Michael Bossetta (University of Copenhagen)

Populism as the Performance of Crisis: A Case Study of the 2014 LBC Europe Debate between Nigel Farage and Nick Clegg

Michael Bossetta (University of Copenhagen)

Introduction

Leading up to the 2014 European Parliament elections, Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage squared off twice to debate whether Britain should remain in, or exit out, the European Union. Although the two men stood side-by-side, they represented two starkly opposed perspectives about what Britain’s future in the EU should look like. Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party and then Deputy Prime Minister of a Conservative-led government, embodied the perspective of staying ‘In’. Farage, charismatic leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), embodied the perspective of getting ‘Out.’ The ultimate goal of the two party leaders was to persuade the audience – those present as well as those watching online or listening at home – that each represented the right course of action for Britain. Given the predefined roles of the debate, the stances of each politician were widely known. What the audience was interested in, and the focus of this paper, is how each politician argued for his respective standpoint.

The debates provide an interesting opportunity to examine the political performance of a prototypical populist (Farage) against a high-ranking official of the political elite (Clegg) that populists tend to criticize. This paper looks at how the politicians perform their diverging opinions of EU membership to a live audience during the first Europe debate, which was hosted by the British radio station Leading Britain’s Conversation (LBC). More specifically, the paper is an exploratory attempt to operationalize recent research conceptualizing populists as mediators – and consequently, makers – of crisis. My paper is guided by the following research question: How do populist politicians construct the crisis of Britain’s EU membership?

Theoretical Approach and Hypothesis

Undoubtedly, populism is most widely construed in the literature as an ideology with a set of core ideational features, which can be summarized as moral agonism between a monolithic conception of ‘the people’ and a corrupt elite (Mudde 2004: 543). If the “[p]opulist ideology becomes visible in the communication strategies or discursive patterns of…populist actors” (Kriesi and Pappas 2015: 5-6), the debate format is suitable to test the idea that, in order to thrive, populists actively construct a narrative of imminent threat.

To locate instances of populism empirically, I propose a focus on crisis, which has recently been argued to be an internal and necessary feature of populism (Rooduijn 2014; Moffitt 2014). Earlier research tends to view crisis as a phenomenon external to populism – a “powerful reaction to a sense of extreme crisis” (Taggart 2000: 2). However, following the larger performative turn in the social sciences, researchers are starting to focus on the agency of populist of actors in mediating and performing a sense of crisis to ‘the people’ they claim to represent. In this conceptualization, a crisis exists only when it is perceived as one, “when a failure gains wider salience through its mediation into the political, cultural, or ideological spheres and is commonly accepted [by the people] as symptomatic of a wider problem” (Moffitt 2014: 9). Populists are not passive markers of crisis; they are active makers of crisis.

Drawing from the work of Hay (1996), who looked at how the British media successfully constructed a sense of crisis during the ‘Winter of Discontent’ in the UK, I understand crises as discursive constructions. Crises are discursively constructed by social actors, who first select a number of disparate events or statistics from an entire host of material in a given society. These events then undergo a process of mediation, where social actors represent these events as failures. Lastly, these failures are linked together into a coherent narrative by the attribution of these failures as symptoms of a “common essence” (Hay 1996: 266), the unifying root source perceived as constituting the crisis. The figure below, a slight adaption from Hay’s model, illustrates this process:

Figure 1: The Discursive Construction of Crisis, adapted from Hay (1996: 268)

In Hay’s study, the discursive construction of crisis was made salient to the public through the media’s representation of a crisis of the state; however, the same meaning-making processes can be enacted in the political sphere through political performances (e.g. speeches, rallies, debates). Political performances “seek to communicate to an audience meaning-making related to state institutions, policies, and discourses,” and this meaning-making may take the form of promulgating a sense of crisis (Rai 2014: 1-2). In linking together a number of unrelated events to the same source, populists use crisis constructions to simplify the reality of complex problems (Canovan 1999: 6).

