Legitimation in government social media communication: the case of the Brexit department

1. Introduction

When governments introduce controversial policies or face a risk of policy failure, officeholders tend to engage in blame avoidance behaviour to dodge public blame attacks and hold on to power (Hinterleitner, Citation2020; Hood, Citation2011; Weaver, Citation1986). Blame avoidance in government may involve the strategic use of language, often aimed at minimising the citizens’ perception of harm, or shifting or diffusing the blame (Hansson, Citation2015, Citation2018a, Citation2018b, Citation2019). While public-facing government communication increasingly takes place on social media, the defensive discursive strategies used by officeholders in these online environments have yet to be studied. In this article, we contribute to filling this research gap by exploring the uses of legitimation strategies – a type of rhetorical blame avoidance focused on justifying problematic social action – in the Twitter communication of the British government’s Brexit department.

The Brexit department’s communication on Twitter deserves particular attention because the Department dealt with a complex and controversial policy that engendered numerous public blame firestorms and triggered several ministerial resignations. The Department for Exiting the European Union (informally known as the Brexit department and abbreviated as DExEU) was established by Prime Minister Theresa May to oversee the UK’s exit from the EU, following a UK-wide referendum on 23 June 2016, in which 51.9 per cent of voters voted in favour of exiting the EU. In August 2016, as a part of its public communication efforts, the Department created a profile on Twitter (https://twitter.com/DExEUgov) where it posted content over the course of three and a half years until the Department was dissolved on 31 January 2020 when Brexit took effect. For our study, we collected a dataset of all the 1,869 tweets and retweets that the Department published during its lifespan, and analysed these qualitatively to identify the ways in which the Department used language for the purpose of self-legitimation during the highly controversial Brexit process.

Our analysis draws upon the existing discourse-analytic literature on legitimations (e.g. van Leeuwen, Citation2007), but sheds new light on the uses of defensive discursive strategies specifically in the context of government social media communication about controversial policies. As we will demonstrate below, in their social media communication, government departments may try to legitimise their actions by appealing to (1) the personal authority of individual policymakers, (2) the collective authority of (political) organisations, (3) the impersonal authority of rules or documents, (4) the goals or effects of government policy, (5) ‘the will of the people’, and (6) time pressure.

While our aim in this study is to improve our understanding specifically of the legitimation strategies used in official social media messages, we should note that relatively little is known of the linguistic aspects of social media communication of government departments in general. Both in communication and discourse studies, much of the research on the political uses of Twitter, for example, have focused on electoral campaigns (Bennett, Citation2019; Gruber, Citation2019; Hoffmann, Citation2018; Jungherr, Citation2016; Kreiss et al., Citation2018; Mueller & Saeltzer, Citation2020; Stier et al., Citation2018), presidential and prime ministerial communication (Boukala, Citation2018; Kreis, Citation2017; Waisbord & Amado, Citation2017; Wignell et al., Citation2020), and networking among citizens (Bouvier & Rosenbaum, Citation2020). Scholars of public administration, information systems and e-government have mainly been interested in managerial, institutional, legal, and political aspects of social media use in government (Medaglia & Zheng, Citation2017). A rare example of linguistically informed research into the Twitter use of government organisations is Krzyżanowski’s (Citation2018) detailed analysis of 519 tweets posted by the European Commission’s spokesperson service in 2014 and 2015. It is also worth noting that existing studies usually do not cover the entirety of the social media posts of a particular government department throughout its lifespan. Our corpus provides a complete overview of how a department communicated over time.

Our study also makes an empirical contribution to the growing literature on Brexit as a political and linguistic phenomenon, which has so far largely focused on the pre-referendum campaigning era and has rarely addressed social media content (Bennett, Citation2019; Buckledee, Citation2018; Charteris-Black, Citation2019; Koller et al., Citation2019; Zappettini & Krzyżanowski, Citation2019). An exception to this is Bouko and Garcia’s (Citation2019) multimodal analysis of a random sample of 2,196 tweets mentioning Brexit posted in the weeks following the EU membership referendum in the UK, showing that citizens’ reactions to Brexit on Twitter often conveyed negative sentiments.

In what follows, we will first briefly introduce literature on legitimation strategies and then provide background about the Brexit department and its social media communication. In the analysis section, we will describe and exemplify the types of legitimising appeals we identified in our dataset. We conclude by discussing the implications of our study and suggesting that similar legitimations may be exploited by governments in other contexts where they face blame risks.

