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
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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
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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
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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
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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:
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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.”
Overall, Nigel Farage received 13 instances of applause to Clegg’s 7. This suggests, given that the audience
was carefully selected to be evenly position on the In and Out sides of the debate, that Farage’s
performance of crisis was more successful than Clegg’s performance of stability. The audience’s sentiment
is echoed by a snap poll conducted by YouGov after the debate that gave Farage the win by a margin of
57% to 36%.
Interestingly, Clegg’s performance of stability regarding Britain’s membership in the EU was accompanied
by his own crisis narrative: what would happen if UKIP got its way and Britain left the EU. In relation to
Figure 3, Clegg also mediated his empirical examples by arguing that if Britain left the EU, the “NHS would
collapse overnight” without immigrants paying taxes, jobs tied to foreign investment would be lost,
Britain’s clout would shrink in global trade negotiations, and streets would be less safe without the
European Arrest Warrant. This counter crisis narrative to Farage’s suggests that what we may be
witnessing is a new form of political engagement with populist parties by technocrats. That is, the
performance of stability alone may not be sufficient in countering the rising success of populist parties.
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As the cases of Belgium and Sweden show, refusal to cooperate with far-right populist parties like Vlaams
Blok and the Sweden Democrats has only improved their numbers in the polls. Representatives of
traditional mainstream parties, i.e. technocrats, may be driven to discursively construct and perform crisis
scenarios that revolve around if populist parties were to have their way. As populist parties increasingly
play the role of kingmaker in influencing the public debate, perhaps the best way to counter their rise is to
construct a crisis narrative around what would happen if the policies they advocated were to actually
happen.
Conclusion
This study of the first Europe In/Out debate set out to test whether Nigel Farage performed a sense of
crisis, a key feature of the populist political style. Indeed, the evidence suggests that he did, and his
message resonated with both the studio audience and the British public. Nick Clegg, while performing the
stability typically associated with the technocratic political style, also performed a sense of crisis around if
Britain were to leave the EU. His message was less effective, garnering applause half the instances of
Farage and generally perceived to have lost the debate. The study demonstrates that the performance of
crisis is an effective strategy in political debate. Furthermore, it suggests that one way to counter the rise of
populism is for mainstream politicians to focus less on defending the status quo, and more on constructing
crisis narratives around what would happen if populists came to true power.
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