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Populist Communication and Foreign Policy in a Competitive Authoritarian Context
Abstract
The connection between populism and foreign policy has received a lot of scholarly attention in recent years. Nevertheless, the nature and impact of populist discourse in an African setting is understudied. This chapter aims to expand our knowledge of populist communication and foreign policy in a competitive authoritarian context, offering an analysis of two Ugandan politicians—Bobi Wine and Yoweri Museveni—and their communication on Twitter before the January 2021 election. The analysis finds that, when it comes to their position on foreign policy, the two candidates use strategic electoral communication to position themselves in relation to the West, signalling a commitment to a strong linkage with the West and democratisation in the event of electoral victory. Museveni, the long-standing incumbent, uses populist tropes that brought him past political success to reinforce his regime, highlighting his government’s well-established linkage to Western donors and experienced conduct of a successful foreign policy based on foreign aid and economic development. Counter-candidate Wine is a contemporary populist who strongly opposes the decades-long regime, critiquing the Western support for Museveni’s presidency. By the same token, Wine promises a corruption-free linkage with the West and a truthful commitment to democratisation, if successfully elected.
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Who speaks for ‘the people’? Populists across the globe have mobilised this question to attack liberal institutions, political opponents, and the democratic process itself, communicating a political reality in which globalist elites have allegedly betrayed the sovereign will of the popular community. The recent ‘surge’ (Mudde, 2016) or ‘wave’ (Aslanidis, 2016) of populism around the world has encompassed electorally successful right-wing populist leaders in the Northern Hemisphere such as Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Jaroslav Kaczynski, Recyp Erdogan, and Victor Orbán, who have advanced nationalist, exclusionary, protectionist and Eurosceptic political agendas. In parallel, left-wing populists in Greece, Spain and Bolivia have attracted voters disillusioned with neoliberal economic policies and existing representational mechanisms of liberal democracy with anti-elitist and anti-globalist platforms. In the Southern Hemisphere, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro and Yoweri Museveni are oft-cited examples of contemporary populist leaders who have enjoyed continued electoral success with agendas promoting ethnocultural and religious-Nationalist slogans in post-colonial contexts. Prior analyses of these populists’ electoral success and political leadership have usually focused on the ideas, ideologies and strategies populism encompasses, especially in the domestic political arena.
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.
Much like his candidacy, Donald Trump’s presidency has been described as populist par excellence and as fundamentally breaking with the liberal internationalist tradition of American foreign policy. Despite a growing interest in populism and the role it has played in shaping Donald Trump’s appeal to the public at election time in 2016, we lack an understanding of how populist rhetoric after his electoral victory shaped his approach to foreign policy. This article proposes a study of President Trump’s official campaign communication through rally speeches and Twitter during the 2 months prior to the mid-term election in November 2018 as well as tweets published in the official personal account @realDonaldTrump from September to November 2018. The analysis finds that resurgent Jacksonian populism promoted by the Tea Party shapes President Trump’s approach to foreign policy. Fundamentally anti-elitist, Trump’s populism opposes migration, multilateralism, and is deeply sceptical of the United States’ capacity to support a liberal global order that he perceives as detrimental to the economic interest of the American people. In addition, the analysis finds inconsistencies between his campaign discourse of non-intervention in military conflicts abroad and his foreign policy action.
This introduction presents the special issue’s conceptual and empirical starting points and situates the special issue’s intended contributions. It does so by reviewing extant scholarship on electoral rhetoric and foreign policy and by teasing out several possible linkages between elections, rhetoric and foreign policy. It also discusses how each contribution to the special issue seeks to illuminate causal mechanisms at work in these linkages. Finally, it posits that these linkages are crucial to examining the changes brought about by Trump’s election and his foreign policy rhetoric.
As populists have formed governments all over the world, it becomes imperative to study the consequences of the rise of populism for International Relations. Yet, systematic academic analyses of the international impact of populist government formation are still missing, and political commentators tend to draw conclusions from few cases of right-wing populism in the Global North. But populism – conceptualised as a ‘thin’ ideology based on anti-elitism and anti-pluralism – takes different shapes across world regions as populists combine it with different ‘thick’ ideologies. To reflect such diversity and gain more systematic insights into the global implications of populism, we focus on cases of populist government formation in the Global South. We find that populists in power are not, per se, more belligerent or less willing to engage globally than their non-populist predecessors. Factors like status seeking or a country's embeddedness in international institutions mitigate the impact of populism. Its most immediate effect concerns procedural aspects: foreign policymaking becomes more centralised and personalised – yet, not entirely unpredictable, given the importance of ‘thick’ ideologies espoused by populist parties and leaders. Rather than changing course entirely, populists in power reinforce existing trends, especially a tendency towards diversifying international partnerships.
