Abstract
As a key feature of the contemporary political landscape, populism stands as one of the most contentious concepts in political science. This article presents a critique of dominant conceptions of populism – as ideology, logic, discourse and strategy/organisation – and introduces the category of ‘political style’ as a new compelling way of thinking about the phenomenon. We argue that this new category captures an important dimension of contemporary populism that is missed by rival approaches. In doing so, we put forward an inductive model of populism as a political style and contextualise it within the increasingly stylised and mediatised milieu of contemporary politics by focusing on its performative features. We conclude by considering how this concept allows us to understand how populism appears across the political spectrum, how it translates into the political mainstream and its implications for democratic politics.
Populism is, it seems, a key feature of the contemporary political landscape. Currently, populism can be seen in action in settings as disparate as the United States, the Netherlands, Thailand and Venezuela, where the rise of the Tea Party, the controversy around Geert Wilders, the continuing influence of exiled former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra and the success of Chávismo, respectively, exemplify regional variations of the phenomenon. In line with these empirical developments, interest in populism has increased dramatically over recent years, becoming one of political science's most contentious issues (Canovan, 2004; Comroff, 2011). However, there is still little agreement as to how properly to conceptualise populism. Dominant definitions of populism often attempt to fit a square peg in a round hole, and fail to capture the specificity of the phenomenon.
This article presents a critique of dominant conceptions of populism, and introduces the category of ‘political style’ as a new compelling way of thinking about the phenomenon. We argue that although there might be a general consensus on which political actors can be labelled as ‘populist’ in the contemporary literature, there is actually a relatively wide disparity in these populist actors’ ideologies, discourses and political and organisational strategies. For example, populists can appear across the ideological spectrum, from far left (Evo Morales) to far right (Jean-Marie Le Pen). They can incorporate different discourses into their populism, such as elements of technocratic discourse in the case of Rafael Correa (De la Torre, 2012), or hardly use populist discourse at all, as in the case of Carlos Menem (Hawkins, 2010, pp. 80–1). Finally, in terms of political organisation, they can build loose networks (Hugo Chávez) as well as tight party discipline (Geert Wilders). In other words, current ideological, discursive and organisational conceptions of populism leave us in the strange position of arguing that some of the ‘usual suspects’ or archetypal cases of contemporary populism are not actually ‘populist’ at all. In this light, we aim to overcome these disparities by developing a model of populism as a ‘political style’ on an inductive basis, identifying features common to those leaders commonly accepted as populists in the literature from 1990 onwards – appeal to ‘the people’; crisis, breakdown, threat; and ‘bad manners’ – aiming to highlight an important dimension of populism missed by rival approaches.
In order to do so, we begin by considering the theoretical and empirical problems with current conceptualisations of populism – as ideology, logic, discourse or strategy – arguing that while there might be agreement about some of the features of populism, the choice of the categories that have been used to describe the phenomenon are problematic. We then introduce the concept of political style by drawing on recent developments in political sociology and theories of representation, focusing on the performative dimension of populism within the context of the heavily mediatised and ‘stylised’ milieu of contemporary politics. We then set out our model of populism as a political style, and conclude by explaining how this approach allows us to understand how populism appears across the political spectrum, how it translates into the political mainstream, and its theoretical and methodological implications.
The Problems with Populism
Like many terms in the lexicon of political science, populism is marked by a high degree of contestability. Indeed, it is an axiomatic feature of literature on the topic to acknowledge the contested nature of populism (Ionescu and Gellner, 1969; Laclau, 1977; Taggart, 2000), and more recently the literature has reached a whole new level of meta-reflexivity, where it is posited that it has become common to acknowledge the acknowledgement of this fact (Panizza, 2005a, p. 1). There are two ways this situation can be read. The first is to argue that the concept of populism has become so widely used – and usually in a derogatory manner to denigrate any political personality we do not like – that it has lost its analytical value and has become meaningless.
By contrast, there are those who see the debate over populism as indicating that there is something important and promising about the concept. The combination of constant contestation with populism's surprisingly resilient staying power in the literature can be read as a sign of its vitality and relevance. One might also suggest that the plurality of definitions of populism reflects the multifaceted nature of the phenomenon. Such debates also reflect the fact that it is only in the last decade or so that serious attempts at bridging the literatures on populism (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2011; 2012; Rovira Kaltwasser, 2012; Taggart, 2000) – most specifically between Latin American, North American, European and political theoretical literatures – have been made, and as such we can expect some serious intellectual and terminological arguments to occur in this collision between different approaches.
We subscribe to the latter view. The task of clarifying what we mean when we talk about populism is an important one; all the more so given that the term is now widely used by comparativists as well as area studies specialists. Furthermore, the issue is not merely of academic interest. Populism is often claimed to be a destabilising element within democratic politics (Rosanvallon, 2008; Urbinati, 1998). Assuming this to be the case, much rides on the sharpness of the conceptual tools we use to understand populism.
