Kings, jesters, or kingmakers? European populist parties as a microcosm for celebrity politics
| Date | 01 August 2019 |
| Published date | 01 August 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1369148119844494 |
| Author | Gianfranco Baldini,Matteo Giglioli |
| Subject Matter | Original Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148119844494
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2019, Vol. 21(3) 576 –593
© The Author(s) 2019
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DOI: 10.1177/1369148119844494
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Kings, jesters, or kingmakers?
European populist parties
as a microcosm for celebrity
politics
Matteo Giglioli and Gianfranco Baldini
Abstract
The article explores a key aspect in the development of contemporary European populist parties:
the celebrity dynamics of their leadership. It presents a systematic comparison of leaders from
the main populist parties, exploring the correlation between leadership visibility, fame, and the
ideological and organisational characteristics of parties. Furthermore, it investigates the subset of
leaders whose public notoriety predates their political involvement, with a view to establishing
how they balance the demands of political responsibility and authenticity of character, both in
terms of organisational control and communicative strategy. Analytically, the study helps illuminate
the mechanisms through which populist parties adapt to participation in the political game while
continuing to mark their ideological difference. Empirically, the findings highlight the uniqueness
of an outlier case, Beppe Grillo’s leadership of Italy’s Five-Star Movement, in which celebrity is
leveraged into a kingmaker role, while still retaining the public persona of an outside observer.
Keywords
charisma, personalisation, political communication, political parties, populism, social capital
Introduction
Contemporary politics in Europe has seen a pronounced shift in the direction of personali-
sation, a dynamic that implies the use of communication strategies and public personas
typically associated with celebrities and the star system. At the same time, the ‘populist
wave’ is perhaps the largest change in macro equilibria in European politics in a genera-
tion. It is often argued that there is some form of ‘elective affinity’ between various dif-
ferent aspects of personalised and celebritised politics on one hand, and populist leaders
on the other (Waisboard, 2018). We take such affinities as a starting point for a systematic
analysis of populist leaders, in order to show how those among them who exhibit
Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
Corresponding author:
Matteo Giglioli, Department of Social and Political Sciences, University of Bologna, 40125 Bologna, Italy.
Email: matteo.giglioli3@unibo.it
844494BPI0010.1177/1369148119844494The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsGiglioli and Baldini
research-article2019
Original Article
An early version of this project was presented at the 4th Prague Populism Conference ‘Current Populism in
Europe: Culture, History, Identity’ on 22 May 2018. In writing this article, Baldini contributed the first and last
section and the Grillo case study; the second section was written jointly, and Giglioli provided the rest. The
authors share joint responsibility for all parts of this work.
Giglioli and Baldini 577
celebrity traits differ from their professional-politician brethren. In this way, we use popu-
list parties as a microcosm in order to learn more about celebrity politics more broadly.
Our argument is intended as a contribution in an ongoing conversation hosted by The
British Journal of Politics and International Relations (Street, 2004, 2012; Wheeler, 2012;
Wood et al., 2016) on typologies of celebrity politicians and their role within changing politi-
cal systems. Our specific contribution to this debate lies in showing the relationship between
celebrity dynamics and the more traditional variables of ideological and organisational anal-
ysis of political parties. Indeed, we believe that, in order to move our understanding of these
political phenomena forward, it is necessary to place the literature on celebrity politics in
communication with scholarship on the rise of populism and political personalisation.
The rise of populist forces is a key development in contemporary European politics
(Mudde, 2004; Albertazzi and McDonnell, 2008). The literature on populism is divided
on how to categorise its object of study. Some see populism as a type of behaviour avail-
able potentially to all politicians in varying degrees based on circumstances, the audi-
ence, and the communication medium. Others (Rooduijn, 2018; Van Kessel, 2015) see
populism as a question of kind, which at least in principle clearly separates populist and
non-populist political forces, and provides a ‘family resemblance’ among all populists,
in spite of their differences. For the purposes of this study, we adopt the latter approach,
which allows us to isolate a group of cases of recognisably populist leaders within which
we can observe the operation of celebrity dynamics.
Of course, political celebrity is nothing new: at least since the presidency of John F.
Kennedy, explicit parallels have been drawn between the appeal of political leaders and
the functioning of the entertainment star system; the theme of charisma in politics has
even deeper historical roots in democratic politics (Michael et al., 2015). However, the
past two decades have seen a qualitative leap in the prominence of such attributes
(Lawrence and Boydstun, 2017: 47–49): personal visibility is now a necessity for all
political careers. Leaders seek new, non-technical forms of expression to address their
constituents, new media systems reward innovative communication techniques, new per-
sonal parties are born, and traditional parties tend to highlight the figure of their leader
over collective decision-making. Individuals who prove adept at this new style of politics
reap significant rewards. The present article aims to study the intersection of these two
phenomena, populism and personalisation, by analysing how the leaders of populist par-
ties harness the power of personalised politics for political advantage. In particular, we
focus on a subgroup of such leaders, who epitomise this new politics by being able to
claim a distance, a separation from traditional political life, an outsider persona.
Methodologically, our study follows a mixed-methods approach, analysing quantita-
tive data on a set of European populist parties and leaders (n = 66), which we then com-
plement with three case studies, two of them (Andrej Babiš of the Czech Republic and
Frank Stronach of Austria) representative of the main types of outsider leadership and one
(Beppe Grillo of Italy), a very specific and unique outlier, in terms both of organisational/
leadership model and of party ideology. With these means, we seek to find empirical cor-
roboration (within the subset of European populism) for hypotheses originally formulated
by ’t Hart and Tindall (2009) with regard to celebrity politicians in general: specifically,
linking the rise of celebrities in politics with public disaffection and predicting a shorter
length of their tenure at the helm of their parties compared to professional politicians.
Our main findings are that, within the typology of populist leadership we develop,
celebrities tend to cluster in certain types rather than in others, in ways that distinguish
them from professional politicians. We find empirical corroboration for ’t Hart and
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