Contemporary populism as a political style: media, crisis & democracy

Abstract

Populism is one of the key features of contemporary politics. Yet extant approaches to populism fail to account for populism’s shifting character in a rapidly changing political and media landscape, where media touches upon all aspects of political life, a sense of crisis is endemic, and populism seems to be on the rise around globe. This thesis puts forward a new understanding of populism as a ‘political style’ in order to account for these changes. Arguing that we must move from seeing populism as a ‘thing’ or ‘entity’ towards viewing it as a political style that is performed, embodied and enacted, this new approach accounts for populism’s ability to appear across a number of contexts. Demonstrating that populism as a political style has three central features – appeal to ‘the people’; ‘bad manners’; and crisis, breakdown or threat – the thesis uses a performative framework to examine the key actors, stages, audiences and mise-en-scène of contemporary populism. It engages in-depth with the four central approaches to populism within the contemporary literature – populism as ideology, political logic, discourse and strategy/organisation – while also drawing on illustrative examples of populism from across the globe. In doing so, the thesis seeks to account for populism’s complex relationship to crisis, media and democracy. The thesis has three central aims. The first is to build a stronger conception of populism as a ‘political style’ than currently exists in the populist literature. The second is to demonstrate that a comprehensive understanding of contemporary populism must take account of the role of media. The third is to move beyond regional conceptions of populism, and contribute to an understanding of populism as a global phenomenon. Taken together, this thesis offers an important new approach to understanding populism in the twenty-first century.