In the contemporary literature, there exist at least four central approaches to populism – as ideology, logic, discourse and strategy/organisation – which each manifest their own problems. While most of these approaches agree somewhat on the features of populism in their definitions, we argue that they use problematic terms to categorise the phenomenon. Below, we identify the central shortcomings of these approaches, before proposing our own account of populism as a political style and considering its position in the contemporary mediatised political landscape.
Populism as Ideology
There is little doubt that the conceptualisation of populism as an ideology has become the dominant position in the literature over the past few years, particularly among European political scientists. Much of this can be attributed to the contribution of Cas Mudde (2007; 2009), whose writings on populism have set the agenda for comparativists in the field. Mudde puts forward a minimal definition of populism as:
a thin-centred ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic groups, ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’, and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people (Mudde, 2007, p. 23).
For Mudde, the strength of a minimal ideological definition of populism lies in its applicability to comparative empirical research – particularly its ability to transcend regional bias – as well as its ability to jettison any normative baggage that conceptions of populism have often been brandished with. He further argues that by conceptualising it as a thin-centred ideology we can understand that populism does not exist in any pure form, but rather is always present in mixed iterations with other ideologies (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser, 2011, p. 5). Other writers who have also developed the idea of populism as a thin-centred ideology include Koen Abts and Stefan Rummens (2007), Ben Stanley (2008) and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (2012), with Margaret Canovan (2002) even going so far as to argue that populism can be understood as the ideology of democracy.
There are a number of issues with classifying populism as a thin-centred ideology. The primary concern is that the term ‘ideology’ is used relatively unproblematically throughout the literature on populism, and often ends up serving as a catch-all term that implicitly swallows up other approaches along the way – most obviously the discursive approach – thus losing its initial apparent clarity. Further, we need to question whether a ‘thin ideology’ can actually become so thin as to lose its conceptual validity and utility. The founder of the morphological approach to ideology that these authors employ, Michael Freeden, notes that thin ideologies such as ecologism or feminism, although starting from a restricted conceptual core, ‘have since made strenuous efforts to accumulate a range of conceptual furniture that will thicken their ideational density and sophistication and extend their appeal and viability’ (Freeden, 1996, p. 486). Populism is clearly not an ideology on these terms. Unlike ecologism or feminism, hardly anyone self-identifies as ‘populist’, and there is no kind of wider global ‘populist movement’ or Populist International. There are no key philosophers or theoreticians of populism, or any texts that seek to ‘thicken’ its ‘ideational density’. Further, populism lacks a clear common historical or genealogical referent beyond the People's Party of the 1890s (or perhaps the narodnichestvo of 1870s Russia). As such, it makes little sense to conceptualise populism as an ideology given the very ‘thinness’ of the concept of ideology in this approach. This is not to doubt that populism has a significant ideational element, but as we shall argue below, these ideational elements are better conceptualised as part of populism's political style.
Populism as a Political Logic
While the ideological approach of Mudde and others has proven influential in European comparative politics, in the area of political and social theory it is Ernesto Laclau's (2005a; 2006) conceptualisation of populism as a political logic that has made the biggest impact. Aiming to escape the vagaries of the semantic tussles around populism that have been discussed above, Laclau argues that prior attempts to define populism have necessarily failed as they have been concerned with locating populism's ontic content, rather than capturing the ontological status of the concept. By moving away from the specific concrete contents of ‘politics’ – that is, empirical political reality – and to the more abstract level of ‘the political’ – that is, the ways in which society is instituted (Mouffe, 2005a, pp. 8–9) – Laclau puts forward his case for populism as a structuring logic of political life, evident wherever equivalence triumphs over difference.
Populism is not just any political logic, however; Laclau argues that it is the logic of the political. ‘The people’, in this formulation, become the possibility of any renewed and effective political project and, indeed, the very subject of the political. And if ‘the people’ are the subject of the political, then populism is the logic of the political. In this sense, Laclau claims that all politics is populism: ‘if populism consists in postulating a radical alternative within the communitarian space, a choice in the crossroads on which the future of a given society hinges, does not populism become synonymous with politics? The answer can only be affirmative’ (Laclau, 2005a, p. 47).
There are three central problems here: the slippage of concepts, the issue of empirical counter-examples and methodological applicability. First, while Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985, p. 193) once argued that the name of the game that takes place in the field of the political is hegemony, Laclau now argues that ‘populism is the royal road to understanding something about the ontological constitution of the political as such’ (Laclau, 2005a, p. 67). This results in a conflation of Laclau's key concepts, most aptly put in the title of a recent review article, ‘Populism is Hegemony is Politics?’ (Arditi, 2010). Second, there are political movements in the contemporary political landscape, such as the Zapatistas as well as the alter-globalisation and Occupy movements, which self-consciously seek to distance themselves from populist modes of discourse and organisation, thus attempting to disavow the ‘populist logic’ that Laclau sees as universal, by refusing to articulate demands through a leader, or not articulating concrete demands at all. 1
Third, from a methodological point of view, Laclau's conceptualisation is too broad to allow any meaningful application of his theory. A clear illustration of this is the collection of essays that make up Panizza's edited volume, Populism and the Mirror of Democracy (Panizza, 2005b), in which the majority of the contributors attempt to apply a version of Laclau's theory of populism to a range of empirical cases. The problem here is that the chosen empirical examples all correspond to the allegedly problematic ‘ontic’ contents that Laclau attempts to jettison in his theory. However, one cannot blame the authors for grasping at those political manifestations that revolve around concrete appeals to ‘the people’ – if we are to take Laclau's theory of populism seriously, it should be able to apply it to absolutely any political case study. One can see, however, how this level of generality begins to lead to vagueness and banality in the choice of concrete cases for empirical analysis if followed to its logical conclusion. As such, Laclau's attempt to equate populism with the political is of little help in understanding sameness or difference – which, after all, is the key task of comparative politics.
