Rosalynd Southern’s research while affiliated with University of Liverpool and other places

Social media has become an important tool for political discussion and participation. Furthermore, recently, the question of gendered harassment in online political spaces has gained much scholarly attention. However, work here has largely focused on elected representatives, with little work on how this affects ordinary citizens. This article seeks to establish whether there is a gendered online participation gap, using data from the British Election Study across three elections. It further seeks to reveal why this gap may exist by assessing specific questions about being harassed or fearing negative responses online. The findings show a persistent gender gap in political participation online across all elections studied. Furthermore, although women were not necessarily more likely to have been harassed online, they were far more likely to have avoided posting about politics for fear of a negative response. This suggests that fear of harassment may contribute to lower political participation online for women.

Negative campaigning has long concerned scholars because of the potential effects on the electorate and on democracy. Most scholarship has focused on single-election studies in the United States, whereas less is known about how campaigns go on the attack in the UK, and few compare two elections. Drawing from a dataset of Facebook posts by parties and leaders in Great Britain during the five weeks of campaigning in the 2017 and 2019 General Elections (N = 3560), we use supervised machine learning to categorise posts as negative campaigning and distinguish between attacks focused on issues and attacks on candidates’ images. Our findings show that the 2019 election was more negative than in 2017, and that larger parties were more inclined to adopt attacks as a campaign strategy. Moreover, we found that party accounts posted more attack messages than leader accounts and were more focused on attacking based on issues, rather than personal character or image. Finally, we found that attack messages elicit stronger engagement from audiences, with attack messages receiving more attention, particularly attacks on image.

Emily Harmer and Rosalynd Southern examine how two of the most significant online-only news platforms, BuzzFeed and Huffington Post, reported the election. Although there were similarities with legacy providers’ outputs, the sites also covered the campaign in distinctive ways more attuned to the digital landscape: among other things, they were more able to understand and critique the ways different parties attempted to campaign online.

In recent years, some political commentators and mainstream media outlets in the United Kingdom have pejoratively labelled young people, especially university students, a ‘snowflake generation’ – a term used to mock their perceived intolerance and over-sensitivity (Fox, 2016; Gullis, 2017; Slater, 2016; Talbot, 2020). This article challenges this discourse by drawing on findings from a large-scale study ( N = 810) conducted on a university campus in England that critically examined student’s perceptions of and attitudes to different forms of online harassment, including abusive, offensive and harassing communications, using survey and interview data. Key findings indicate that online harassment is so pervasive in digitised spaces that it is often viewed as the ‘norm’ by the student population who appear willing to tolerate it, rather than take actions to address it, which challenges pejorative claims that they are intolerant and easily offended ‘snowflakes’. Respondents who identify as female and transgender are more likely to be targeted by online harassment. We argue that the label ‘snowflake generation’ is diverting attention away from student’s everyday experiences of online harassment and its adverse effects, particularly on women and transgendered people, which has the potential to create a gender-related digital divide (Jane, 2018). The implications of these findings for the higher education sector will be outlined.

Online abuse directed at female politicians has the potential to present barriers to the political representation of women in the digital age. Previous research has produced mixed results, with some finding little difference between the extent of abuse received by male and female MPs, while others found that women and minority groups are subjected to specific kinds of abuse. While straightforward examples of abuse and discrimination are easy to identify, categorise and quantify, tweets which include more subtle microaggressions that position women and minority MPs as unqualified and unwelcome in politics deserve attention. This research therefore employs a qualitative thematic analysis of 11,543 tweets sent to UK members of Parliament. The analysis identified four themes: 1. ‘overt online abuse’, 2. ‘everyday sexism and othering’, 3. ‘dismissing discrimination and victim blaming’, and 4. ‘claiming reverse discrimination’. We argue that these digital microaggressions serve as constant reminders of the marginalised status of female representatives, and women of colour specifically, and should be conceptualised as forms of psychological and semiotic violence that reconstitute online political spaces as a hostile environment for women and may discourage women from seeking political office or compel women representatives to leave. Digital microaggressions may therefore be as damaging to women’s democratic representation as outright abuse.

Jeremy Corbyn proved to be one of Labour's most popular and yet one of its most divisive leaders amongst the membership. From his surprise election in 2015, he was characterized as both hero and villain. A conviction politician, determined to do things his way, he was leader of the opposition during one of the most fraught and difficult periods in modern history. And yet, despite opposing a minority government, Corbyn made little headway in uniting his own party and translating the country's discontent into ballot success. In this collection of carefully researched essays, Corbyn's influence on and legacy for the Labour Party are assessed. Each chapter focuses on an aspect of his time in office, his approach, his political thought and policy formation in an attempt to posit what constitutes 'Corbynism'. Chapters assess his leadership style, his attitude towards antisemitism and women in the party, his controversial foreign policy positions, as well as his views on the European Union. The essays also engage with a range of wider debates about populism, identity politics and fandom.