Mémoire
| Résumé : | On the 31st of January 2020, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK) ceased its membership with the European Union (EU), ending a years-long political process that had started with a referendum in June 2016 and cost two prime ministers their office. The results of the referendum that legitimized this move were close and the electors of two nations, Scotland and Northern Ireland, voted against leaving the EU. Coincidentally, these regions happened to host four of the most important secessionist parties operating within the UK: the Scottish National Party, the Scottish Green Party, the Social-Democratic Labour Party and Sinn Fein. On the basis of a thorough review of the existing literature on regionalism, minority nationalism, the determinants of the Brexit vote and attitudes towards the EU, it has been hypothesized that these parties would instrumentalize the regional differentiation of voting behaviour to support their secessionist agendas and, in the course of doing so, would frame European issues more positively and would work to raise their saliency in the public debate. Hypotheses were also drawn on how the distinct historical and political journeys of Scotland and Northern Ireland would influence their rhetoric. For the methods of quantitative content analysis have been deemed to be the most appropriate in analysing the evolution of partisan discourses, a coding scheme has then been established that was aimed at testing the nine hypotheses which were formulated. More than 30 election manifestos from all parties issued between 2010 and 2019 were subsequently analysed and coded which resulted in the creation of a dataset composed of 2803 sentences. Hypotheses were then confronted to the gathered data and it resulted from the analysis that the studied parties’ discourses on secession and the EU have indeed evolved since the referendum on EU membership. These changes, however, were far from homogeneous as it has been observed that argumentations differ significantly over time and amongst and between regions and parties. This dissertation then proceeds to discuss these findings, the limitations of its own design and potential ways of furthering the scientific knowledge on this question. |