Populism as Discourse
Two central approaches to populism can be found under this heading. The first is linked to Laclau's (1977; 1980; 2005b) earlier theoretical work and the subsequent bulk of literature that has emerged from the ‘Essex School’ of discourse analysis, while the second deals in both classical and quantitative content analyses.
We will not go into detail about the Essex School approach given that much of it overlaps with a number of the fundamental assumptions made by Laclau as outlined above. Indeed, Laclau and Mouffe (1985) stand as the figureheads of this approach, with substantial contributions also made by Jacob Torfing (1995), David Howarth, Aletta Norval and Yannis Stavrakakis (Howarth, 2000; Howarth et al., 2000). This approach considers populism to be ‘an anti-status quo discourse that simplifies the political space by symbolically dividing society between ‘the people’ (as the ‘underdogs’) and its ‘other’ (Panizza, 2005a, p. 3), and primary examples of it include Sebastian Barros (2005), Stavrakakis (2005) and Alejandro Groppo (2009). The crucial problem with the bulk of this literature on populism (as with this approach to discourse more generally) is that it often serves not to illuminate or truly analyse the subject at hand, but rather to verify and ‘prove’ the correctness and universal applicability of the Laclauian framework it utilises.
The second type is more empirically focused than the Essex School approach, and is becoming increasingly common. Classical content analyses, such as those by Kirk Hawkins (2009; 2010) and Jan Jagers and Stefaan Walgrave (2007) typically endeavour to develop a qualitative coding scheme which attempts to measure the ‘level’ of populism in a certain set of discursive texts, while recent quantitative approaches such as those by Ariel Armony and Victor Armony (2005), Emmanuelle Reungoat (2010) and Teun Pauwels (2011) seek to undertake computer-assisted analyses of a large set of texts based on the appearance of certain key terms. Both have significant problems. As Pauwels (2011, p. 102) argues, classical content analysis suffers from questionable reliability, irregular sampling and possible coding bias. Furthermore, there is little agreement on what sources should be measured, from speeches to party manifestos to party broadcasts. Quantitative content analysis, on the other hand, has its own issues: it is difficult to see how charting the percentages of how often certain keywords appear in party material can really do much more than verify or supplement already existing theoretical assumptions. It certainly does not provide a workable theoretical framework, and is entirely reliant on the chosen keywords of the coder. Moreover, both of these empirical approaches to populism as a discourse fundamentally miss important elements of populist appeal – namely the ‘stylistic’ elements beyond what is recorded on the page. These include visual, performative and aesthetic elements, as well as those features that contribute to the affective or passionate dimension of populism that a number of significant researchers of populism (Canovan, 1999; Mouffe, 2005b; Stavrakakis, 2004) on the topic have stressed. For a subject notorious for its prevalence of charismatic leaders and stylistic flourishes, it is fanciful to imagine that populism can only be measured as a set of words to be counted and collated. Ultimately, the discursive approach to populism should be seen as a methodological approach that can supplement our understanding of populism, rather than as a primary framework for exploring the phenomenon.
Populism as Strategy/Organisation
It is not only ideological approaches that have made developing a minimal definition of populism a central goal. Kurt Weyland's definition of populism as ‘a political strategy through which a personalistic leader seeks or exercises government power based on direct, unmediated, uninstitutionalized support from large numbers of mostly unorganized followers’ (Weyland, 2001, p. 14) has proven popular as a starting point for empirical analyses, particularly in the literature on Latin American populism (see Ellner, 2003; Roberts, 2003; 2006).
The primary difficulty with this definition is that it identifies modes of organisation or strategy that appear across the political spectrum in many different articulations that we would ordinarily never consider calling ‘populist’; a number of social movements (such as religious or millenarian movements) or forms of community politics could fall under such a definition (Hawkins, 2010, p. 168). Equally, there is no reason to believe that populism only thrives in instances of low institutionalism or organisation; the fortunes of Le Pen's Front National or Wilder's Partij voor de Vrijheid prove that populism can indeed thrive in an environment of tight party discipline and organisation. Ultimately, the legacy of the classic literature on Latin American populism as multi-class urban alliances under charismatic leaders casts a long shadow here (see Di Tella, 1965; Smith, 1969). Such definitions also miss both the stylistic and ideational elements of populism: as Hawkins (2010, p. 39) has pointed out, such ‘conceptualizations of populism emphasize largely material aspects of politics, that is, coalitions, historical preconditions and policies. This is an incomplete account’.