In a given society, though, there can be competing and conflicting narratives of crises (Hay 1996: 225), and the performance of crisis is not specific to populists alone (see Nord and Olsson 2011). Populists perform crises against competing, and usually more dominant, narratives. The aim of a populist performance is thus to persuade their audience that the crisis, as they have written it, is real. Rhetoric, or the art of persuasion, can afford insight into how competing ideas about future action are conveyed as “efforts to refigure situations by actively privileging particular interpretations and diminishing others” (Martin 2013: 89). Moffitt (forthcoming) has argued that populists tend to engage in this power struggle according to a particular ‘political style,’ which he defines as “repertoires of embodied, symbolically mediated performance made to audiences that are used to create and navigate the fields of power that comprise the political.”

The characteristics of the populist style are not only the performance of crisis, but also “appeals to the people” and the use of “bad manners”, e.g. “slang, swearing, political incorrectness, and being overly demonstrative and ‘colourful’” (Ibid.). Diametrically opposed to this populist style of performance is the technocratic style, which performs “stability or measured progress”, appeals to expertise and experience and exhibits ‘good’ manners (e.g. “using ‘dry’ language, dressing formally”). Given the word limitations of the paper, I will only focus in-depth on the performance of crisis versus stability. According to Moffitt’s populist performance of crisis versus technocratic stability framework, I hypothesize that when debating the EU:

Farage will perform a sense of crisis, while Clegg will perform a sense of stability

Case and Method

During his weekly LBC radio program ‘Call Clegg’ on February 20, 2014, Nick Clegg challenged Nigel Farage to a debate on the topic of “should we be in the European Union?” Farage accepted the following day, and the debate between the two party leaders took place a month later on March 26, 2014. The debate was broadcasted through the LBC airwaves as well as via a live video feed on the LBC website. In terms of the format, the debate was one hour long and consisted of a selected studio audience, equally comprised of supporters of staying in, as well as exiting from, the EU. After a one-minute opening statement, each politician answered pre-screened questions from the audience, after which the other politician had a chance to respond.

The debate was a crucial moment for Nigel Farage, who hoped to represent his party, UKIP, in the 2015 leader debates ahead of the UK national elections the following year. The first televised party leader debates in the UK took place only in previous election cycle of 2010. Clegg is considered to have performed exceptionally well there, inspiring a phenomenon of ‘Cleggmania’ across the UK, marked by increased media attention for the LibDems and a surge in the polls (Washbourne 2013; Rai 2014). Clegg also hoped to repeat his 2010 performance and bolster support ahead of the 2014 European Parliament elections.

In order to operationalize the research question and test my hypotheses, I utilize a primarily qualitative method. First, I transcribe the hour-long debate divided into ten segments, corresponding to the responses to eight questions asked to both politicians and their opening and closing statements. I ignore questions posed to only one politician, as well as one question on gay marriage that was not directly relevant to Britain’s membership in the EU.

To test the hypothesis, I manually code instances where the politicians indicated a sense of crisis as opposed to stability using MAXQDA, a qualitative coding software. The unit of analysis used in the coding was a ‘turn’ in the debate, defined as an uninterrupted segment of discourse until it was interrupted by either the other politician or the moderator. I assigned the crisis code to mentions of systemic breakdown or a perceived threat to the UK. Stability was coded when the politicians spoke about measured progress in relation to the EU.

I also include a measure for audience engagement, coding for when the audience gave applause after a politician’s ‘turn.’ If the audience applauded to a segment of the political performance, we can consider the performer to have successfully achieved a mediation that resonates with the audience’s experience of social and cultural reality.