2. Framework: blame avoidance and legitimation in political discourse

Since the 1980s, political scientists have explored how policy choices, institutional design, and communication of governments may be shaped by officeholders’ motivation to avoid receiving blame and losing their office (Hood, Citation2011; Weaver, Citation1986). The self-defensive communicative behaviour of officeholders may be either aimed at avoiding public debates over blame issues (e.g. by providing no comments to the press, or by shifting public attention to something else) or trying to win an argument against blame makers by using denials, justifications, excuses, or counterattacks (Hansson, Citation2015; Hood, Citation2011). Blame avoidance behaviour may be either reactive, when officeholders respond to public accusations, or anticipative, when officeholders try to communicate in a way that would lower the risk of becoming a target of accusations (Hansson, Citation2017a).

Among the most important discursive strategies of blame avoidance are legitimations: answers to the spoken or unspoken ‘why’ question to justify some social action (Hansson, Citation2015; van Leeuwen, Citation2007). Discourse analysts have noted that people who wish to defend their behaviour or (political) standpoint tend to use, among other things, appeals to personal authority, rules, role models, experts, tradition, moral values, fear, goals and effects, a hypothetical future, or altruism (Reyes, Citation2011; van Leeuwen, Citation2007; van Leeuwen & Wodak, Citation1999). The uses of legitimation strategies have been explored in various domains, including political campaigning (e.g. Mackay, Citation2015; Zappettini, Citation2019), public administration and public diplomacy (e.g. Björkvall & Höög, Citation2019; Simonsen, Citation2019), business organisations (e.g. Holmgreen, Citation2021), and news and social media texts (e.g. Lee, Citation2020; Pérez-Arredondo & Cárdenas-Neira, Citation2019; Vaara, Citation2014). These studies demonstrate how powerful groups or institutions have sought approval for their problematic behaviour or harmful policies by using persuasive and sometimes manipulative discourse where their ‘institutional actions and policies are typically described as beneficial for the group or society as a whole, whereas morally reprehensive or otherwise controversial actions are ignored, obfuscated or reinterpreted as being acceptable’ (Rojo & Van Dijk, Citation1997, p. 528).

Following van Leeuwen (Citation2007), a basic distinction can be made between legitimation via authorisation and rationalisation. The former means imposing some kind of authority without further justification: the answer to the ‘why’ question is either ‘because [authority figure] says so’ (personal authority legitimation), or ‘because [rule, policy, law, etc.] says so’ (impersonal authority legitimation). Rationalisation, however, involves referring to the utility of the practice that is being justified: the answer to the ‘why’ question is ‘in order to do/be/have [something desirable]’. Besides these, van Leeuwen’s (Citation2007) framework includes two forms of legitimation focused on morality: moral evaluation and mythopoesis. Moral evaluation legitimation involves referring to some system of moral value, so the answer to the ‘why’ question is ‘because it is [good/associated with positive values]’. Mythopoesis means telling of moral or cautionary tales where legitimate social practices are rewarded and deviant behaviour is punished.

These legitimations may be regarded as typical appeals used in political argumentation (Hart, Citation2013; van Leeuwen, Citation2018) and their reasonableness may be evaluated from an argumentation-analytical perspective. Defensive appeals may rely on quasi-argumentative shortcuts, content-related conclusion rules (‘if x, then y’ or ‘y, because x’) which may seem plausible because they refer to values, biases, or prejudices that the audience presumably shares with the speaker/writer. Normatively, certain uses of such appeals could be classified as argumentative fallacies, for instance if their formulations are confusingly ambiguous or the claims cannot be supported by relevant evidence (see Reisigl & Wodak, Citation2001, pp. 74–80; Reisigl, Citation2014, pp. 77–79).

The use of legitimations is topic-specific and context-specific. For example, Reyes (Citation2011) showed how in their speeches, US Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama tried to legitimise the US military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan during the ‘War on Terror’ via appeals to fear, hypothetical futures, rationality, expertise, and altruism. Vaara (Citation2014) found that in Finnish news media, the struggles over legitimacy concerning the 2009 Eurozone crisis involved position-based authorisations using institutionalised authorities and ‘voices of the common man’, knowledge-based authorisations using economists, rationalisations via economic arguments, moral evaluations based on (un)fairness, mythopoesis involving alternative future projections, and cosmological claims of inevitability. In a similar vein, in this study we aim to unveil a distinctive set of legitimations the UK government used in their social media communication in the run-up to Brexit.

