
21. The political establishment here [Germany, France and Italy] has carried
on the battle against Brexit by maintaining that the referendum vote was
some sort of irrational aberration. It was nothing of the sort: it was a vote
by ordinary voters who were fed up with being told they had no choice
but to go along with the EU elite. (Appendix 1, text id 16)
As seen in 3.2.3, Brexit is constructed as an extraordinary movement full of vigour and
enough potential to bring the EU down. This picture is consistent with Britain’s portrayal
(see 3.3.2) as a visionary country that will set trend and will be followed by others:
22. The other countries who could follow Britain out of the EU after
becoming disillusioned with Brussels FAR right political parties across
Europe are calling for their own countries to stage referendums on
leaving the EU just hours after Brits voted in favour of Brexit yesterday.
(Appendix 1, text id 8)
Paradoxically, this populist construction of the EU as an elitist project contrasts with
Gifford (2008), who states that Euroscepticism, as the hegemonic position within the
British political order, is the brainchild of the British political elite.
4.2. Right-wing populism against foreigners and immigrants
An important number of the keywords analysed shows that the articles where Norbert
Hofer was mentioned were concerned with the EU and migration. Corbett (2016:17)
thinks that dissatisfaction with the enlargement of the EU and the movement of people,
“[…] especially from new member states in central Europe opened up tensions in British
politics that neither New Labour nor Conservative parties could address”. In this light,
Brexit is seen as a direct consequence of these tensions. In our corpus, political
uncertainty is something EU countries need to deal with, in particular Italy. Youth
unemployment appears inexorably linked to migration, as if there was a direct,
Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016
UK right-wing t abloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De Cesare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
15
undisputed causal link between the two. Some of the uses of the keyword European
show how it was used to suggest that the EU can pose threats to the readers of the
media analysed. The following example links European decline with migrant workers and
asylum seekers’ sexual assault in Germany:
23. The calendar of European decline begins not with last month’s
referendum in Britain or the unrest in Turkey. For the Germans at least it
probably started on New Year’s Eve in Cologne when hundreds of women
were sexually assaulted by migrant workers and asylum seekers.
Information was initially withheld by the authorities because they did not
want to admit that the state could no longer cope. (Appendix 1, text id 9)
However, this never happened according to German police, The Bild and The New York
Times
9
. This incident appears on another article in the corpus (Appendix 1, text id 2).
The presence of anti-migrant and anti-asylum seeker discourses against migrants and
asylum seekers in the press is deeply worrying because of their effect on the formation
of public attitudes, opinions and will (Wodak, 2015). As with the elites, it seems that a
topos of cause was used in the corpus around the ideas of economic crisis and migrants.
According to Wodak (2015: 53), “if the cause exists then so does the effect. If the cause
does not exist, then there is no effect”. Such a causal link is implied in our corpus. In all
the instances where the top 1 multi-word keyword migration crisis occurs, what we find
is not a humanitarian interest in the situation of migrants coming to the EU to improve
their life conditions (away from a war in Syria), but a breakdown of the negative effects
on countries (see 3.2.2) and citizens in the EU:
24. That figure has increased from 35 per cent over the last year, suggesting
that Eurosceptic momentum is building due to the country’s migration
crisis, poor economy and unemployment figures.
The extended concordance line refers to Italy, one of the unexpected protagonists of
our initial search. In 3.3.3 Italy was constructed as one of the EU countries that may
eventually follow the UK in leaving the EU. Italy and Austria provide the backdrop
against which the migration crisis unfolds and against which a populist pro-Brexit
discourse emerges, possibly suggesting “an idealized conception of a [nation´s]
imagined past, which has since been weakened or destroyed by enemies of the people”
(Corbett, 2016: 15), especially by the EU project (Wellings, 2010; Geddes, 2013). Part of
that conception remains implicit in the HUKT corpus, as if the invocation of the topos of
cause would suffice for the effect of crises and disasters to validate the effects and the
consequences of the Brexit vote. In some of the keywords, however, we find a more
explicit vindication of Brexit. This is the case of free movement:
25. Joseph Muscat effectively said there wasn’t a cat’s chance in Hell of our
having access to the single market while restricting free movement of
labour. Sometimes it seems intransigent Remainers actually want
9
URL: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/16/world/europe/bild-fake-story.html
Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016
UK right-wing t abloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De Cesare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
16
negotiations to founder so that Brexit can be universally recognised as a
total disaster.
