Post-Truth Politics in the UK's Brexit Referendum

Abstract

The term post-truth became the 2016 Oxford Dictionary word of the year, yet many scholars question whether the term signals anything new, or whether post-truth is just lying, which has always been a part of politics and media. This paper contributes to this discussion by critically evaluating the extent to which the Brexit referendum, the UK's vote to exit the European Union, was based on post-truth politics. The paper develops the argument that Brexit is a key example of post-truth politics, and that two key factors ushered in this new form of politics into the UK: 1) technological changes associated with social media, which lead to a situation in which a significant portion of the population acquire their news online, while anybody can post anything online without checks on the accuracy of the claims; 2) a growing distrust in democratic institutions, political elites, expertise, and traditional media gatekeepers which leads, in turn, to a loss of trust in established expert knowledge, leaving the population willing to rely on information originating from questionable sources. This combination of a decline in trust of politicians and experts with social media reliance, drove the British public to emotionally charged, value-based decision making to a greater extent than before, which thus supports the claim that post-truth politics is indeed a novel phenomenon. Our analysis of the Brexit referendum raises the need for scholars to study the daily activities of the population and focus on its role as an active regime shaper.

Post‐truth politics and discursive psychology

“…Marshall and Drieschova (2018) considered the wider contexts that enabled the rise of post‐truth politics in the context of the 2016 Brexit referendum. Unlike the previous two examples, their focus was not so much on what is post‐truth politics or the academic conditions that are guilty of its resurgence.…”

“…Crucially, their distinct approach emphasises a move towards an empirical enquiry of the type that Wight (2018) and Hyvönen (2018) allude as needed to understand post‐truth politics. Marshall and Drieschova (2018), thus, give us some indication of wider contexts for post‐truth politics.…”

“…These three examples from the special issue of New Perspectives highlights the issue of post‐truth in terms of what it is and what the scholar of post‐truth politics can do. Wight (2018), Hyvönen (2018) and Marshall and Drieschova (2018), and indeed the rest of the special issue, gives a rounded image of how one could go about understanding and studying post‐truth politics. However, what these approaches tend to do is to treat post‐truth politics as some form of loss for ‘objective truth’ (Michelsen & Tallis, 2018), whatever that is taken to mean, against emotions or emotive language.…”

“…Likewise, Marshall and Drieschova (2018) point to this direction when they suggest that ‘scholars of politics and international relations thus need to pay more attention to the everyday activities of ordinary citizens and how those shape political decisions, and potentially even political regimes’ (p. 91) and the ‘need to pay heightened attention to the people as active shapers, not just passive recipients’ (p. 101). Discourse forms the central part of these everyday activities that Hyvönen (2018) and Marshall and Drieschova (2018) point to, and DP provides an empirical way to explore these activities. Of course, my summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the works above should not be taken as representative of strengths and weaknesses of all scholarly work on post‐truth politics.…”

“…First, it is a concept lacking a consistent scholarly understanding. It is variously viewed as ‘an increasing disregard for factual evidence in political discourse’ (Lockie, 2017, p. 1), as ‘the diminishing importance of anchoring political utterances in relation to verifiable facts’ (Hopkin & Rosamond, 2018, p. 642), as a period in time (Glăveanu, 2017), a place where ‘truth and consistency are unimportant’ (Paxton, 2017, p. 22) or it is discussed without a substantial definition (Marshall & Drieschova, 2018; Muñoz, 2017). This is in part to do with different disciplinary approaches and in part with the following issue.…”