Performing the People: The Specificity of Populist Representative Claims

In spite of the controversial debates surrounding the nature of the concept, the literature in political theory has reached a consensus on two defining features: a focus on the people and an opposition to the elite. However, the role of a political leader in populism remains a debated topic, between those who argue that populism needs the mediation of a leader to take shape and those who claim that such intervention is not necessary. Adopting the tools of the discursive-performative approach to populism, this article will make the case for the role of political leaders as central locus for populist performances of identity. In order to do so, this paper will discuss the links between performing the people and issues of political representation, using in particular the concept of "representative claim" (Saward 2010). Instead of seeing representation in democratic politics as a static phenomenon granted on specific occasions (Pitkins 1967), Saward’s argument is that representation is a performative act, a claim made by a person or a group of people to represent others. Understood in this way, populism relies on a specific claim to represent a contextually defined people (whether at the national level, or beyond) conducted by an individual who will within their own performances embody the opposition between people and elite. Since there is no pre-existing ‘people’ or ‘elite’ before they are discursively articulated, populist representative claims are thus a crucial locus for performativity. Using the concept of synecdochal representation (Casullo 2021), this article will demonstrate the difficult balancing act between performing ordinariness and extraordinariness and the importance of representation within the populist repertoire.