Elements of Populism in Boris Johnson's Political Communication on Brexit
Elements of Populism in Boris Johnson's Political Communication on Brexit

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores Boris Johnson's political communication style by analyzing his use of language and its populistic elements. The aim is to shed light on his linguistic construction of reality by examining the statements he made in a Brexit-related context. Therefore, qualitative discourse analysis was chosen as the most suitable method and 100 statements were generated by the Google search engine from multifarious sources. This included the systematization of several categories of used rhetorical figures, phrases, slogans, and word types. The paper discovered specific patterns in named language categories depending on which elements of populistic communication Johnson is practicing. For example, this is reflected in rhetorical questions when he is talking about “dangerous others”, the repetition of words such as “fantastic” and “great” and associating them with nouns like “country” and “people” in the sense of national unity, or an evident “us-them” division displayed while referring to Britain’s uncertain future.

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