Firm's Tweets Pushing the Brexit Agenda

• In Event: Citizen and Party Linkages in the EU

Abstract

Posters plastered with “Stronger in Europe” or “Take Back Control” littered the United Kingdom in 2016 as aggressive campaigning fought to leave the European Union or remain in the regional partnership. Though a public referendum decided by citizens, anyone would be remiss to neglect the involvement of businesses and labor unions in creating polarizing narratives during the campaign. One would also be remiss to observe businesses and labor unions adopting Brexit stances as if they were playing a game of darts in the dark; taking opposing stances within factors and industries, labor unions splintered, businesses uncertain of gains or losses. How did businesses and labor unions determine their stance on Brexit and as a result, end up with no apparent policy cohesion and challenging longstanding theories of political economy? This paper seeks to understand how the inherent traits of economic actors, such as factor mobility and labor market skills, poised businesses and labor unions to advocate for their trade policy preferences. The body of this paper is twofold: first, evaluating the usefulness of previous theories of political economy where economic integration was held as a “golden standard” in a global economy that is trending away from cooperation and second, assessing how businesses and labor unions externally project preferences and pressures of trade policies. A Twitter social media analysis will be used of the thirty largest labor unions and businesses to understand the language and topics most discussed during the Brexit campaign to analyze if there was a shift in themes (migration, economics, sovereignty) as the referendum drew nearer. A random sample of 10% of all tweets from targeted firms in 2015-2016 will be hand-coded for themes of sovereignty, economics, and immigration to train a neural net for the 180,000 total tweets.

Author

• Keely Rose Eshenbaugh, University of Nevada Reno