Current understandings of regime survival in Uganda tend to over-emphasise the role of ‘semi-authoritarian’ and ‘neopatrimonial’ politics and neglect the extent to which the regime deploys alternative strategies of political rule that also involve ‘soft’ forms of power and formal elements of state-building. The regime’s extensive deployment of ‘soft’ power includes President Museveni’s responsiveness to popular concerns and fears and the careful management of political rivals. Meanwhile, certain pockets of bureaucratic effectiveness have played an important role in securing legitimacy amongst both the voters and international actors who help maintain the regime in power. Viewed in comparison to previous elections in Uganda, the 2016 presidential poll revealed the regime’s ability to achieve a balance between the extensive deployment of both hard and soft forms of power and of both formal and informal strategies of rule. However, whilst this capacity to manage ‘institutional multiplicity’ has underpinned the regime’s success in maintaining itself in power for over three decades, a closer understanding of how this balancing act is achieved helps expose the increasingly contradictory logics of regime survival, democratisation and state-building in Uganda.
The fundamental question uniting the contributions to this volume is: what exactly is populism? This is certainly not a new question, as a large amount of literature has focused on this topic for more than half a century. As little conceptual consensus has been reached so far, this book aims to reduce the level of abstraction. To this end, it approaches the populist phenomenon from a broader theoretical and empirical perspective, making reference to its developments on several continents. The book is divided into two parts: the first is theoretical and discusses various perspectives on populism, while the second is empirical and emphasises the diversity of the forms populism has embraced throughout the world. Without aiming to solve old dilemmas, to cover all the existing forms of populism, or to outline unequivocal conclusions, the contributions to this book fulfill a twofold task. On the one hand, they help to clarify theoretically a concept that is difficult to grasp and use. On the other hand, by way of reflecting these difficulties, they present several forms of populism worldwide. Their main purpose is to highlight the differences between the continents. Each of the chapters in the second section successfully accomplishes this, providing an overview that is useful both in analysing populism and in identifying the populist elements in national and international political actions or discourses.
This paper draws on the notion of “coercive power” as developed by Levitsky and Way (Competitive authoritarianism: hybrid regimes after the cold war, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2010) to argue that the incumbent regime in Uganda, the National Resistance Movement under President Yoweri Museveni, offers a particularly interesting case of competitive authoritarianism. Using empirical data, the paper extends Levitsky and Way’s scope of analysis to include contemporary Uganda, which has vital characteristics of both democracy and authoritarianism. The paper provides a fresh insight into the hitherto lesser-analyzed “trinitarian” interplay whereby President Museveni, the military and the ruling party essentially function as one and the same. The paper singles out the incumbent regime’s coercive capacity as the most instrumental factor that explains its continued stability. Subsequently, the paper elucidates the symbiotic coercive strategies that are applied to systematically resist opposition challenges.
Competitive authoritarianism has emerged as a major concept in the study of political regimes. The introduction of this special issue revisits Levitsky and Way’s seminal study Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. Although Africa is the world region with the highest absolute number of competitive authoritarian regimes, political scientists working on Africa have rarely engaged with Levitsky and Way’s modern classic. In this introduction, we summarize their arguments, outline the empirical findings for Africa, and review the critiques. In doing so we provide the background for the contributions to this special issue.
By looking at a number of different commodities and how they are traded, this article shows how informal cross-border trade in West Nile and Panyimur, Uganda, is governed by a locally negotiated system of hybrid governance, in which neither state nor nonstate actors have a regulatory monopoly. Notions such as legality and illegality are secondary to the functioning of these hybrid institutions, which instead are the outcome of perceptions of the legitimacy of regulatory actions and trading practices and the power configurations of the actors involved. There are different “registers” at play about what constitutes legitimate economic action among different moral communities, but the actual impact of this system depends on the power of the strategic groups involved.
En regardant un certain nombre de produits différents et la faç;on dont ils sont négociés, cet article montre comment le commerce informel transfrontalier dans la région du Nil occidental et le Panyimur est régi par un système négocié localement de gouvernance hybride, dans lequel les acteurs qui ont un monopole réglementaire ne proviennent ni de l’intérieur ni de l’extérieur du pouvoir d’Etat. Des notions telles que la légalité et l’illégalité sont secondaires pour le fonctionnement de ces institutions hybrides, qui sont plutôt le résultat de la perception de légitimité des mesures de réglementation, des pratiques commerciales et des configurations de puissance des acteurs impliqués. Il existe différents “registres” en jeu parmi les différentes communautés morales sur ce qui constitue la légitimité d’une action économique, mais l’impact réel de ce système dépend de la puissance des groupes stratégiques impliqués.
