Abstract
This article offers new ways of conceptualising style in right wing populist communicative performances, by foregrounding a structured and conceptually informed use of “style” that moves beyond the descriptive sense routinely employed in political communication. Specifically, it explores how a discourse-analytic approach to mediated populist discourse can inform and advance the current understanding of populist ‘style’ by analysing some contextually produced linguistic and discursive choices in populist rhetorical repertoires—i.e., the communicative strategies that are deployed in mediated contexts for right-wing populist political communication. Taking three illustrative examples of right wing populist party performances on TV news and current affairs broadcasts in Greece (GD), France (FN) and the UK (UKIP), the speakers’ use of a range of rhetorical devices is examined using models from socio-linguistics and discourse analysis: aspects of register shifts by GD in blame attribution speeches, interactional ‘bad manners’ in a French political debate, and Nigel Farage speaking ‘candidly’ in three different contexts of news reporting from the UK. In taking such a qualitative approach, it is argued that populist style cannot be defined in terms of one single feature, or set of features, common to all right wing populists and transferrable from one socio-cultural context to another, but more usefully as a set of motivated choices among alternative semiotic resources (linguistic/discursive, interactional and visual), which have social and cultural resonance. This focus on micro-level features of mediated interaction thus offers a more fine-grained understanding of style than is currently the case, as it shows how right-wing populist politicians’ performative styles are situated within specific (here European) socio-cultural and political communicative contexts; in this study, this is to say, the various television broadcasts in which they occur.
Highlights
This article offers new ways of conceptualising style in right wing populist communicative performances, by foregrounding a structured and conceptually informed use of “style” that moves beyond the descriptive sense routinely employed in political communication
The consideration of style and performance as phenomena that can be analysed through the lens of sociolinguistics and discourse analysis as a key to understanding identity construction, is more recent, and in this paper we examine some aspects of contemporary right wing populist style using theory and methods developed within this field
In the week before the second round of voting in the French presidential elections 2017, the two final candidates were interviewed separately by David Pujadas on France 2. When asked why he had chosen the same media video footage as his opponent Marine Le Pen to symbolise his campaign for that interview, Emmanuel Macron said that this event “was important from a political point of view because it showed the difference in our styles and the two different ways that we relate to French people and in particular to workers.”
Summary
This article offers new ways of conceptualising style in right wing populist communicative performances, by foregrounding a structured and conceptually informed use of “style” that moves beyond the descriptive sense routinely employed in political communication. Taking three illustrative examples of right wing populist party performances on TV news and current affairs broadcasts in Greece (GD), France (FN) and the UK (UKIP), the speakers’ use of a range of rhetorical devices is examined using models from socio-linguistics and discourse analysis: aspects of register shifts by GD in blame attribution speeches, interactional ‘bad manners’ in a French political debate, and Nigel Farage speaking ‘candidly’ in three different contexts of news reporting from the UK In taking such a qualitative approach, it is argued that populist style cannot be defined in terms of one single feature, or set of features, common to all right wing populists and transferrable from one socio-cultural context to another, but more usefully as a set of motivated choices among alternative semiotic resources (linguistic/discursive, interactional and visual), which have social and cultural resonance. It is through such differences, and in breaking the norms and conventions of public communication, that the ‘non-establishment’ is being performed
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