Populism 2.0, New Media and the False Allure of ‘Unmediated’ Representation

While the early 2000s were characterized by a cyber-utopianism that viewed the internet as promising openness, progress and new forms of connection for citizens and their representatives, fifteen years later it seems that those politicians who have benefitted most from the rise of social networks, the viral circulation of memes and other forms of online political communication have been those who are explicitly against openness and progress – namely racists, neo-Nazis, trolls, the ‘alt-right’ and right-wing populists. This paper examines the latter group, specifically focusing on how populist actors have utilized new media in order to present themselves as ‘directly’ in touch with ‘the people’. Combining traditional repertoires of representative claims together with those that seek to obfuscate the representative relationship between ‘the people’ and the leader at play within populism, this has allowed populists to present themselves as somehow ‘escaping’ the problems associated with the ‘crisis of representation’ in contemporary democracy. This paper examines these novel forms of political representation by drawing on the theoretical work associated with the ‘constructivist turn’ in political representation, and empirically draws on recent successful cases associated with ‘populism 2.0’, from the rise of Donald Trump to the success of Beppe Grillo’s 5 Stelle MoVimento, to illustrate its claims.