Abstract
This chapter empirically explores UKIP’s and the EFF’s performances of representation in a grounded theory analysis. It queries the parties’ attitudes to performances of elite representation. They diagnose their respective representative democracies with a widening gulf between elites and people that results in an undemocratic disconnect. This chapter also interrogates how the parties’ stories about political performance are themselves performed through disruptive action. It finds that their performances respond to the given dominant mode of representation and institutional fragility. But their performances share three core functions of a populist mode of representation: constituting populists’ self-connected and responsive authenticity; projecting an identity lacking in political influence onto “the people”; and imbuing populist representatives with agency to overturn the elite’s immoral and unresponsive mode of representation.
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Notes
- 1.
The populist parties’ conceptions of political performance are often reductionist and do not correspond to my own, which I developed in Chap. 7.
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Sorensen, L. (2021). UKIP’s and the EFF’s Disruptive Performances. In: Populist Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65756-7_8
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