Additionally, this approach leaves out the classic referent in discussions of populism: ‘the people’. To do so is not only to abandon the one central feature that differentiates populism from other styles of politics, but also to ignore the etymological roots of the term, which are primarily based on the Latin populi. While tracing the etymology of terms is obviously not a primary reason to discard concepts, when it comes to populism, Alan Knight notes that ‘the etymology is sufficiently clear, recent and compelling for us to take it seriously’ (Knight, 1998, p. 226).
Political Style
Thus far we have offered a brief critique of the current key approaches to populism – as ideology, logic, discourse and strategy/organisation – and addressed their central shortcomings. While their outlines of some of the features of populism may be valid, we have argued that the categories they use are problematic. In this light, the remainder of this article outlines why thinking of populism as a ‘political style’ offers a promising new perspective on populism that helps to solve a number of the issues raised above in relation to the existing literature. By focusing on the performative elements of the phenomenon, thinking of populism as a political style contextualises populism's position in the contemporary ‘stylised’ political landscape and brings representation to the forefront of discussions about populism.
Why a ‘style’ of politics? The first issue to note is that we are not the first authors to describe populism as a style. Knight (1998, p. 223) sees populism as a loose style ‘characteristically involving a proclaimed rapport with “the people”, a “them-and-us” mentality, and (often, though not necessarily) a period of crisis and mobilization’. Pierre-André Taguieff (1995), Michael Kazin (1998), Margaret Canovan (1999), Carlos de la Torre (2010) and Dani Filc (2011) have also considered populism as a style, but have generally focused on its rhetorical features. Here they address populism's tendency not only to communicate in a simple and direct manner, but also to offer solutions that are direct and simple. Indeed, Jagers and Walgrave (2007, p. 322) go so far to specify it as ‘a political communication style of political actors that refers to the people’. None of these scholars, however, has attempted to flesh out the idea of ‘political style’ so that it can be of use for comparative political analysis. In building the concept of political style, we attempt to move beyond the purely communicative and rhetorical elements that these authors discuss, and emphasise the performative and relational elements of political style. 2
We further choose to focus on contemporary populism as a political style in order to acknowledge the changing shape of the political under conditions of reflexive modernity (Beck, 2006). The collapse of the legitimacy of ‘traditional’ or ‘mainstream’ politics – characterised by the decline of ideological cleavages, the displacement of class character of politics and the alienation of ordinary citizens from traditional party politics (Mair, 2006) – has led to the increasing ‘stylisation’ of the political, whereby rather than these usual markers coordinating our experience of politics, ‘styles’ and ‘repertoires’ have taken on much greater resonance (Corner and Pels, 2003). The suggestion, most commonly associated with the work of situationist thinkers such as Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, whereby the mediatisation of the political leads to the political becoming increasingly ‘spectacular’ (in both the precise and ordinary usage of term), is increasingly prescient. If commentators are correct about the effect of the mediatisation of the political equating to a simplification of political discourse, its reduction to neat us-against-them antagonisms and sound-bite solutions, then this is a milieu in which we can expect populism to flourish as a prominent and effective political style among others.
In this light, we define the concept of political style as the repertoires of performance that are used to create political relations. There are a wide range of political styles within the contemporary political landscape, including populist, technocratic, authoritarian and post-representative styles, all of which have their own specific performative repertoires and tropes that create and affect political relations. Key examples of practitioners of these respective political styles are Hugo Chávez, Angela Merkel, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Subcomandante Marcos. In our case, when it comes to the populist political style, we are interested in how the performances of those involved influence the relationship between the populist leader and ‘the people’, and vice versa. Such an understanding eschews the traditional distinction between style and content that other approaches inherently rely on: we are not purely interested in the ‘content’ of so-called populist ideology, or just the organisational forms of political logic that populism might utilise, but rather how the performative repertoires of populist leaders and their followers interact, and how this affects their relationship. In doing so, we seek to acknowledge the collapsing of style and content in these ‘spectacular’ times: as Frank Ankersmit (2002, p. 135) argues, ‘aspects of political reality itself, as denoted or referred to by the notions of “content” and “style”, tend to interfere and interact with one another … style sometimes generates content, and vice versa’. We contend that this condition is prevalent in contemporary politics. Our point is not to argue that all politics is purely ‘surface’ (as per Baudrillard, 1994), or on the other hand that the ‘superficiality’ of contemporary politics conceals a much more important, obfuscated Real (as per Žižek, 1999), but merely to acknowledge and highlight the fact that the contemporary political landscape is intensely mediated and ‘stylised’, and as such the so-called ‘aesthetic’ or ‘performative’ features are particularly (and increasingly) important. Thus, political style is an important conceptual tool for exploring the contemporary political realm.