Although there is a lively academic debate about contemporary populism in Europe and Latin America, almost no cross-regional research exists on this topic. This article aims to fill this gap by showing that a minimal and ideological definition of populism permits us to analyse current expressions of populism in both regions. Moreover, based on a comparison of four prototypical cases (FN/Le Pen and FPÖ/Haider in Europe and PSUV/Chávez and MAS/Morales in Latin America), we show that it is possible to identify two regional subtypes of populism: exclusionary populism in Europe and inclusionary populism in Latin America.
What is populism? What is the relationship between populism and democracy? Populism: A Very Short Introduction presents populism as an ideology that divides society into two antagonistic camps: the “pure people” versus the “corrupt elite,” and that privileges popular sovereignty above all else. It illustrates the practical power of this ideology by describing populist movements of the modern era—European right-wing parties, left-wing presidents in Latin America, and the Tea Party movement in the United States—and charismatic populist leaders such as Juan Domingo Péron, H. Ross Perot, Silvio Berlusconi, and Hugo Chávez. Although populism is ultimately part of democracy, populist forces constitute an increasing challenge to democratic politics.
Scholarly and journalistic accounts of the recent successes of radical-right politics in Europe and the United States, including the Brexit referendum and the Trump campaign, tend to conflate three phenomena: populism, ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism. While all three are important elements of the radical right, they are neither coterminous nor limited to the right. The resulting lack of analytical clarity has hindered accounts of the causes and consequences of ethno-nationalist populism. To address this problem, I bring together existing research on nationalism, populism and authoritarianism in contemporary democracies to precisely define these concepts and examine temporal patterns in their supply and demand, that is, politicians' discursive strategies and the corresponding public attitudes. Based on the available evidence, I conclude that both the supply and demand sides of radical politics have been relatively stable over time, which suggests that in order to understand public support for radical politics, scholars should instead focus on the increased resonance between pre-existing attitudes and discursive frames. Drawing on recent research in cultural sociology, I argue that resonance is not only a function of the congruence between a frame and the beliefs of its audience, but also of shifting context. In the case of radical-right politics, a variety of social changes have engendered a sense of collective status threat among national ethnocultural majorities. Political and media discourse has channelled such threats into resentments toward elites, immigrants, and ethnic, racial and religious minorities, thereby activating previously latent attitudes and lending legitimacy to radical political campaigns that promise to return power and status to their aggrieved supporters. Not only does this form of politics threaten democratic institutions and inter-group relations, but it also has the potential to alter the contours of mainstream public discourse, thereby creating the conditions of possibility for future successes of populist, nationalist, and authoritarian politics.
Using populist tactics to frame energy transitions is neither new nor a predominantly Western phenomenon. In sub-Saharan Africa, populist leaders have long dispensed energy endowments for political gains. This paper studies populism and energy in Uganda, a highly energy-deprived country. Fact-checking recent governmental speeches and policies reveals a hefty presence of post-truth politics in Uganda's energy sector. President Yoweri Museveni's attempt to highlight developmental achievements have informed overly optimistic depictions of electricity planning, generation, transmission, distribution and pricing. We argue that the success of post-truth politics as a populist instrument may depend on the public's ability to easily falsify the respective claims. While populist narratives have generally helped to legitimise Museveni's leadership, our novel household survey data suggests that they have failed to mask the observable reality of poor governmental electrification performance. Respondents held sceptical opinions of electrification achievements, infrastructure status and the attribution of high electricity tariffs. Over 80% did not believe in the truthfulness of Uganda's energy debate, a result robust to different age, gender, residential, educational and income levels. This well-informed Ugandan public, paired with a growing international presence and global development goals pose unprecedented pressures on Uganda's government to eventually deliver factual, large-scale electrification.
Combining insights from International Relations theory and Comparative Politics, this chapter discusses the effect of international politics on the political fortune of populist parties in the world as well as the impact of populist parties on their countries' foreign policies. It argues that at least four different types of populist parties can be distinguished, each with a distinct foreign policy agenda.
