17:45 - 20:00
Friday-Panel
Chair/s:
Jane Green
Discussant/s:
Cassilde Schwartz
Meeting Room D

Marco Martini, Stefanie Walter
Learning from Precedent: How the British Brexit Experience Counteracts Nationalism outside the UK

Raluca L. Pahontu, Jane Green
Mind the Gap: Why Wealthy Voters Support Brexit

Maarja Lühiste, Jemima Repo
Divorcing the European Union? Examining the Use of Metaphors in Public Debate about Brexit

Nina Barzachka
Brexit, Critical Junctures, and Endogenous Institutional Change

Giorgio Malet, Stefanie Walter
When do voters learn from foreign experiences? Evidence from Brexit
Back
Divorcing the European Union? Examining the Use of Metaphors in Public Debate about Brexit
Maarja Lühiste, Jemima Repo
Newcastle University

News headlines on the 24th of June, 2016, announced of a ‘historic divorce’ set to happen when reporting on the Brexit referendum results. Since then, media references to divorce negotiations, divorce proceedings and divorce settlement have become part of the common discourse. Family metaphors, however, are nothing new in political language: there are ‘founding fathers’, ‘brotherly nations’, ‘party families’, ‘Mutter Merkel’ to name a few. Yet, there is little research on how and why these metaphors are used in the public debate. This article aims to address the gap in the literature by collecting novel data on the use of divorce-metaphor in relation to Brexit in British and international news sources, following the Brexit referendum. We apply a mixed-method approach to investigate how frequently divorce references are made in different types of sources, who are making these references and what is the broader meaning as well as implication of discussing Brexit as a ‘divorce’.

Back