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 Britains 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 Britains 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 Britains 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 ofpopulist 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 Hays model, illustrates this process:

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

In Hays study, the discursive construction of crisis was made salient to the public through the medias 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 Moffitts 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 Britains 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 politicians 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 audiences 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