Populist Leadership: The Superhero Donald Trump as Savior in Times of Crisis
| DOI | 10.1177/0032321720916604 |
| Date | 01 November 2020 |
| Published date | 01 November 2020 |
| Author | Andrea Schneiker |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0032321720916604
Political Studies
2020, Vol. 68(4) 857 –874
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0032321720916604
journals.sagepub.com/home/psx
Populist Leadership: The
Superhero Donald Trump as
Savior in Times of Crisis
Andrea Schneiker
Abstract
The current debate on populism is mainly concerned with populist parties and movements. Less is
written about populist leadership. Yet, political scientists need to pay more attention to populist
leadership, especially in order to understand how populism functions in the absence of a populist
party. In situations in which a political leader adopts a populist way of exercising political power
without the backing of what is considered a populist party, populism is often reduced to a particular
style of acting and speaking of that particular politician. By formulating a theory-based concept of
political leadership based on the literature of celebrity politicians—the superhero—I show that
populist leadership is not limited to a particular style, but also allows to explain particular policy
choices. The concept of the superhero goes beyond that of charismatic leadership, because it
explains how the leader’s exceptionality is performed and how this performance can be analyzed.
Keywords
populism, leadership, celebrity politicians, Donald Trump
Accepted: 12 March 2020
Introduction
In the current burgeoning wave of literature on populism, the discussion focuses much
more on populist parties and movements than on populist leadership. However, more
attention needs to be paid to the latter in order to assess the populist quality of situations
in which political leaders are not backed by what is considered a populist party (Weyland,
2001). In such cases, there might seem to be a gap between the populist style of a politi-
cian and the politics enacted, which may not easily be placed into one populist camp or
another or may not even be considered populist at all. Here, I formulate a theory-based
concept of populist leadership that allows this seeming mismatch between style and con-
tent to be reconciled: that of the populist superhero as a savior in times of crisis.
Department of Social Sciences, University of Siegen, Siegen, Germany
Corresponding author:
Andrea Schneiker, Department of Social Sciences, University of Siegen, Adolf-Reichwein-Str. 2, 57068 Siegen,
Germany.
Email: schneiker@sozialwissenschaften.uni-siegen.de
916604PSX0010.1177/0032321720916604Political StudiesSchneiker
research-article2020
Article
858 Political Studies 68(4)
Authors concerned with populist leadership generally start from the assumption that
populism, in addition to being anti-elitist and anti-pluralist (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser,
2017: 5–16; Müller, 2017a: 2–3), is “a specific way of competing for and exercising
political power” (Weyland, 2001: 11). According to Moffitt, “populism’s reliance on new
media technologies, its relationship to shifting modes of political representation and iden-
tification, and its increased ubiquity have seen the phenomenon transform in nuanced
ways” (Moffitt, 2016: 3), and he suggests to conceive of populism “as a political style that
is performed, embodied and enacted across a variety of political and cultural contexts”
(Moffitt, 2016: 3; emphasis in original). Based thereon, in addition to a particular dis-
course, a leader’s performance and the particular relationship between the leader and her
support base are considered the central elements of populism (Moffitt, 2016: 83–87; see
also Weyland, 2001: 12). Casullo, for example, argues that repertoires (defined as
“socially shared discursive templates”) act as “possible paths to leadership” in that they
“determine legitimate or accepted ways for populist leaders to act, talk, dress” (Casullo,
2019: 56). Yet, the literature on populist leadership does not tell us where to find relevant
repertoires. Acknowledging the importance of performance for populist leadership, I,
therefore, turn to the literature on political branding of politicians—and specifically to the
literature on celebrity politicians—because it discusses relevant repertoires of action (Van
Zoonen, 2005; Wood et al., 2016). Celebrity, like populism, “is a potentially important
phenomenon that politicians can use to connect better with a disaffected public” (Wood
et al., 2016: 582, referring to Street, 2004). Based on studies of celebrity politicians, I
formulate a new type of populist leadership—the populist superhero—and show that such
a conceptualization allows us to understand not only the tone but also the substance of
populist leaders’ policies. From this perspective, the ideational flexibility of populist
leaders is neither discretionary nor solely the result of the constraints of the political sys-
tem, but instead follows a pattern.
The populist superhero has some commonalities with the ideal type of the charismatic
leader as it was originally formulated by Max Weber (1947). The concept of charismatic
leadership relies on “exceptional [. . .] qualities” of the leader (Weber, 1947: 358) who
needs to have some objective success as proof of her exceptionality and to be recognized
as exceptional by her followers (Weber 1947). In addition, some argue that “a situation of
crisis” (Trice and Beyer, 1991: 151) is needed for a leader to be considered charismatic
because ordinary situations do not require exceptional qualities of a leader. The populist
superhero “is a version of charismatic leadership for the 21st century”1 that relies on social
media and on techniques from entertainment. Populist leaders can “be superb masters of
political showmanship, whose theatrics provide welcome entertainment to a voting public
often bored by conventional politics” (Heinisch, 2003: 95). In this sense, the populist
superhero fits Moffitt’s understanding of populism as “a performative political style”
whereby “the leader is seen as the performer, ‘the people’ as the audience, and crisis and
media as the stage on which populism plays out upon” (Moffitt, 2016: 5, emphasis in
original). The present analysis thereby goes beyond Weber’s concept of charismatic lead-
ership by specifically explaining how the situation of crisis and the leader’s exceptional-
ity are performed and how these performances can be analyzed.
Donald Trump is a case in point. Whereas “we can hardly call the Republican Party a
populist radical right party” (Fenger, 2018: 193), Trump’s presidential campaign was
widely considered to be populist (Nai and Maier, 2018; Oliver and Rahn, 2016; White,
2016) and candidate Trump to be “the populist par excellence” (Oliver and Rahn, 2016:
189). But the assessment of his presidency is more ambiguous. On the one hand, his
To continue reading
Request your trial