Blame avoidance and legitimation are complex social phenomena that can only be understood fully by studying particular historical, institutional, and interactional settings in which certain actors experience specific blame risks. We will outline these in the following sections.

3. Context: blame risks of the Brexit department

Throughout its existence, the Brexit department of the British government was vulnerable to blame attacks mainly from two perspectives:

1. Many UK citizens opposed Brexit, seeing it a harmful policy that would negatively affect their wealth and freedoms. Throughout the 2016–2020 Brexit process, opinion polls in the UK consistently indicated, although in slightly lesser proportions than in the Brexit referendum, still more than 40 per cent support to remaining in the European Union (whatukthinks.org, Citation2020). The share of Brits who thought that the economy would be worse as a result of Brexit rose above 50 per cent while fewer than a quarter believed it would be better (Curtice, Citation2020). Surveys also suggested that more than half of the UK population wanted the ‘freedom of movement’ – the right to live and work in EU countries – to continue after Brexit (YouGov, Citation2019).

2. The government faced constant criticism for poor planning and execution of the Brexit process (Smith, Citation2018; YouGov, Citation2021). The UK’s negotiations with the EU were characterised by ‘a lack of consultation with domestic constituents, a political system engulfed by internal splits and resignations, an insistence on sticking to pre-determined positions, and lower levels of transparency’ (Frennhoff Larsén & Khorana, Citation2020, p. 859).

These vectors of blame reflect the important new divide that developed and persisted in British society in the wake of the Brexit referendum: that between ‘Remainers’ and ‘Leavers’ (Hobolt et al., Citation2021).

That the UK government could not deliver a Brexit deal by their own deadline of 29 March 2019 has been regarded as a policy fiasco at least partially ascribable to poor leadership of Prime Minister Theresa May (McConnell & Tormey, Citation2020). Shortly before the negotiations were to begin, May called a surprise general election to increase the majority of her party in the Parliament and strengthen the negotiating mandate of the government – but the elections resulted in a minority government and weakened Prime Minister’s position (Hobolt, Citation2018). Between January and March 2019, May’s proposal for the UK’s Withdrawal Agreement was defeated at three consecutive votes in the House of Commons. May announced her resignation soon after that.

May’s government adopted a hard, confrontational bargaining style that complicated negotiations with the EU and harmed its reputation abroad (Martill & Staiger, Citation2020). May’s approach to the Brexit process was characterised by secrecy and information leaks that further eroded public confidence in her government and its policies (Heide & Worthy, Citation2019). In their public rhetoric, cabinet members repeatedly misled the public by (1) making claims about overwhelming popular support for their policy, (2) misrepresenting the power relations between the EU and the national government, and (3) seriously downplaying the complexity of negotiations involved in leaving the EU and reaching trade deals thereafter (Hansson & Kröger, Citation2021).

Due to government-internal strife, the Brexit department saw several changes in its political leadership in the middle of the negotiation process. The first Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union (known informally as Brexit secretary), David Davis, was appointed in June 2016, but resigned on 8 July 2018 over the cabinet’s agreement on a plan for the future relationship between the UK and the EU (‘the Chequers plan’). The second Brexit Secretary, Dominic Raab, who was appointed on 9 July 2018, resigned on 15 November 2018 over the draft withdrawal agreement. Finally, Stephen Barclay was appointed on 16 November 2018 and served until the dissolution of the Department on 31 January 2020 when Brexit took effect. There were also several personnel changes to the Minister of State for Exiting the EU who deputised for the Brexit secretaries, Chief Negotiators for Exiting the EU, and Parliamentary Under-Secretaries of State for Exiting the EU who served as the lowest-tier ministers at the Brexit department.

