Charting the populist style: Trump, Le Pen and the populist repertoire of exclusionary nationalism

This thesis engages with the concept of populism through an interdisciplinary framework combining politics and performance studies. Exploring the tension between form and substance, it interrogates the intersection between populism and exclusionary nationalism by developing a comparative case study analysing the 2016 and 2017 presidential campaigns of Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen. The thesis begins by tracing the origins and most widespread uses of populism in the literature. Placing itself in the lineage of the discursive approach inspired by the work of Laclau, it however departs from the notion of discourse by emphasising the performative dimension of populism as a way of doing politics. Adapting an approach developed by Moffitt, this work conceptualises populism as a political style, embracing the interdisciplinary inputs of performance studies both theoretically and methodologically. Theoretically, it defines populism as a repertoire of performances comprising three performative clusters: performances of identity, transgression, and crisis. Methodologically, it adopts a combination of deductive and inductive methods to engage with a corpus of curated political performances from each campaign. In addition to critical thematic analysis, it uses an original questionnaire to conduct a performance analysis of the corpus. The thesis then successively explores the three clusters of the populist style. Considering performances of identity, it looks at the way Trump and Le Pen performed the people, the elite and themselves as leaders. Using the concept of transgression, it engages with the way the two political actors disrupted interactional, rhetoric and theatrical norms. Finally, it examines the crisis narratives developed in their campaigns by distinguishing their nativist and anti-establishment components. After a summary of the comparative differences between Trump and Le Pen, the thesis concludes by highlighting the relevance of style in politics and the importance of engaging with populism critically and contextually