26. Expanding the EU to include additional countries, which is very much
Brussels’ plan, would exacerbate opposition to the free movement of
people. Given all this, Remain needs to explain why we wouldn’t be
better off trying to diversify our economy towards more resilient parts
of the world
Remainers and Brussels are used here in similar ways as elites in the previous section as
part of the topos of threat (Wodak, 2015): if Remainers continue their fight to repeal
Brexit, we are warned, the voices of the people will be unheard and the EU elites will
triumph. Freeden (2017:1) states that Brexit has “[…] occasioned the need to reassess
the ranges and guises of populism, especially when populist agendas are voiced in part
from within the political Establishment of a democratic state”. The results of the study
reveal a discourse that tries to blame the EU and migrants (Wodak, 2015) for the many
challenges and problems the UK and the EU are facing in 2016 and beyond.
5. Some conclusions
Data-driven methods such as keyword analyses and word sketches were used to surface
the themes and the aboutness of our corpus (Scott, 2008). This study has tried to gain
further understanding of the role played by Austrian far-right politics in the discourse of
right-wing press in the UK during 2016. Using a combination of corpus linguistics
research methods and the analytical framework provided by Abts and Rummens (2007),
the results of this research show evidence that Norbert Hofer and the FPÖ were used to
articulate the EU on a vertical axis where right-wing tabloids’ populist discourse against
the EU elites and migrants could be framed. Complementary collocation analyses
support the idea that, while far right leaders in right-wing media are portrayed as neutral
stakeholders, their politics and beliefs are used to showcase populist discourse against
the EU and migrants. This is an interesting finding that lends support to Wodak´s (2015)
analysis of right-wing populisms as embodying the feelings of fear of the future and the
desires for change. In this context, “fear is easily converted into scapegoating and is
politically instrumentalized” (p. 186). This study also corroborates that the Brexit vote
was a reaction to a narrative about immigration as a danger to UK values and
sovereignty:
[…] immigration was central to the debate in the UK. The Leave campaign was
relentless in its narratives about the problems of immigration in Britain, in
particular by UKIP, where opposition took on racist overtones as party leaders
claimed foreigners were taking jobs and overburdening the social services
(despite evidence to the contrary) (Schmidt 2017:256).
The UKIP poster suggesting thousands of migrants trying to break into the UK will remain
as one of the most dishonourable tricks in the history of social manipulation.
Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016
UK right-wing t abloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De Cesare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
17
One of the contributions of this analysis is to unmask the dangerous discourse of
populist media that tries to oversimplify complex issues such as migration and
sovereignty and exploits the fear of those who feel their life style threatened. Another
is to show how necessary is to challenge views on populism situating it as an ideology,
as they take advantage of “[…] rising immigration, growing ethnic diversity of national
populations, changes in cultural mores, persistent social inequality, economic crises,
terrorist threats, and ineffective political governance” (Bonikowski 2016: 21).
Understanding the rhetorical strategies of right-wing populist discourse is necessary to
fight the ideological makeup (Wellings, 2010) covering up the use of foreign politics in
UK tabloids in order to legitimize the hatred towards minorities, in particular migrants.
