Political Performance: A Framework for Analysing Democratic Politics
| Author | Shirin M. Rai |
| Published date | 01 December 2015 |
| Date | 01 December 2015 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.12154 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
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P O L I T I C A L S T U D I E S : 2 0 1 5 V O L 6 3 , 1 1 7 9 – 1 1 9 7
doi: 10.1111/1467-9248.12154
Political Performance: A Framework for
Analysing Democratic Politics
Shirin M. Rai
University of Warwick
This article develops a framework to examine the co-constitutive nature of performance and politics and to suggest
that such a framework is critical to promoting an interdisciplinary approach to understanding our complex political
world. It does this by disaggregating the component parts of political performance and suggesting how, once these
are made visible, we are able to reflect upon more complex processes of its re-aggregation into our analysis of politics.
The framework is constituted along two axes – one that maps individual performance, which is nevertheless socially
embedded; and the other that charts the political effects of performance. The framework allows us to reflect upon
social and political institutions, movements and events and analyse these through the prism of performance and
politics. The empirical core of the article is the Indian parliament.
Keywords: performance; parliament; representation; audience
‘Cleggmania. ... One sure-footed TV performance, and the Lib Dem leader [Nick Clegg]
has transformed the election campaign,’ headlined The Independent in April 2010 (Merrik,
2010). Several things contributed to this performance: he took the time to rehearse his
presentation; he had a clear message – a challenge to a two-party system that is failing the
electorate; he spoke to the audience – both in the room and through television – by calling
people by their first names and by looking directly into the cameras; and his delivery of the
Clegg/Lib Dem package came across as credible – he was seen as ‘sincere’, without political
artifice. His performance built on public cynicism of politicians but went further with
glimpses of a positive alternative (Merrik, 2010). The performance worked; it convinced
his audiences, invoked new audiences and delivered at the ballot box a result that few
would have expected before that first debate. Did Clegg’s performance alone make possible
this seismic shift in British politics? Has the impact been a lasting one? Of course, the
political backdrop to this performance cannot be overlooked, but it did underline the fact
that performance matters in and to politics. Perhaps it is because the role of performance
is so often overlooked in political analysis that the effect of Clegg’s performance surprised
many students of British politics.
I have been studying the importance of ceremony and ritual in parliament, through
which we can trace the circulation of meanings, the particularity of institutional cultures
and the sedimentation of power in political institutions (Rai, 2010). This alerted me to the
importance of performance in and to politics, which can be broadly defined as the
distribution of power, and, specifically, how the changes over time in the social profile of
parliaments1 are reflected in the political performances conducted within them. In this
article I develop a framework for reading political performance in institutional politics – in
this case, the social organisation of governance such as parliaments2 (Lowndes and Roberts,
2013). In this context I define the term ‘political performance’ as those performances that
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seek to communicate to an audience meaning-making related to state institutions, policies
and discourses. This meaning-making is read in very specific socio-political contexts; it can
be either consolidative or challenging of the dominant narratives of politics. The perfor-
mance can be situated inside buildings that host political institutions or in the public spaces
that surround them – the public sphere is then the stage of political performance. The script
of political performance bridges the public and the private; indeed in this way it mobilises
political traction – the rhetoric about the family, care and sexuality, for example, is
routinely brought into focus to make arguments about citizenship, the welfare state and
political rights. To be effective, meaning-making has to be seen to be, in J. L. Austin’s
(1975) words, ‘felicitous’. Its legitimacy rests on a convincing performance; it has to be
representative of a particular political stand; it must engage the audience that is its particular
target; it should satisfy the formal rules, rituals and conventions of the institutions through
which the meaning is being projected; and be received as logical and coherent. Because
much of this performance can be challenged by disruption of the performance itself
through counter-performance, mis-recognition or mis-reading of and by the audience,
political performance is inherently unstable and vulnerable to being seen as illegitimate.
Thus, I am also interested in moments of performance when something that ought not to
have been felicitous in the ‘normal’ course of politics becomes so and emerges in the form
of a change in the grammar of performance. Political performance is critical to our reading
of politics itself.
However, in order to read a political performance we need to understand its component
parts as well as the whole performance and its effects. In this article I develop a political
performance framework (PPF), which I suggest can be usefully employed to study political
processes and institutions such that the separation between the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ of
politics is bridged and is always seen as imbricated and co-constitutive. I illustrate this by
reading some moments/events/spaces through the lens of the framework I present. The
case selection of empirical material presented here makes no claim for representativeness;
rather, I share these examples of performance in the Indian parliament as readings that have
provoked me to reflect upon performance of and in institutional politics.
It is useful to hold parliament as the object of study in developing this framework
because it is the institutional space where the performance of representation – a concept
at the heart of any democratic system – goes on in symbolic and literal ways. In democratic
systems, members of parliament not only represent citizens, they also claim collectively to
mirror the society and nation at large. They not only make laws and hold the executive
accountable, but they also make a ‘representative claim’ (Saward, 2006) to represent
different constituencies, identity groups and interests. If this claim is seen as valid – through
the shaping of parliamentary membership by regular, free and fair elections, for example –
then the parliament, and indeed the country, is seen to be democratic; if the representa-
tiveness of parliament is disputed, it can result in apathy and cynicism. Issues of identity,
representativeness, legitimacy and authenticity are important here. While there is a rich
literature in the field of political science on democratic representation and claim-making
(Norval, 2000; Pitkin, 1967; Saward, 2010), very little work has been done on how these
representative claims are made and what makes them legitimate – and even this is largely
spun off from institutional practices and norms. Overlooking the processes through which
© 2014 The Author. Political Studies © 2014 Political Studies Association
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democratic practice takes shape is a serious limitation to our understanding of represen-
tative politics; it is a gap in democratic theory that this article will attempt to fill.
We become aware of representative politics through the mode of performance3 in
which individuals and institutions (actors) make claims to represent and affect their
audience (the represented). Claims of representativeness are complex to make, to stabilise
and to have accepted generally. Unlike factual claims – say, for example, ‘I am a British
citizen; I have a British passport’ – a claim to ‘Britishness’ is a claim that encapsulates a
particular understanding of identity politics, political history, a social positioning that is
recognisably inscribed in the public imaginary and a relational matrix which might place
‘the British’ in contrast to ‘the Other’. When Judith Butler (1990; emphasis in original)
famously invoked Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that, ‘one is not born, but, rather, becomes
a woman’, and argued that ‘[i]n this sense, gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of
agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in
time – an identity instituted through a stylized repetition of acts’, she suggested that gendered
power reproduces itself through repeated acts (rituals) that have an affective resonance,
thereby normalising particular gender orders.
Butler’s framing of the reproduction of power relations through the concept of
performativity while critical, does not in itself allow us to deconstruct the performances
that make for the stylised repetitions. Nor does it allow us to analyse why and how some
performances mark a rupture in the everyday reproduction of social relations. This article
focuses on the ‘performance’ rather than the ‘performativity’ (although the two are
co-constitutive) of everyday politics in institutions such as parliament. It argues that these
performances – even when policy-driven – reflect, resist and refurbish existing and shifting
power...
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