Pronouns and political identity on social media: a comparative study of Friedrich Merz's and Keir Starmer's online discourse

Abstract

This study adopts a corpus-linguistic approach to examine how political actors employ collective pronouns in their online political discourse, drawing on two comparable subcorpora of Twitter (now X) posts. The first subcorpus consists of messages produced by Keir Starmer, while the second comprises posts authored by Friedrich Merz, published between January and September 2025. The compilation of two speaker-specific subcorpora enables a systematic cross-linguistic and cross-national comparison of pronoun use in British and German political communication. The objectives of the present study are twofold. From a quantitative perspective, the analysis seeks to identify the frequency and distribution of collective pronouns across the corpus, with the aim of uncovering significant differences between Starmer’s and Merz’s patterns of usage. From a qualitative perspective, the study examines the discursive and pragmatic functions of collective pronouns, specifically exploring whether these forms are used to construct internal collective alignment (e.g. party members, supporters, or national ingroups) or to demarcate boundaries between the collective self and external groups