While populism has received much attention in the academic literature over the past decade, scholars have tended to address nationally-bounded cases of populism, and in doing so, implicitly relied on static notions of political representation in their analyses. However, recent empirical developments point to the development of ‘transnational populism’, where claims on behalf of ‘the people’ move beyond national boundaries. Such developments require a rethinking of how representation is conceptualised within contemporary populism.
This paper argues that the ‘constructivist turn’ within political representation offers the most promising avenue for understanding these shifts. Drawing on the work of Saward and Disch, it identifies the dynamics between performers, audiences and constituencies in transnational claims to speak for ‘the people’, and applies this work to empirical examples of transnational populism. In doing so, it shows that the constructivist turn opens up new questions around popular sovereignty and representation for empirical work on populism.
