Who Gets to Be in the Picture? Political Identity Ownership on Labour and Conservative Facebook Pages at the 2015 and 2017 General Elections

Abstract

Parties do not only tell voters what they will do. They also show voters who they are for. Kreiss, Lawrence and McGregor call this political identity ownership: the work a party does to be seen as the natural home of particular groups of people. I test the idea with 1,208 hand-coded Facebook posts from the Labour and Conservative party pages and the pages of their leaders in the month before the 2015 and 2017 UK general elections. Three findings stand out. First, the parties spoke to the broad public and almost never to smaller groups: the 13 codes for religion, sexuality, disability and ethnic minority politicians were applied 39 times in total across 1,208 posts. Second, the parties swapped places. In 2015 Conservative posts pictured members of the public more often than Labour's (40% against 25%) and young people more often (17% against 8%). In 2017 Labour led: members of the public in 48% of posts against 32%, and young people in 23% against 3%. The swap appears on both party and leader pages, though with only eight pages the evidence for most single groups is uncertain once differences between pages are allowed for. One measure moved the other way: by 2017 the Conservatives let the public speak in their own words as often as Labour did. Third, the 2017 Conservative campaign gave much more room to the leader and the nation: 88% of its posts put Theresa May centre stage and 19% used patriotic imagery. The record includes the counts of posts carrying each code, by page. The posts themselves are not shared, in line with the terms under which they were collected.