Why else focus on performance, rather than ideology, discourse, logic or strategy? We draw inspiration here from three diverse sources: the recent turn towards social action and practice in political sociology (Jansen, 2011, p. 77; Tilly, 2008); fresh developments in the theory of political representation that focus on its relational elements (Arditi, 2007a; Saward, 2010); and theories of performativity (Butler, 1990; Chambers and Carver, 2008). In the first case, by focusing on populism as a political style based on the behavioural aspects of performance, we avoid what Robert Jansen (2011, p. 82) refers to as ‘a fundamental problem that cuts across all three generations of the populism literature … treat[ing] populism as a thing’ (emphasis in original). Rather, populism is a style that is performed and enacted. As such, we are able to understand how different performative repertoires can be used by diverse political actors, instead of simply collapsing populist identity and populist appeals together, as many scholars of populism unwittingly do (see Ostiguy, 2009, p. 21).
Second, as Michael Saward (2010) has recently argued, contemporary forms of political representation fundamentally rely on the activity of claim making, and the subsequent ‘audience’ to which the claim is addressed receiving, accepting or rejecting such claims. Such a conceptualisation makes clear the relational character of political representation. However, it also makes clear the role of performance: as Saward (2010, p. 66) claims, ‘representing is performing, is action by actors, and the performance contains or adds up to a claim that someone is or can be representative’, before going on to list a number of politicians who have all likened the art of politics to that of performance. Indeed, the centrality of performance in politics has become even more prominent as the 24-hour news cycle has continued to accelerate, and as such, politicians’ projected images have become increasingly important, often garnering more scrutiny than their proposed policies (see Tanner, 2011). Politicians have become pseudo-celebrities, and political events like protests often gain attention for their novel stylistic features (such as flash-mobs, bus tours, truck convoys or occupations) rather than for their traditional ‘content’.
Further, we argue that performance can go so far as to bring political subjects into being. As Ankersmit (1996) notes, there is an ineradicable ‘aesthetic gap’ when it comes to political representation, as the multiplicity of voices and identities within any political community means that any claim a politician might wish to make on behalf of a demos cannot capture the whole community. As such, when a populist leader claims to speak for ‘the people’, this subject called ‘the people’ does not – and cannot, in reality – include all citizens within a given community. However, this operation is not just a one-way street; populists do not just attempt to ‘capture’ an already existing ‘people’. As theorists of performativity have shown us, performance and utterances can have strong perlocutionary effects. As Judith Butler (1990, p. 2) states, performativity is essentially a term for how ‘juridical power inevitably “produces” what it claims merely to represent’. This is important in regard to political style. For example, when populists claim to speak in the name of ‘the people’, they are attempting to bring a subject called ‘the people’ into being: they produce what they claim to represent by covering up the aesthetic gap and claiming to have direct, immediate contact with ‘the people’. In doing so, populists attempt to make the plebs and the populus one and the same. Thus performance within a political style is not merely a one-sided relationship in which a politician ‘performs’ for a passive audience, but rather a feedback loop whereby the performance can actually change or create the audience's subjectivity, and this in turn can change the context and efficacy of the performance. 3 Again, here we see that performance is not merely a ‘superficial’ feature of politics.
It should be clear by now that we are not using ‘performance’ in a pejorative sense – that is, performance as fake or inauthentic when contrasted to other kinds of acting. Performance is necessary in politics. Indeed, performance within political styles can act to ‘constitute the natural … through discursively constrained, but nonetheless signifying, gestures and speech’ (Chambers and Carver, 2008, p. 36). In other words, in utilising the concepts of performance and performativity with political style, we can examine how certain tropes, themes and ways of acting within politics can become mainstays of our political ‘common sense’, and how others fail to gain a foothold.
Given this focus on the performative, it is obvious that political style differs substantially from other central approaches to labelling political phenomena, such as ideology or discourse. While ideological approaches are generally concerned with analysing ‘structural arrangement[s] that attribute decontested meanings to a range of mutually defining political concepts’ (Freeden, 2003, p. 54) or exploring the reproduction and maintenance of certain Weltanschauungen, they do not emphasise performative elements. The ideological ‘content’ is their focus, which as we argue above is only one part of the picture. As such, while we can speak of liberalism and socialism as ideologies, the ‘political styles’ associated with them are not necessarily functions of the ideology; the ideology of communism, for example, has spurred very different ‘political styles’, from the grandiose displays associated with Stalin to the modest, ascetic styles associated with communists like Luxemburg and Lenin. In other words, ideology and political style are not mutually reliant on one another, nor are they one and the same – hence, in our particular case, populism does not need to be understood as an ideology to examine it as a political style.
Nor are political style and discourse one and the same. While discursive approaches to populism associated with Laclau and Mouffe (1985) argue that ‘all objects are objects of discourse’ (Howarth and Stavrakakis, 2000, p. 3), and thus take potentially anything as their focus for analysis given that nothing can be ‘outside’ discourse, the political style approach narrows its focus to the performative elements of politics. As such, while the key conceptual tools of discursive approaches to populism are empty signifiers, dislocation, nodal points and antagonism, the political style approach utilises conceptual tools from dramaturgical approaches to politics – performance, performativity, actors, audiences, stages, scripts, mise en scène and so forth. This difference in conceptual tools reflects a broader divide between approaches in regard to political ideas and actions: while Jansen (2011, p. 80) notes that ‘the discursive approach assumed that ideas and subjectivities translate unproblematically into political action’, the political style approach attempts to avoid this problem by focusing on political performance and action in the first place, and how this expresses political ideas and subjectivities. So there is a clear distinction here: while discursive approaches still primarily focus on discursive ‘content’, and see style as secondary, the stylistic approach apportions primacy to the stylistic realm for reasons discussed earlier in the article. More so, the discursive approach relies on an ontology of constitutive lack, which Andrew Robinson (2005) has argued is problematically essentialist and stultifying, and a framework of hegemony, which Benjamin Arditi (2007b) and Jon Beasley-Murray (2010) have both criticised for its self-proving theoretical structure. As noted earlier, the political style approach is not rooted in a set ahistorical ontological framework as such, but instead is sensitive to the contours of the contemporary political landscape, which is intensely mediatised and ‘stylised’. Thus, one does not need to subscribe to a distinct political theoretical framework to utilise the concept of ‘political style’.
