Populist Communication | 2021
Political Performance and Populist Representation
Abstract
This chapter develops an initial conceptualisation of populist performance—the telling of populism’s story about representative politics. Populists perform this through disruption, a meta-performance that dissects and undermines elite performance. They simultaneously constitute the identity of the populist and the people. Populist performance relies on two senses of authenticity. Self-connected authenticity—being true to oneself—is a moral ideal that populists perform through transgressive ordinariness in formal institutional settings. Responsive authenticity—being true to the values, feelings and beliefs of the represented—is central to the populist mode of representation and is achieved through identification with ‘the people’. The populist representative claim to mimesis suggests that the populist is simply a conductor of public opinion with no friction or transformation occurring in the process of political representation.