In the wake of President Museveni’s latest election victory in Uganda, this article provides a critical review of the current literature on his National Resistance Movement (NRM) regime and seeks to affect a paradigm shift. We find that much of this scholarship has tended to track the regime’s increasing authoritarianism over the years with an implicit assumption of social detachment, as if the NRM’s successful electoral machine is one imposed on the voting public in ways that counterbalance Museveni’s declining legitimacy and lack of genuine political support. While agreeing with the substance of many of the points made to this end, we draw on the events of the 2016 election, our own ethnographic evidence from four traditionally pro-NRM districts and the research in the rest of this special issue to outline the ways that the regime’s election strategies rely on a more embedded presence in Ugandan political culture. The article focuses specifically on how three often-cited components of the NRM electoral machine – its dominant party network, its use of patronage as election finance, and its deployment of physical coercion through the security services – can only be understood when viewed with this more grounded approach.
This paper examines populist claims-making in US presidential elections. We define populism as a discursive strategy that juxtaposes the virtuous populace with a corrupt elite and views the former as the sole legitimate source of political power. In contrast to past research, we argue that populism is best operationalized as an attribute of political claims rather than a stable ideological property of political actors. This analytical strategy allows us to systematically measure how the use of populism is affected by a variety of contextual factors. Our empirical case consists of 2,406 speeches given by American presidential candidates between 1952 and 1996, which we code using automated text analysis. Populism is shown to be a common feature of presidential politics among both Democrats and Republicans, but its prevalence varies with candidates' relative positions in the political field. In particular, we demonstrate that the probability of a candidate's reliance on populist claims is directly proportional to his distance from the center of power (in this case, the presidency). This suggests that
populism is primarily a strategic tool of political challengers, and particularly those who have legitimate claims to outsider status. By examining temporal changes in populist claims-making on the political left and right, its variation across geographic regions and field positions, and the changing content of populist frames, our paper contributes to the debate on populism in modern democracies, while integrating field theory with the study of institutional politics.
This book examines the effects of ethnicity on party politics in sub-Saharan Africa. Sebastian Elischer analyzes political parties in Ghana, Kenya, and Namibia in detail, and provides a preliminary analysis of parties in seven other countries including Tanzania, Botswana, Senegal, Zambia, Malawi, Burkina Faso, and Benin. Elischer finds that five party types exist: the mono-ethnic, the ethnic alliance, the catch-all, the programmatic, and the personalistic party. He uses these party types to show that the African political landscape is considerably more diverse than conventionally assumed. Whereas ethnic parties dominate in some countries, non-ethnic parties have become the norm in others. This study also finds a correlation between a country's ethnic make-up and the salience of political ethnicity: countries with a core ethnic group are prone to form non-ethnic parties. In countries lacking a core ethnic group, ethnic parties constitute the norm.
Populism is best understood as a Manichaean worldview linked to a characteristic language or discourse. Chavismo, the movement that sustains Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, is a paradigmatic instance of populism. Using a novel, cross-country dataset on populist discourse, combined with extensive data from within Venezuela and across other countries, this book demonstrates that populist movements can be understood as responses to widespread corruption and economic crisis. The book analyzes the Bolivarian Circles and government missions in Venezuela, revealing how populist ideas influence political organization and policy. The analysis provides important insight into the nature of populism, including its causes and consequences, and addresses broader questions about the role of ideas in politics.
Why do strong opposition party organizations emerge in some democratizing countries, while those in others remain weak or quickly fragment on ethnic lines? This book offers an explanation for why opposition parties vary in organizational form, cohesion, and mobilizational reach. The book draws upon an in-depth analysis of three countries in Anglophone Africa: Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Kenya. Though these countries share similar institutional frameworks, including electoral rules, party development has taken a different route in each. The explanation emphasizes the ways in which historical legacies interact with strategic choices to produce different trajectories of party development. In terms of the role of history, the book argues that strong opposition parties are more likely where authoritarian states relied on alliances with corporate actors like labor. In these contexts, ruling parties armed their allies, providing them with mobilizing structures and political resources that could later be used to challenge the state. Secondly, opposition parties are more likely to maintain their organizational cohesion and the commitment of activists when they use strategies and appeals that escalate conflict and reorient social boundaries around the lines of partisan affiliation. Polarization forges stronger parties, but it also increases the likelihood of violence and authoritarian retrenchment. The book provides an explanation of why democratization in the hybrid regimes of the late Third Wave may prove more conflictual and more protracted than earlier transitions to democracy.