Populism as a Political Style
Here we outline our model of populism as a political style. The key elements of the model were discerned on an inductive basis, in which we undertook a review of the literature on contemporary populism (that is, from the 1990s onwards) and identified the cases of leaders who were accepted as uncontroversial examples of populists. These included politicians from across the world, ranging from Latin America (including Alberto Fujimori, Hugo Chávez, Evo Morales and Rafael Correa), Europe (including Jean-Marie Le Pen, Jörg Haider, Umberto Bossi, Viktor Orbán and Pim Fortuyn), North America (including Sarah Palin, Ross Perot and Preston Manning) and the Asia-Pacific region (including Thaksin Shinawatra, Pauline Hanson and Winston Peters). We then analysed this set of cases to determine what stylistic features linked these leaders to build our model: ‘how’ are these leaders ‘populist'? How do they become ‘populist'? We focused on style for the reasons noted above, and because we found that there was wide disparity in regard to these leaders’ ideological approaches, discourses and political and organisational strategies.
Laclau (2005a) has criticised the inductive approach to defining populism, and instead has used deductive principles to build his model. However, as noted earlier, his deductive account suffers from frustrating vagueness and ends up equating populism with politics, thus losing the analytical utility of the concept. Furthermore, his criticism of inductive theories of populism draws on dated literature, failing to acknowledge that there has been substantial consensus on populist cases in recent years in the literature. In this light, we build on this consensus on case studies, aiming to find a middle ground between academic debates about populism and more popular usage of the term.
It is important to note that this is not an attempt to capture the very ‘essence’ of populism, nor is it an ideal type. Rather, we are interested here in creating a concept that allows us to chart the ‘family resemblances’ between a number of disparate cases of contemporary populism across the world. We wish to stress, however, that these elements should not be considered in isolation from one another – in other words, each element is not ‘in itself’ populist. The model should thus be considered as ‘the sum of its parts, not the parts themselves’ (Tormey, 1995, p. 73). For example, nearly every mainstream politician in the Western political landscape speaks in the name of ‘the people’ at some point, but again this does not mean that he or she is a populist. Equally, utilising one of these features does not mean a politician is ‘one-third’ populist – such claims make little sense. So what are the elements of the populist style?
Appeal to ‘the People’
The evocation of ‘the people’ is the central element that differentiates populism from other political styles. ‘The people’ is both the central audience of populists, as well as the subject that populists attempt to ‘render present’ (Arditi, 2007a) through their performance. Further, ‘the people’ are the true holders of sovereignty. Related to the appeal to ‘the people’ is the dichotomous division of society between ‘the people’ and an other/s. As opposed to Mudde's (2007, p. 23) division between ‘the pure people’ and ‘the corrupt elite’, we do not believe that populists necessarily think the elite are corrupt, or that they are always opposed to the elite. This is contextually specific, and it may be the case that the primary antagonism of ‘the people’ may be other groups in society (for example, asylum seekers or immigrant workers, as in the case of Geert Wilders’ welfare chauvinism, or Pauline Hanson's targeting of Asian immigrants), or even institutions. Populists will, however, claim to be distinct from the elite. Nonetheless, this view of the political as bifurcated stems from the performative aspects of the appeal to ‘the people’.
‘The elite’, ‘the establishment’, ‘the state’ or ‘the system’ (or other related signifiers) are usually evoked in populist discourse as the source of crisis, breakdown, corruption or dysfunctionality, as opposed to ‘the people’ who in turn have been ‘let down’, ‘ripped off’, ‘fleeced’, rendered powerless or badly governed. 4 Such efforts often attempt to establish their exteriority from ‘politics as usual’. This can take many forms, from use of common slang to certain gestures to fashion. It can also include claims against the ‘political correctness’ of the system/elite, which are used to demonstrate that the populist ‘really knows’ what people are thinking. Further, it can take the form of the denial of expert knowledge, and the championing of ‘common sense’ against the bureaucrats, technocrats, representatives or ‘guardians of our interests’. This was particularly evident in the language of Preston Manning's Reform Party, whose charter declared that ‘we believe in the common sense of the common people’ (Reform Party of Canada, 1993) as well as Sarah Palin and Pauline Hanson's valorisation of knowledge of ordinary citizens – a phenomenon that Paul Saurette and Shane Gunster (2011) have recently labelled ‘epistemological populism’.
