The Scottish independence referendum in 2014 saw the breakthrough of online political campaigning in the UK. Despite the outcome, research and media alike concluded that the main pro-independence campaign, Yes Scotland (YS), outdid the main pro-union campaign, Better Together (BT), in the online battle. This article addresses this discrepancy by exploring how YS and BT used social media affordances in order to legitimize their own and de-legitimize their opponents' positions. The material consists of multimodal tweets published by YS and BT in the run-up to the referendum. The article employs a model for multimodal legitimation that takes into consideration the construction of authority, moral evaluation and the construction and justifications of means and goals. The findings show that both campaigns made extensive use of de-legitimating strategies, although YS was more balanced. The article also shows that the campaigns' communicative choices had implications for the construction and justification of goals and means, with YS running a more visionary campaign than BT.

In 2014, a referendum was held in Scotland in order to decide the country’s constitutional future. The referendum was the climax of years of campaigning that gave rise to a rich body of political discourse. This compilation thesis attempts to show how an independent Scotland was discursively constructed, and how these constructions impacted on Scottish identity. The thesis consists of four original research papers which employ a number of complementary approaches in order to analyse a rich and diverse data set.

The first article examines how the Scottish government looked at small European states in order to construct a vision of a future independent Scotland. This was achieved by discursively constructing small states as economically successful and democratically progressive and then by emphasizing Scotland’s role as a small country.

The second article analyses the many new metaphorical personifications of Scotland, notably as a woman, that appeared during the campaign. The article finds that traditional, gendered metaphors were largely reworked in order to function in a modern political context.

The third article maps the central topics and the ideological morphology of discourses on Scottish independence produced by the Scottish National Party and the intellectual and artistic movement National Collective. Unlike previous research, the results of the analysis suggest that these organizations as complementary but labels the former politically nationalist and the latter culturally nationalist.

The fourth article analyses image tweets published by the official Yes and No campaigns in order to ascertain how the two campaigns legitimated their own standpoints and how they delegitimated their opponents online. The analysis finds that the Yes campaign balanced between promoting its own visions whilst criticizing their opponents, in contrast to the No campaign which almost entirely focused on delegitimating its opponents, thus failing to offer alternative visions.

Collectively, the thesis paints a picture of a diverse independence movement with different aims and different rationales for advocating independence. Besides making a contribution to the literature on nationalism in general and Scottish nationalism in particular, the thesis further integrates the fields of political theory and discourse studies.

 The creation of national personifications is a political act that informs us about ideological and cognitive strategies underpinning nation-building. Many European nations are associated with national personifications, but Scotland stands out by not having a tradition of representing the nation in this way. The 2014 independence referendum began to change that, and national personifications featured, not only in the main pro-independence campaign material, but in the visual profile of many new, radical organizations. These personifications also raise questions about the use of metaphor in political discourse. By combining multimodal metaphor and metonymy analysis with interviews with artists who have designed Scottish personifications for the independence movement, this article investigates how new Scottish body politic metaphors were constructed during the campaign. This methodology increases our understanding of the wider context of the referendum, and aids the interpretation of national personifications by providing arguments for interpretation. The analysis shows that body politic metaphors used in the campaign draw on traditional Scottish symbols, but traditional body politic metaphor types are subverted, typically concerning gender roles, in order to convey messages that are relevant in a contemporary political landscape.

The Scottish independence referendum in 2014 was propelled by the Scottish National Party (SNP), but the referendum also saw the emergence of a plethora of pro-independence groups. One of the most prominent was National Collective (NC), a cultural movement emphasizing the empowerment of the younger electorate. NC has been described as part of a radical pro-independence movement, heralding the end of the nationalist hegemony and the arrival of a new post-nationalist politics in Scotland. This article investigates that claim from a political discourse perspective by analysing interviews conducted with NC and SNP representatives. The analysis of the interview data is framed by Gorski’s conception of nationalism as discourse and mobilization, and the ideological presentation of these two organizations are analysed by drawing on Freeden’s morphological approach. The findings suggest a great degree of discursive overlap between NC and the SNP but wide divergences in terms of imagined recipient scope.