The liberalisation of African economies under structural adjustment has altered the economic conditions for political predominance in the continent’s party systems. Dominant parties have often been able to compensate for the loss of state patronage by forging ties with the private sector, through networks with domestic capitalists or through business ventures directly owned by the party. However, the ways in which they have done so vary widely. This article argues that the approach chosen by a particular party—whether in the form of a pact with the economic elite, the provision of a platform for private-sector interests, an informalisation of political and economic networks around senior leaders, or the outright domination of the business sector—depends primarily on the relative strength of the private economy, and on the party’s own degree of institutionalisation. The typology of dominant-party strategies toward the private sector is illustrated by the different approaches chosen by the ANC in South Africa, the EPRDF in Ethiopia, the CDP in Burkina Faso, and KANU in Kenya.
In seeking to maintain their power, many African regimes rely on strategies of extraversion, converting their dependent relations
with the external world into domestic resources and authority. This article assesses the relationship between extraversion
and political liberalization, a dimension of African democratization that has been somewhat underappreciated in recent empirical
studies. African countries vary in their extraversion portfolios, or the dimensions of their relations to the outside world
that they can instrumentalize, and these variations correspond both to different degrees of vulnerability to the demands of
foreign donors and to different preferences from the donors themselves. We find four quantitative measures of extraversion
vulnerability to be statistically associated with the initial transitions of the 1989–1995 period and with the ‘consolidations’
at different levels of democracy observable between 1995 and 2011. These findings shed new light on both democratic and hybrid
regime trajectories in Africa.
Although military rule disappeared in Latin America after 1990, other forms of authoritarianism persisted. Competitive authoritarianism, in which democratic institutions exist but incumbent abuse skews the playing field against opponents, emerged in Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador during the post-Cold War period. This article seeks to explain the emergence of competitive authoritarianism in the Andes. It argues that populism – the election of a personalistic outsider who mobilizes voters with an anti-establishment appeal – is a major catalyst for the emergence of competitive authoritarianism. Lacking experience with representative democratic institutions, possessing an electoral mandate to destroy the existing elite, and facing institutions of horizontal accountability controlled by that elite, populists have an incentive to launch plebiscitary attacks on institutions of horizontal accountability. Where they succeed, weak democracies almost invariably slide into competitive authoritarianism. The argument is demonstrated through a comparative analysis of all 14 elected presidents in Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, and Venezuela between 1990 and 2010.
The paper examines cases of corrupt military procurement in Uganda since the late 1990s. It also considers the illicit business activities of Ugandan army officers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1998. The paper then discusses how military corruption aroused the concern of parliament, and became a matter of importance in the 2001 presidential elections. We argue that the prevalence of military corruption was the result of government and army leaders not being subject to public accountability. Not a single leader has been faced with prosecution or punishment for corrupt military behaviour. We conclude by arguing that military corruption has helped to maintain the National Resistance Movement (NRM) in power, although this has been realised at the cost of building a professional national army in Uganda.
In recent years, scholars have begun to focus on the sources of "authoritarian resilience." But democracy has also shown surprising resilience, in part because the disorders to which it is prone tend to counteract each other.
A dozen years after the adoption of Uganda's new constitution, the democratization process has been thrown into reverse. Uganda today is sliding backward toward a system of one-man rule engineered by the recently reelected President Yoweri Museveni, who has now been in power for more than two decades. Due to Museveni's use of force and intimindation on the one hand, and his manipulation of patronage on the other, the stakeholders whom one would naturally expect to denounce the backsliding have been silent.
As African countries moved toward electoral democratization in the 1990s, many countries remained basically authoritarian, but incorporated some democratic innovations to one degree or another. Thus, the rules for authoritarian regimes changed in fundamental ways so that such regimes differed markedly from the autocracies of the earlier post-independence period. Post-1986 Uganda is used in this paper to show how authoritarianism has softened under Yoweri Museveni when compared with the earlier regimes of Idi Amin and Milton Obote. However, as we also see in the Ugandan case, most rulers have only gone as far with political reforms as they have felt they have needed to in order to satisfy domestic and donor pressures. Enormous constraints on civil and political liberties persist. The article examines the nature of semi-authoritarian regimes using the case of Uganda.
In recent years,new types of nondemocratic government have come to the fore,notably competitive authoritarianism.Such regimes, though not democratic,feature arenas of contestation in which opposition forces can challenge,and even oust,authoritarian incumbents.
Populism, understood as an appeal to ‘the people’ against both the established structure of power and the dominant ideas and values, should not be dismissed as a pathological form of politics of no interest to the political theorist, for its democratic pretensions raise important issues. Adapting Michael Oakeshott's distinction between ‘the politics of faith’ and ‘the politics of scepticism’, the paper offers an analysis of democracy in terms of two opposing faces, one ‘pragmatic’ and the other ‘redemptive’, and argues that it is the inescapable tension between them that makes populism a perennial possibility.
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