Crisis, Breakdown, Threat
Populism gets its impetus from the perception of crisis, breakdown or threat (Taggart, 2000). This in turn leads to the demand to act decisively and immediately. Crises are often related to the breakdown between citizens and their representatives, but can also be related to immigration, economic difficulties, perceived injustice, military threat, social change or other issues. The effect of the evocation of emergency in this fashion is to simplify radically the terms and terrain of political debate, which is reflected in the tendency towards simple and direct language. For example, Hugo Chávez ramped up his populist style in the light of a perceived crisis regarding an imperialist conspiracy perpetrated by the United States, while Geert Wilders has posited the increasing Islamisation of the Netherlands as an imminent threat to social and economic well-being.
This relates to a more general distrust of the complex machinery of modern governance and the complicated nature of policy solutions, which in contemporary settings often require consultations, reviews, reports, lengthy iterative design and implementation. In contrast, populists favour short-term and swift action rather than the ‘slow politics’ (Saward, 2011) of negotiation and deliberation. Politics thus becomes highly instrumentalised and utilitarian. That which gets in the way of addressing ‘the issue’ or the ‘crisis’ has to be ignored, supplanted or removed. This does not mean, however, that populist politics is necessarily ‘simple’ or ‘single issue’: as Laclau has demonstrated, it can be complex and sophisticated, as a number of previously disconnected grievances can find articulation under a populist claim.
‘Bad Manners’
A function of the appeal to ‘the people’ as the arbiters of ‘common sense’, the ‘way forward’ and of the urgency of the matters with which populist figures are concerned is a coarsening of political discourse. Much of populists’ appeal comes from their disregard for ‘appropriate’ ways of acting in the political realm. Canovan (1999, p. 5) has identified this as a ‘tabloid style’, while Pierre Ostiguy (2009) has identified this as the ‘low’ of a high—low axis that runs orthogonal to the traditional left—right axis. Such elements of this ‘low’ include use of slang, swearing, political incorrectness and being overly demonstrative and ‘colourful’, as opposed to the ‘high’ behaviours of rigidness, rationality, composure and technocratic language. An American example of this high—low distinction would be to compare the patrician Al Gore to the populist Sarah Palin. Gore's virtues are those of the establishment: seriousness, earnestness, gravitas, intelligence and sensitivity to the positions of others. Palin's are those of the ‘outsider’: directness, playfulness, a certain disregard for hierarchy and tradition, ready resort to anecdote as ‘evidence’ and a studied ignorance of that which does not interest her or which does not go to ‘the heart of the matter’.
Thinking of populism as a political style with the aforementioned elements has a number of repercussions for political analysis. The first is that it frees us from the ‘puzzle’ of populism's ability to appear across the political spectrum. If we agree that populism is primarily a style of politics, then there is little difficulty in noting that populism can be a feature of both left-wing and right-wing leaders and movements. We can thus compare populisms of the left and right, and compare populism with non-populist political styles. Second, it allows us to consider the repercussions of populism's ‘mainstream’ appropriations. This may be anathema to comparativists who argue for a robust minimal definition of populism (Mudde, 2007; 2009; Rovira Kaltwasser, 2012), but there is a need to consider how to deal conceptually with those leaders who might employ some elements of populism, but might not fit precisely into the category of being traditionally ‘populist’; some oft-discussed examples here would be Tony Blair (Mair, 2002), George W. Bush (Shogan, 2007) or former Australian Prime Minister John Howard (Wear, 2008). Gianpietro Mazzoleni (2008) has attempted to conceptualise this divide by putting forward a difference between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ populism, while Dave Snow and Benjamin Moffitt (2012) have called it ‘mainstream populism’. Thinking of populism as a political style rather than a distinct ideology or logic allows us to consider how politicians can slip in and out of the populist style, or to consider the difference between ‘populism’, and what Francisco Panizza (in Wilson Center, 2009) terms the ‘populist interventions’ of mainstream politics. How such usage of the populist style affects the quality of democratic politics is a question ripe for analysis, as is that of how far a mainstream politician can flirt with the populist style before being branded a ‘populist’.
Third, it brings the issue of how representation operates to the forefront of any discussion of populism. By talking about populism as a style of politics, the question is not only who ‘the people’ are, but also how the activity of ‘rendering present’ (Arditi, 2007a, p. 64) ‘the people’ actually occurs, and how the distinction between constitutive and constituted power (Kalyvas, 2005) – that is, whether ‘the people’ are an active entity that shapes democratic politics, or whether ‘the people’ are shaped by external forces (such as a constitution, history, leader and so on) – operates in populism.
Fourth, it avoids conceptual slippage regarding the relationship between populism and democracy. The numerous characterisations of this relationship – as ‘mirror’ (Panizza, 2005a), ‘shadow’ (Canovan, 1999), ‘spectre’ and ‘internal periphery’ (Arditi, 2007a) – speak to this uncertainty, with opaque claims about ‘the populist ideology of democracy’ (Canovan, 2002, p. 29) and the like quite common. Discussing populism as a political style frees us from the debates about populism's structural location in relation to democracy, and instead allows us to explore the relationship in a clearer way, considering perhaps how populism attempts to cut through the complex ‘messiness’ of contemporary politics and, indeed, how this political style may present an immanent critique of certain forms of democratic politics.