The Sweden Democrats (SD) was the first radical right populist party (RRPP) to be elected to the Swedish Parliament in 2010, and today it is an established and important force in Swedish politics. The SD have the lowest proportion of female members of all parties in the Swedish Parliament, and also retain the view that there are biological and cognitive differences that affect men’s and women’s roles in society. There is, however, a growing tendency to emphasize the need for gender equality and even feminism in the party. Previous research (Mulinari & Neergaard 2013; Towns, Karlsson & Eyre 2014) has dismissed these attempts as rhetorical duplicity aiming at constructing immigrants as an out-group. In this paper we analyse interviews conducted with women representatives of the SD in local, regional and national assemblies. By mapping ideas about gender and equality and by identifying the ontological scales on which they exist, we paint a picture of a party with a dynamic and sometimes contradictory understanding of gender equality. Several gender equality discourses co-exist in SD ideology, but their inconsistency is caused by changes in context rather than by purposeful ambiguity.

In 2013 the Scottish government launched its flagship publication, Scotland’s Future, intended to mobilize the electorate to vote for independence. A particularly salient feature of this document is the large number of references to small northern European countries. Combining theories of cognitive linguistics with a discursive approach to political myth, this article argues that Scotland’s Future employs the political myth of national rebirth in tandem with the construction of small European countries as democratic role models. This results in a mythical conception of small states, here referred to as the myth of successful small states. This myth is then used to legitimate the Scottish government’s policies that are conveyed to the Scottish  lectorate.

This article investigates the self-presentation and the construction of immigration discourses in articles and policy documents published by the British National Party (BNP) and the UK Independence Party (UKIP). By combining corpus analysis with the Discourse-Historical Approach to Critical Discourse Analysis, a picture emerges of two parties whose use of language is governed by the same principle of differentiation. Fundamental to the BNP’s and UKIP’s language is the dichotomy in-group/out-group. The in-group analysis investigates the parties’ choice of form of self-representation, claims to unique competence, denial of attributes and mutual perception. The out-group analysis shows how the parties construct immigration, and focuses on the aspects of legal status, quantification and origin. The analyses suggest considerable lexical and conceptual overlapping in both in-group and out-group formation.

The Sweden Democrats (SD) was the first radical right populist party (RRPP) to be elected to the Swedish Parliament in 2010, and today it is an established and important force in Swedish politics. The SD have the lowest proportion of female members of all parties in the Swedish Parliament, and also retain a traditionalist view that there are biological and cognitive differences that affect men’s and women’s roles in society. There is, however, a growing tendency to emphasize the need for equality and even feminism in the party. Previous research has dismissed this as rhetorical duplicity aiming at defining immigrants as an out-group. In this paper we analyse interviews conducted with women representative for the SD in local, regional and national assemblies. By mapping ideas about gender and equality and by identifying the ontological scales on which they occur, we paint a picture of a party with a dynamic and sometimes contradictory understanding of equality. Several equality discourses co-exist in SD ideology, but their use is the result of contextual application rather than purposeful ambiguity.

There is today a growing interest in integrating theories and models subsumed under the label Cognitive Linguistics with critical approaches to discourse. Recently, Hart (2011a, 2011b, 2013) has broken new ground by combining theories of Cognitive Linguistics (Croft & Cruse, 2004; Langacker, 1987; Talmy, 1988) with Critical Discourse Analysis (see e.g. Meyer & Wodak, 2009). This has rendered critical enquiries more systematic and helped us understand the cognitive underpinning of powerful language, but such approaches often focus on text rather than image.

This paper presents an analysis of the use of images in political texts published by the extreme-right nationalist British National Party (BNP). The BNP is to date the most successful extreme-right party in British electoral history and the only one to have been represented in the European Parliament. The BNP also pioneered the use of multimodal features in political online material where the different semiotic resources also clearly have different functions (see Copsey, 2008 and Goodwin, 2011 for general accounts of the BNP).

This case study complements Hart’s (2013) approach with blending theory (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) in order to better understand how the BNP constructs what is traditionally called in-groups and out-groups using text and images. The analysis is aided by corpus linguistics methods, which allows for systematic and rigorous annotation of relations between semiotic forms and underpinning cognitive processes. By focusing on the interaction of text and image in news articles published by the BNP, this paper argues that the party has pioneered the aestheticization of the far-right and that BNP images express what cannot be expressed using words. Furthermore, using blending theory, it is argued that BNP adversaries are not so much real social actors as synthetic hate objects emerging from a generic mental space of enmity.

The findings of this paper have important implications for our understanding of group formation and can be generalized to other forms of right-wing and nationalist parties. By combining blending theory and critical approaches, we can study the construction of political enmity and out-groups and thus dismantle arguments used against these “enemies”. Furthermore, as an empirically oriented form of the emerging field of Cognitive Semiotics, the methodological synthesis presented here suggests one way in which cognitive theories can be applied to matters of rising social concern.