Abstract
This chapter further develops the concept of populist performance based on the preceding empirical analysis. It fills out the populist mode of representation as a set of forms and functions of exposure and representation. Disruptive forms transgress conventions of speech, behaviour and appearance of formal politics. The functions are to expose elites’ untrustworthiness, unresponsiveness and selectivity in who is represented and to perform populists’ own self-connected and responsive authenticity. Populism therefore performs a claim to truth-telling. This chapter also discusses the performative impact of bringing into being a political reality characterised by a crisis of representation and a people lacking in feelings of political efficacy. It makes populism highly consequential and contextual. Its meanings and implications are shaped by the dominant mode of representation, institutional robustness and democratic pathway.
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Notes
- 1.
Populists in power may engage in additional forms of norm-breaking, including challenging and restructuring democratic and legal institutions and making unusual appointments to political and independent offices.
- 2.
I here follow Michael Saward (2010, pp. 70–74) in approaching the trustee and delegate roles not as binary, static roles in a typology but as cultural resources in dynamic performances of representative claim-making or in the construction of a political reality in crisis.
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Sorensen, L. (2021). Populist Disruptive Performance: The Forms and Functions of Populist Representation. In: Populist Communication. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-65756-7_9
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