The thesis examines the discursive construction of ideologies in online news comment sections. The data come from news stories related to gender-based issues such as the #MeToo Movement, gender discrimination in scholarly publication during the Covid-19 pandemic, and gendered media bias in the reporting of missing peoples, known as Missing White Woman Syndrome. In examining discourse in online news comment sections, the thesis aims to uncover how ideologies are constructed even in the more accessible, mundane online spaces. The four studies in the thesis each address the question of how ideologies are discursively constructed in online news comment sections, approaching it from different perspectives and using various methods and materials. These are primarily informed by work within Critical Discourse Analysis complemented by approaches such as the Appraisal framework, Narrative Analysis and dialogism, and corpus-assisted methods.

The thesis contributes to our understanding of the relationship between identity and ideology, particularly in its examination of how the discursive construction of ideologies in the data is connected to social categorisation. Commenters construct identities for themselves or for others which are used in the (de)legitimation of certain ideologies. Furthermore, the thesis illustrates the role of dialogism in the construction of ideologies in online news comment sections. Commenters expand and contract the dialogue in order to permit or restrict the voices and opinions of others. Additionally, commenters evaluate the normality of certain practices in order to construct them as legitimate or otherwise. The thesis therefore contributes to scholarship on how ideologies are discursively constructed in online spaces.