Results and Discussion

The results of the qualitative coding generally support the hypothesis. Farage linked together a number of perceived failures as symptoms attributed to a “crumbling” and “failed” EU, e.g.: an “open-door” immigration policy to migrants from poor countries, a lack of British representation in global trade negotiations, the “destruction of British liberty and freedom” by adopting European human rights. The following excerpt from his closing statement presents the gist of his this crisis:

“…Is it true that we have a total open-door to 485 million people, many of them from poor countries?...The answer is yes, we have a total open-door and that is the issue that has woken people up. That by being a member of the European Union, we’ve lost the ability to govern our country and control our borders. Now, Nick represents a tired status quo defending a model that maybe forty years ago looked like a good idea but leaves us totally unfit to compete in the 21st century global trade economy…I believe that the best people to govern Britain are the British people themselves.”

Here, Farage clearly links Britain’s EU membership to a crisis of representation and sovereignty (the ability to “govern our country and control our borders,” respectively). His delivery is peppered with populist rhetoric through, for example, appeals to the “British people”, who he aligns himself with through his use of the pronoun ‘we.’ He also blames a “tired status quo” (referring to mainstream politicians) for defending the source of the crisis, namely the EU.

To provide a more in-depth schema of Farage’s performance of crisis across the debate, I have recreated the previously presented model of the discursive construction of crisis according to Farage’s main arguments. The Q’s in parenthesis correspond to which question they pertain to in the debate. It is important to note that all of these segments received applause from the audience, indicated Farage’s performance of crisis resonated well with the audience:

Figure 2: Farage's Discursive Construction of Crisis

The empirical examples on the bottom row are isolated events/statistics that have been selected by Farage and are not necessarily connected. From left to right, the selected events statistic correspond to: the Schengen Agreement, protocol of EU trade negotiations, an instance where a British student was extradited to Greece on a suspected murder charge, and the adoption of the Euro. These events are relatively objective and unrelated instances that, through a process of mediation by Farage, are imbued with (negative) meaning and linked together as symptoms of an overarching crisis of EU membership. Through the attribution of these symptoms to a common cause, i.e. EU membership, these events have been mediated to result in (from left to right): the depression of wages, loss of sovereignty, destruction of British liberty, and the imposition of poverty upon tens of millions in the Mediterranean. This second level of subjective interpretation is a narrative that must be communicated and made salient to the audience, and the supportive applause from the public suggests that Farage successfully performed his version of the crisis.

Nick Clegg, in line with the technocratic political style, did perform a sense of stability by putting forth the narrative that Britain is “richer, stronger, [and] safer” by being a member of the EU. The following excerpt from his opening statement surmises his argument:

“…[I]f we cut ourselves off from Europe, from the countries we trade with more than anyone else, then our hard-won economic recovery will simply be thrown away. [This debate] is also about who we are: a Britain that leads in the world by standing tall in our own European backyard, a Britain prepared to work with other countries on the things we can’t possibly sort out on our own. So don’t let UKIP, or anyone else, put all of that at risk. We’re better in Europe. Richer, stronger, safer. And that’s why I will fight to keep us in…”

Throughout the debate, Clegg usually supported his narrative of stability by citing facts from studies or relaying quotes from authorities (e.g. high-ranking police officers expressing support for the European Arrest Warrant, or heads of global companies claiming the EU makes it easier to create jobs in the UK). This appeal to expertise, even if not his own, is characteristic of the technocratic style. Clegg, like Farage, uses an inclusive form of the pronoun ‘we’; however, he does not directly make an appeal to the British ‘people.’ To get a better sense of Clegg’s performance of stability, I reconstruct it with examples from across the debate:

Figure 3: Clegg's Performance of Stability

Clegg’s performance of stability resonated less with the audience than Farage’s performance of crisis; boxes in grey indicate that these segments did not receive applause from Clegg. The audience showed support for Clegg’s argument for staying in the EU on the basis of saving jobs and retaining clout as being part of the world’s largest economy. However, both the statistic of immigrants leading to company creation, and Clegg’s mediation of that statistic in claiming that immigrants create wealth, failed to garner audience support. Moreover, while the audience did support Clegg’s statistic that 149 murders have been extradited to the UK based as a result of the European Arrest Warrant, they did not applause his mediation of that statistic: namely, that participation the EU makes “our streets safer.”