Julia Peetz

This essay argues that interdisciplinary scholarship on politics and performance underestimates the complexity of social performances, particularly in the realm of politics. By reducing performance to performativity, current scholarship fails to appreciate how the specifically theatrical quality of social and political life affects people’s experience of politics. In moving beyond the designation of politicians’ showmanship as straightforwardly ‘theatrical’, this essay proposes that a more conceptual reading of theatricality illuminates both how political representation works through performance and the urgent and widespread problem of political distrust. Because theatrical situations that occur outside of theatre settings still depend on the highly contingent, tenuous connection of suspended disbelief between a performance and its audience’s reception, it is important to account for the specifically theatrical qualities of social and political performances. It is therefore vital to introduce theatricality as an analytical concept into fields beyond theatre and performance studies.

It is frequently debated whether politicians should be good public performers or whether voters should focus less on presentation and more on the substance of policy proposals. However, missing from these debates, in both theatre studies and political science, is a detailed theorization of the role played by politicians’ public performances in representative democracy. This article responds by excavating representative democracy’s performative core. Taking a historico-theoretical approach that draws on Paul Friedland’s study of theatrical and political representation during the French Revolution as well as performance theory and political theory, I argue for the performativity of democratic legitimacy and its dependence on the interplay of politicians’ public performances and their audiences’ suspension of disbelief. Through its exploration of how performance contributes to the functioning, not merely the embellishment, of representative politics the article draws interdisciplinary connections between performance scholarship and political science. Different figurations of performed legitimacy are explored through a focus on shifting patterns of the performance of the US presidency. The article traces the journey away from an early model based on Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address, which cast the president as the chief explicator of the Constitution, to twentieth- and twenty-first-century styles of presidential performance, which tend to emphasize the President’s independence from other political institutions. This analysis suggests the possibility of a link between performed legitimacy and a broadly populist discourse, thereby offering a provocation on how historically rooted practices might still influence current oratorical and performative styles in the United States.

This case study details my experience of conducting semi-structured elite interviews with presidential speechwriters in the United States for an interdisciplinary research project on politics and performance. The case study explores the rationale behind the choice to conduct interviews and the ways in which the interviews intersected with the study’s theoretical work. Particular attention is paid to the process of recruiting elite interviewees and preparing for elite interviews. I explore the advantages and disadvantages of targeted emailing and chain referral as recruitment techniques and discuss how to get around pre-set narratives elite interviewees might be trying to impart to the interviewer to get more spontaneous, less contrived responses to interview questions. The case also addresses the vexed question of sample size in qualitative interviews. I explore the concept of “theoretical saturation” and discuss how one might judge a corpus of qualitative interviews to be saturated.

This article explores a striking performance of crisis by U.S. President Barack Obama in a speech on gun control delivered at the White House in January 2016. I begin by contextualising the speech within Obama’s presidency and the polarized political landscape of the United States. By performing his own ineffectiveness, I argue, the President shrewdly deployed anti-establishment rhetoric to paint himself as an incorruptible outsider to America’s corrupt political system. Seen in this light, the tears he shed during the speech performatively underscored a range of rhetorical gestures, with which Obama sought to align himself with the American public and against a conspiratorial political culture dominated by lobbyists. The second section engages with Obama’s tears on a more conceptual level, asking whether they can be said to authenticate Obama’s professed emotional investment. I consider the reception of the tears in the American news media alongside questions surrounding the nature of acting, authenticity, staging, and reality in my argument that the tears are unreliable indicators of emotion. As such, they can be said to perform a crisis of authenticity in twenty-first century political discourse, which demands highly polished performances of politicians and seeks to discredit any performance that betrays its staged nature.