4. Data: Twitter communication of the Brexit department

When government officeholders communicate with the public, they mainly do it for two broad purposes: (1) to exert their executive power by influencing people’s behaviour via commands, requests, and other persuasive techniques, and (2) to hold on to power by presenting themselves in a positive light and warding off blame via various defensive and self-legitimating communicative moves such as justifying, boasting, and flattering (Hansson, Citation2017b). Government agencies’ use of social media channels, such as Twitter, may also serve multiple functions, including information provision about policies and operations of the agency, input/feedback seeking from citizens, and favourable symbolic presentation of the government (DePaula et al., Citation2018). As our study deals with legitimation strategies used in the service of blame avoidance, we focus on the latter.

Twitter is a social media networking service that has become increasingly popular since its launch in 2006. As of August 2016, when the Brexit department started posting on Twitter, about 17 per cent of adults in the United Kingdom used Twitter daily, and this figure reached 43 per cent by 2020 when the Department was dissolved (Tankovska, Citation2021a, Citation2021b). Twitter is used strategically by people interested in politics and can be seen as a tool that various elites exploit for the purpose of agenda setting (see, e.g. Adi et al., Citation2014; Bennett, Citation2019). In the UK, Twitter profiles have been set up both by hundreds of individual politicians who may use these for party-political campaigning purposes, as well as official collective entities, government departments/agencies, that are overseen by the ministers but according to the Civil Service Code may not participate in party-political battles (Social media guidance for civil servants, Citation2014).

Twitter as a communication platform has particular affordances. Users can publish short posts (‘tweets’) online containing various types of content (text, links, images, video), share (‘retweet’) messages published by other users, and ‘follow’ other users to keep track of their published/shared messages. They can also add ‘hashtags’ (words preceded by the symbol #) to cross-reference messages on certain topics, classify the content, as well as construe interpersonal relationships and evaluations (see Zappavigna, Citation2015). In this article, we focus on textual content published by the UK Brexit department; the uses of links, images, and videos can be analysed in future research. For this study, we scraped all the tweets and retweets from https://twitter.com/DExEUgov using the rtweet R software package.

By the end of its term in 2020, the Brexit department’s Twitter profile had attracted 55,600 followers.Footnote¹ Throughout its existence, the Brexit department posted 968 original messages and shared (‘retweeted’) 901 messages that originated from a total of 145 accounts. The Brexit department mainly shared tweets posted by the UK Prime Minister’s office (@10DowningStreet), 14 senior and junior ministers who oversaw the Brexit department during different periods, and other UK government departments and agencies. Out of the 901 retweets, 186 came from the UK Prime Minister’s profile, 94 from the Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay, 44 from the Brexit Secretary David Davis, 35 from the Department for International Trade, and 31 from the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy. All the other sources were retweeted less than 30 times. These figures indicate that a significant part of the Brexit department’s Twitter communication was geared towards amplifying and spreading Brexit-related messages from the most senior political leaders (particularly the Prime Minister) and relevant government departments. We included all the retweets in our analysis as these constitute an inherent part of the Brexit department’s communication stream on Twitter and represent the Brexit-related government communication strategies that we are interested in in this study. Our dataset contains a total of 1,869 twitter posts (42,618 words).

5. Analysis: legitimising appeals in government social media communication

As explained above, legitimising means answering the spoken or unspoken ‘why’ question to justify some social action (van Leeuwen, Citation2007). In the context of the blame risks affecting the Brexit department, legitimising primarily revolves around the following two interrelated ‘why’ questions: (1) Why should Brexit be implemented – and why should it be done in the way the UK government and its Brexit department do it? (2) Why might the UK government and its Brexit department deserve praise (and not deserve blame) for what they do? As is common within qualitative critical discourse studies, our analytical process was abductive, that is, recursively moving between deductive and inductive inquiry (see KhosraviNik & Unger, Citation2016; Wodak & Meyer, Citation2016). The categories used in the analysis were identified partly by consulting the existing literature on legitimations reviewed above, and through scrutiny of the data. The two authors of the paper read the entire dataset independently, identifying all the possible strategies of legitimation present in the data. We first noted various references to the authority of individual and collective actors, rules, documents, and time. We also found mentions of goals or anticipated effects of government policy. However, we did not observe instances that could be strictly categorised as moral evaluation legitimations or mythopoesis. Based on this initial scrutiny of the data, we compiled an annotation manual to set out the criteria for each category present, with illustrative examples. The two authors analysed the entire dataset in three consecutive rounds, using inter-coder agreement procedures to identify ambiguous cases and correct errors in analysis. In the first round of analysis, we reached above 80 per cent agreement, and in the second round, 98 per cent agreement for each of the categories. All disagreements were resolved at the third round of analysis.Footnote² Below, we discuss the six kinds of legitimising appeals present in our data, and their features with illustrative examples, starting with appeals to authority.

