The construction of political authenticity: Jeremy Corbyn's use of commitment-boosting I think

The last decade has been marked by the rise of a new breed of “authentic” politicians. Relative outsiders to the political institution, these politicians presented themselves as constituting a break from the (overly and overtly) mediatized and staged performance of politics by constructing authentic identities through various verbal and non-verbal resources. Starting from the social-constructionist view of identity as performance, this paper explores the performance of political authenticity by Jeremy Corbyn, ex-leader of the British Labour Party, in three political interviews held prior to the 2019 general elections in the U.K. In particular, the paper operationalizes the notion of indexicality, as used in recent, “third-wave” sociolinguistic research on identities and styles, to explore how Corbyn uses the epistemic phrase I think to construct his politically authentic identity. Through a close reading of Corbyn’s discourse in the three interviews, it seems that he uses I think, in its commitment-boosting variety, to construct his identity as an authentic politician — one whose values accord with his behavior and one who is deeply committed to the ideas and ideals that he espouses.