Finally, the concept of political style helps us compare and distinguish populism from other political styles – technocratic, authoritarian and post-representative among others – and allows us to question why political actors utilise different political styles at different times. In acknowledging that styles are used differently (and not necessarily consistently by the same actor), it recognises that political identities – and the performances of these identities – are increasingly fluid and contingent. The notion of political style further makes clear that populism is not ‘normal politics’: hence the attention it garners in both academic and popular literature. ‘Normal politics’ today in Western liberal democracies is generally marked by an absence of outward performative style, and instead favours the coldness of ‘office politics’ and the technocratic style. Here, administration and stylistic mildness or blandness triumph, with ‘good governance’ rather than vision, decisive leadership or even democratic legitimacy the primary aim of our representatives. The populist style turns this state of affairs on its head, with expert knowledge being dismissed in the face of the valorisation of ‘everyday experience’, and Third Way-style consensual politics being eschewed for Schmittian divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Populists further disturb this technocratic neutrality through their often disruptive performances, with a heady combination of charisma, political incorrectness and sometimes blatant discrimination or even illegality upturning the ‘gentrified domain of political performances’ at times (Arditi, 2007a, p. 78). These challenges to ‘politics as usual’ help us to recognise that populism is a force to be reckoned with, and that its primary stylistic features actually have deep ramifications for democratic life in an increasingly mediatised political world.
Conclusion
In the famous 1969 Ionescu and Gellner collection on populism, Peter Worsley (1969, p. 245) argued that populism needs to be understood as ‘emphasis, a dimension of political culture in general, not simply a particular kind of overall ideological system or type of organization’. We argue that the same still holds, but that this ‘emphasis’ is best expressed in the idea of ‘political style’, a repertoire of performative features which cuts across different political situations that are used to create political relations. While the term ‘political style’ has been used somewhat haphazardly in the literature, with Weyland (2001, p. 12) arguing that ‘political style is a broad, not clearly delineated concept’, it has been the aim of this article to offer a starting point for giving the term substance, to make it less slippery and more useful for political analysis – both in the empirical study of populist leaders and movements, and in the development of populist theory. It should not be mistaken as an attempt to provide a ‘grand theory’ of populism but, instead, a new approach to the subject in line with recent calls for embracing pluralistic paradigms in the study of populism (Kogl, 2010).
This article has made clear that the concept of populism as a political style is sensitive to the contours of the contemporary political landscape, as politics becomes increasingly more ‘stylised’ and the aesthetic and performative elements of politics become more prominent. Within this context, it is little wonder that populism has established itself as a permanent feature of the political landscape over the past fifteen years or so. The concept of political style allows us to rethink populism by placing its performative dimensions at front and centre, and gives us a chance to reflect on the complex relationship between style and content. For all these reasons, thinking about populism as a political style opens up an important new dimension from which to explore the phenomenon.
Footnotes
The authors wish to thank the three anonymous referees and the editorial team for their comments and suggestions for improvement, and John Keane for his conceptual advice.
1
See Chesters and Welsh (2006) and 
for examples of how these movements attempt to escape the populist logic.
2
The term ‘political style’ has also gained some traction in the field of rhetorical studies, most notably in the work of Hariman (1995). However, its usage in the field has been generally limited, unsurprisingly, to the hermeneutic examination of speech and writings, and does not include other elements of political performance that we discuss here. Those who have utilised it in political analysis include Ankersmit (2002) and Pels (2003), who has extended Ankersmit's theoretical work into political sociology with an incisive exploration of the Pim Fortuyn phenomenon, as well as co-editing a Dutch-language collection on the notion of political style (Pels and te Velde, 2000).
3
The case of Thaksin Shinawatra is instructive here. While initially a fairly bland pro-business capitalist, Thaksin's tactics began to change following his 2000 indictment by the National Counter Corruption Commission. Styling himself as a man of ‘the people’, he began wearing less formal clothes, speaking in local slang and talking about his sex life. He toured the countryside, and was embraced by the rural poor. The rural poor responded by supporting him at the polls and transforming him into their symbol of power against the elite. The rise of Thaksin was a result of the political inclusion of the rural poor, which itself was a result of the rise of Thaksin – in other words, a feedback loop of performances from the leader and ‘the people’ was operating. For an excellent account of this, see .
4
While much work has been done in the populist literature on formulations of ‘the people’, significant conceptualisations of ‘the elite’ in terms of populism are rare. This is a problem, as signifiers like ‘the elite’, ‘the establishment’ or ‘the system’ are just as ‘empty’ as that of ‘the people’. As such, these groups can be construed in different ways depending on to whom ‘the people’ are directly being set in opposition: for example, in the United States, the ‘cultural establishment’ and ‘economic establishment’ are very different groups – possibly even opposed to one another – but can serve the same antagonistic purposes for populists.