‘Saying it like it is’: Right-wing populism, international politics, and the performance of authenticity
| Author | Corina Lacatus,Gustav Meibauer |
| Published date | 01 August 2022 |
| Date | 01 August 2022 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13691481221089137 |
https://doi.org/10.1177/13691481221089137
The British Journal of Politics and
International Relations
2022, Vol. 24(3) 437 –457
© The Author(s) 2022
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DOI: 10.1177/13691481221089137
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‘Saying it like it is’:
Right-wing populism,
international politics, and the
performance of authenticity
Corina Lacatus1* and Gustav Meibauer2*
Abstract
Populist leaders base their electoral appeal on underlying their agenda with claims to authenticity
reflected both in the content and in the style of their political communication. Based on a
conceptualisation of authenticity as discursive performance, we conduct a comparative analysis
of the authenticity claims of two right-wing populist leaders, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump.
We focus on authenticity claims associated with international politics. International issues are
central to populist exclusionary narratives, but also difficult for populist incumbents to narrate
authentically. We find that despite differences in their public personas, Johnson and Trump show
considerable similarities in both content and style of their authenticity performances. In particular,
they ‘domesticate’ international politics to reinforce domestic issues assumed closer to ‘ordinary’
voters, all the while employing rhetorical styles suggestive of their authenticity. These findings
highlight the centrality of authenticity performances to populist politics and electoral appeal.
Keywords
authenticity, Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, international relations, political communication,
political rhetoric, populism, Twitter
Introduction
The electoral success of populist leaders has challenged international order because it threat-
ened to break with decades of post-war tradition in foreign policy. Right-wing populist agen-
das on both sides of the Atlantic have challenged core values of liberal internationalism
– alliances, multilateralism, international law, and trade agreements, and democratic norms
like human rights (Destradi and Plagemann, 2019; Ikenberry, 2017; Voeten, 2020). Populists
are electorally appealing because they are perceived as authentic. Their authenticity relates
1Queen Mary University of London, School of Politics and International Relations London, UK
2Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
*Both authors contributed equally to this work.
Corresponding author:
Gustav Meibauer, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Department of Political Science, Heyendaalseweg 141 6525
AJ Nijmegen, The Netherlands.
Email: gustav.meibauer@ru.nl
1089137BPI0010.1177/13691481221089137The British Journal of Politics and International RelationsLacatus and Meibauer
research-article2022
Special Issue Article
438 The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 24(3)
both to their political ideas and to their rhetorical style: they ‘say it like it is’. Despite much
definitional divergence, most scholars agree that populism rests on the distinction between
two antagonistic groups – the ‘pure people’ and the ‘corrupt elite’ – and associated demands
that politics operate exclusively as an expression of the former’s interests and will (Mudde,
2004). This ‘thin’ ideational commitment is ‘performed, embodied and enacted’ in different
contexts, including through language (Moffitt, 2016: 3). Accordingly, we focus on populism
as a combination of ideas and rhetorical style to argue that central to populist political com-
munication is the discursive performance of authenticity.
Authenticity has recently attracted scholarly attention precisely because of its linkage
to populism (Bossetta, 2017; Enli, 2017; Enli and Rosenberg, 2018; Pillow et al., 2018;
Stiers et al., 2019; Wood et al., 2016). We understand authenticity as a social construct
‘created and negotiated in different communication processes among politicians, the
media, and the audience’ that refers to the degree a leader is perceived to be ‘true to them-
selves’ (Luebke, 2020: 2; Montgomery, 2017; Pillow et al., 2018). We suggest that perfor-
mances of authenticity are central both to the ideational content and style of populist
political rhetoric (Layoff, 2017; Montgomery, 2017; Stiers et al., 2019; Valgarðsson et al.,
2020). At the core of populism is the populist’s alleged connection and proximity to the
‘authentic’ people, which they claim to represent against the ‘fake’ elite. Correspondingly,
any political problem or challenge is translatable to a consistent political idea at the core
of their populist agenda and familiar to voters. While populists can employ different
styles (McDonnell and Ondelli, 2020), populist rhetoric often aims at ‘speaking like the
people’ (Bischof and Senninger, 2018; Moffitt and Tormey, 2014). Together, populist
ideas and rhetorical style aim at presenting a worldview expressing common-sensical
knowledge (Holland and Fermor, 2020).
In the following, we compare two political leaders, Boris Johnson and Donald Trump,
and carry out a qualitative content analysis of their Twitter communication prior to elec-
tions (November–December 2019 for Johnson; October–November 2020 for Trump).
The comparative angle allows us to study cross-country variation in authenticity perfor-
mances of populist incumbents on the right of the political spectrum. Drawing on recent
scholarship on populism and political authenticity, we explore how these leaders com-
municate authentically about international politics. To that end, we propose an operation-
alisation of political authenticity based on variation along four categories of political
communication: consistency, intimacy, ordinariness, and immediacy.
We focus on international politics and foreign policy for three main reasons. One,
existing research has focused predominantly on the content and style of populist dis-
courses and on populist communication about domestic political issues. Two, this is sur-
prising because international political issues are closely connected to populist discourses,
and often constitutive of their electoral success (Verbeek and Zaslove, 2017). Concurrently,
their complexity can render authentic communication about them difficult (Meibauer,
2021: 18). Three, populist incumbents in particular face a gap between voters’ expecta-
tions of what their ‘anti-political’ approach can deliver and what the messy business of
foreign policy actually produces (Flinders and Kelso, 2011). Given their experience in
office, they have an even harder time portraying themselves as outsiders. For the populist
incumbent seeking to perform authenticity, this compounds a strategic problem: how to
‘play the game’ competently and conduct foreign affairs successfully (‘statesperson-
like’), and still be perceived as ‘just like’ (or at least clearly on the side of) their voters.
Because authenticity performances are so central to populist communication, this may
have international politics effects once populists are in office, for example, regarding
personalisation (Destradi and Plagemann, 2019; Jenne, 2021; Schneiker, 2020).
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