6. Conclusions

We have identified six types of legitimations that were used in the Twitter communication of the Brexit department to justify the policies of the UK government. We suggest that these could occur in social media messages of other government departments in other contexts where policymakers face public blame risks in relations to their contentious proposals or actions.

Appeals to the authority of individual officeholders are particularly prevalent in our dataset of government social media messages. This indicates that the departmental social media profiles are often used to amplify the statements of political leaders by rebroadcasting, quoting or paraphrasing them, and directing the users to read their speeches or opinion pieces on other websites. Appealing to the impersonal authority of institutions and rules/documents may seem as an obvious choice in government contexts as officeholders are in the business of producing policy proposals and other documents and seeking approval to these from legislators and various groups in society. However, as noted above, authority appeals may be used to avoid rational debate and exploit people’s vulnerability to manipulation by emphasising the power and superiority of the speaker/source.

While justifying policies by referring to their goals or effects may seem normatively more desirable than merely appealing to someone’s authority, legitimation via rationalisation is often based not on factual evidence but on vague (‘brighter future’) and hyperbolic (‘most ambitious’) positive depictions. Admittedly, social media environments tend to favour sharing of rather short textsFootnote⁶ and, therefore, users may prefer using concise slogans that appeal to emotions instead of presenting extended rational arguments and having substantial conversations. More generally, it has been argued that Twitter usage is more about connections than engagement (Bouvier & Rosenbaum, Citation2020), and as social media platforms have affordances that make these attractive for political campaigners who want to disseminate short-form content (Bossetta, Citation2018), governments may be similarly inclined to use social media largely for the purpose of favourable self-presentation (DePaula et al., Citation2018).

It seems reasonable to assume that some legitimations, such as appeals to the ‘will of the people’ and time pressure, are more likely used in specific circumstances: the former when there are referendum results or opinion poll figures available that could be cast as embodying the ‘will of the people’, and the latter when some (arbitrary) deadline has been set that could be represented as a motivation for urgent action.

Our analysis suggests that the post-referendum Brexit communication of the UK government was focused on implementing a version of Brexit suitable to the Conservative government by pushing for a quick conclusion to the exit negotiations with the EU and getting the related bills approved in the UK Parliament.Footnote⁷ The messages on Twitter primarily suggested that Brexit should ‘get done’ because it was required by the Prime Minister, other ministers, ‘the people’, or impending deadlines, and because certain individuals, organisations, or written documents said that the government’s proposals regarding Brexit should be seen as desirable. There was little discussion of the content of the negotiations and policy proposals, and the concerns many people (including Remainers) may have had regarding the Brexit process and its possible negative outcomes were largely ignored.

As noted earlier, the list of appeals we have presented is context-specific and hence not exhaustive. It is likely that other kinds of legitimations that appeal, for example, to role models, experts, tradition, moral values, or fear, may be used in other government social media communication contexts. Legitimation on social media often relies on visual cues, images, videos, hashtags, or hyperlinks. Therefore, multimodal discourse analysis could help to identify and understand the persuasive elements beyond verbal language (e.g. Hansson, Citation2018c; Mackay, Citation2015; Ross & Rivers, Citation2017). Corpus-assisted methods of discourse analysis could be used to identify patterns in social media communication that may play part in legitimising government policy (Hansson & Page, Citationforthcoming). A challenge for a more quantitative analysis of legitimation is that the general semantic formulations of legitimising appeals (e.g. ‘X should be done because [authority figure] says so’) do not necessarily map on to the actual syntactic patterns that occur in real-life data as indicated by the examples presented in this article. Future studies could compare the uses of various legitimation strategies in social media communication by other governments and organisations in other national contexts, in relation to other kinds of blame risks, and explore more closely their reception and effects (e.g. who will be perceived by particular audiences as deserving blame and to what extent).

As noted at the outset, the social media communication of government departments deserves much more critical linguistic analysis. A deeper understanding of the various defensive and justificatory discursive moves used by powerful institutions in the context of public blame games is a necessary step towards increasing policymakers’ accountability and improving the quality of public debates over contentious policies.