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Appendices
Appendix 1
Corpus lemma list (Top 100)
Rank
Lemma
Freq
Rank
lemma
Freq
1
The
1199
51
leave
49
2
Be
767
52
their
48
3
Of
536
53
party
46
4
To
504
54
all
46
5
A
470
55
about
46
6
In
378
56
want
45
7
And
376
57
no
45
8
Have
273
58
now
44
9
That
244
59
do
43
10
It
183
60
make
42
11
For
176
61
leader
40
12
EU
168
62
than
39
13
On
150
63
there
38
14
As
123
64
people
38
15
Will
119
65
political
37
16
Not
110
66
one
37
17
By
101
67
poll
36
18
He
97
68
crisis
36
19
With
96
69
after
36
20
Would
96
70
or
36
21
This
95
71
many
36
22
Vote
95
72
Renzi
35
23
But
85
73
government
35
24
Say
85
74
come
35
25
They
76
75
into
34
26
If
76
76
she
34
27
referendum
74
77
next
33
28
An
73
78
like
33
29
Country
72
79
even
33
30
From
72
80
our
33
31
Brexit
65
81
see
32
32
His
64
82
also
32
33
I
64
83
most
31
34
Italian
63
84
up
30
35
At
63
85
go
30
36
Italy
61
86
over
30
Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016
UK right-wing t abloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De Cesare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
21
37
Year
61
87
so
29
38
We
61
88
when
29
39
Could
60
89
Mr
29
40
Who
60
90
what
28
41
Europe
59
91
win
28
42
More
57
92
lead
28
43
Britain
56
93
call
27
44
Per
54
94
voter
27
45
Cent
53
95
just
27
46
Out
52
96
may
26
47
Which
51
97
Party
26
48
European
50
98
last
26
49
Its
49
99
France
26
50
election
49
100
Hofer
25
Pérez-Paredes, P. (2019). Little old UK voting Brexit and her Austrian friends: A corpus-driven analysis of the 2016
UK right-wing t abloid discourse. In Hidalgo, Benítez & De Cesare (eds.) Populist Discourse. Critical Approaches to
Contemporary Politics, 1st Edition. London: Routledge.
22
Appendix 2
Texts included in the Hofer UK Tabloid 2016 Corpus
id
Paper
Date
Title
1
Daily Mail
25/04/2016
EU MAKES IT HARDER FOR US TO CONTROL MIGRATION,
ADMITS HOME SECRETARY
2
Daily Mail
14/05/2016
THE BIGGEST LIE OF ALL
3
The Sun
23/05/2016
David Cameron fighting back after PM’s former guru
backed Brexit
4
The Sun
29/05/2016
Tony Parsons: Moronic Remain poster is offensive to both
black AND white people
5*
The Sun
30/05/2016
A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, found in a shed: Hitler’s
code machine discovered in Essex outhouse
6
The Sun
03/06/2016
EU Referendum: Voting Remain is a greater leap into the
unknown than freeing ourselves from the EU’s economic
uncertainty
7
The Sun
24/06/2016
News sites in Europe react in shock as Britain votes to
leave the EU, calling Brexit a ‘dirty divorce’
8
The Sun
24/06/2016
The other countries who could follow Britain out of the
EU after becoming disillusioned with Brussels
9
The Sun
27/07/2016
As Brexit gives Europe’s far-right leaders cheer, it’s now
clear punch-drunk EU has over-extended itself
10
Daily Mail
29/11/2016
POLISH PM: TEACH MY LANGUAGE IN BRITISH SCHOOLS
11
Daily Mail
29/11/2016
ENOUGH OF ALL THIS BREXIT GLOOM! THE EU ‘S IN
TURMOIL - AND WE’VE SOME ACES UP OUR SLEEVES
12
Daily Mail
01/12/2016
NOW MORE GERMANS CALL FOR VOTE ON QUITTING EU
13
Daily Mail
01/12/2016
EUROPE ON A PRECIPICE
14
The Sun
01/12/2016
EUROPE’S MOMENT OF TRUTH Elections, rising
nationalism and banking crisis could spark ‘cataclysmic’
break-up of the EU next year
15
The Sun
02/12/2016
We’re all facing job uncertainty, but unlike business
bosses, miners handle it with real dignity
16
The Daily
Express
02/12/2016
EU could collapse long before Brexit process is finished
17
The Sun
03/12/2016
As Italy hits the polls it may well cripple the EU and serve
a boost to Brexit
18
Daily Mail
03/12/2016
WILL QUITALY SINK THE EU?
19
The Sun
03/12/2016
Working class Brits did not ditch the Labour Party … it
ditched them
*This text was excluded from the analyses and the final corpus