Prof Cornel Sandvoss
Head of the School of Arts and Professor of Film and Television at the University of Bristol.
Email: c.sandvoss@bristol.ac.uk
Dr Benjamin Litherland
Lecturer in Media at the Manchester Metropolitan University.
Email: b.litherland@mmu.ac.uk
Dr Joseph Andrew Smith
Lecturer in Journalism at the University of Leicester.
Email: joe.smith@leicester.ac.uk
UK Election 2024
Section 8: Personality politics and popular culture
87. Ed Davey: Towards a Liberal Populism? (Dr Tom Sharkey, Dr Sophie Quirk)
88. Why Nigel Farage’s anti-media election interference claims are so dangerous (Dr Lone Sorensen)
89. Nigel Farage and the political circus (Dr Neil Ewen)
90. Binface, Beany and Beyond: humorous candidates in the 2024 General Election (Prof Scott Wright)
91. What Corbyn support reveals about how Starmer’s Labour won big (Prof Cornel Sandvoss, Dr Benjamin Litherland, Dr Joseph Andrew Smith)
92. “Well that was dignified, wasn’t it?”: floor apportionment and interaction in the televised debates (Dr Sylvia Shaw)
93. TV debates: beyond winners and losers (Prof Stephen Coleman)
94. Is our television debate coverage finally starting to match up to multi-party politics? (Dr Louise Thompson)
95. Tetchiness meets disenchantment: capturing the contrasting political energies of the campaign (Prof Beth Johnson, Prof Katy Parry)
96. “We’re just normal men”: football and the performance of authentic leadership (Dr Ellen Watts)
97. ‘Make the friendship bracelets’: gendered imagery in candidates’ self-presentations on the campaign trail (Dr Caroline Leicht)
98. Weeping in Wetherspoons: generative Al and the right/left image battle on X (Simon Popple)
99. An entertaining election? Popular culture as politics (Prof John Street)
100. Changing key, but keeping time: the music of Election 2024 (Dr Adam Behr)
101. Truth or dare: the political veracity game (Prof John Corner)
As the presiding officer announced Jeremy Corbyn’s vote tally confirming his re-election, his supporters at the count in Islington North erupted to screams of ‘yes’ in a form of release rarely heard outside football stadia. Over the past four general elections (2015, 2017, 2019, 2024), we have traced the ways in which support for politicians and political parties resembles the fan-like ways in which we engage in other aspects of mediated culture – a trend part of a wider process of ‘fanization’, the increasing prominence in our everyday lives of engaging in an emotionally committed, affective mode in and beyond popular culture. ‘Fanization’, in turn, is driven by changes to modern societies as many roles against which identities have long been constructed and articulated (employment, relationships, religion, etc.) are more fluid. As we seek out new markers of identity through media consumption, political activism is an important space of identity construction. The emotional jeopardy at display at Corbyn’s constituency count is an illustration of the degree to which political support is deeply personal – tied into what we believe as much as who we are. For those invested in politics, it is about a sense of identity.
We conducted three waves of interviews with Jeremy Corbyn supporters before the General Election in December 2019 and in the aftermath of Labour’s defeat. The pain of a shattered political project and the end to Corbyn’s party leadership was experienced as a personal loss by many of our participants. In the months after the election they described disengaging from politics and avoiding news and current affairs. There is ample evidence that some of Corbyn’s supporters have ‘tuned out’ and become less engaged in politics, though our evidence suggests that it is primarily enthusiasts most committed and actively campaigning for Labour under Corbyn who have withdrawn from politics. In the words of one respondent: “I don’t know much about what Jeremy is up to. I’ve lost interest and hope in elections and the government”; or in the words of another respondent who actively campaigned for Corbyn in 2019: “I’ll always look up to him with admiration and respect I think, even though spending so much time fighting expulsion […] is futile and makes me ultimately confused about politics and what we should be focusing on.”
While support for Corbyn among a sizeable group of our respondents has peeled away – in broadly equal parts to the Green Party, Labour under Keir Starmer and Reform, giving Ukraine, antisemitism and an inability to win elections as main reasons for moving on– the majority of our participants echoed this sentiment in reaffirming their affective bond with Corbyn. As ‘Labour’ and ‘Corbyn’ have increasingly become separate political ‘brands’ (again), over half indicated that they would vote for Corbyn as an independent candidate over their current voting intention. Among those who have remained loyal to Corbyn, we find another manifestation of the emotional significance of their support reminiscent of sports fandom: whom we support is simultaneously defined by whom we dislike. The most committed Corbyn supporters in our panel were also most likely to be dissatisfied with Keir Starmer as Labour leader.
Political fandom, especially in an era of populism, is frequently driving, or even driven by, anti-fandom. In our analysis of the 2019 General Election we highlighted the degree to which Corbyn had not only attracted an emotionally committed group of supporters but a much larger group of those motivated and committed to stop him coming to power, spelling the electoral doom witnessed in 2019.
The 2024 General Election was similarly shaped by strong sentiments of dislike or what we might call anti-fandom: as the strong constituency-by-constituency and region-by-region variations in Labour’s vote share illustrate, the overriding theme shaping the outcome of election was a strong dislike of Conservative incumbents. In this context of ‘politics of against’, the seeming weakness of the post-Corbyn Labour leadership – its inability to create a similarly motivated ‘fan base’ – was its biggest strength. This is not to argue that Starmer’s Labour does not have emotionally invested supporters, nor is it difficult to see how, for instance, the often-cited figure of the ‘centrist dad’ is deeply embedded in articulating the identity position of those who would opt for such a self-description. Yet, even among those participants who had most firmly distanced themselves from Corbyn and were most positive about Starmer’s leadership, we did not find the intense enthusiasm that has characterised Corbyn support. In this sense, Starmer’s victory might be more shallow; however, that does not mean it is less stable. As the trajectory of another master of asymmetric demobilisation, former German chancellor Angela Merkel, demonstrates, Starmer’s ability to avoid evoking strong emotional responses among most voters thus far – with the notable exception of those most committed to his predecessor as Labour leader – is an electoral asset in the age of ‘fanization’ that is not to be underestimated.
