Performances and Perceptions of Populism and Misinformation: Understanding the Proliferation of Performative Rhetorics Within the Western European Political Twittersphere

: Understanding Populism, Misinformation, and Performance Through the Eyes of the Actors

Abstract

Populism and misinformation are contested terms, torn between a terminological anarchy and societal controversy, with little consistency found between their academic, political, and civic conceptions. This research elaborates that such contested statuses need not necessarily be limitations, but instead opportunities. In utilising narrative techniques, conceptions of dramaturgy, and queered approaches to bring consensual and congruent structure to the chaos, this thesis offers alternative viewpoints on the topic and offering novel insight into well-researched phenomena.

Following the digital lives of 90 left-wing politicians from Britain, France, and Germany, this research deployed a phased approach, moving from six-month digital ethnography on Twitter, to a process of qualitative coding to demonstrate the wide-spread engagement in surface-level misinformative practices. This was followed by a series of semi-structured interviews with participants, wherein their perceptions of the communicative arena took primacy. Their performances in the interview were contrasted with their digital shadow, offering new insights into the proliferation of populist and misinformative rhetorics as audience-informed communicative styles, performed as protective measures within the combative discursive digital public sphere.

Reality became not just a reflexive concept, but a negotiable one, as politicians stated, contradicted, and renegotiated their responses within the interviews. Eventually, they elucidated a set of motivations underpinning their digital behaviours as intentionally distinct from their physical ones. In communicating online, populism and misinformation were deployed as techniques to reinforce diverse messages of protection, oriented towards their parties, their publics, and their personas, motivated by concepts of honesty, accountability, and electability.

The thesis offers multiple novel insights. It utilises the flexibility of queer theory for topics unbound by sexuality or gender, renegotiates the binaries and boundaries between information and misinformation and populism and non-populism, and allows for a deliberate reconceptualisation of phenomena, normally too bound by objectivist frameworks, to elevate new narratives into the academic hierarchy.

Date of Award	Sept 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Aston University
Supervisor	Carolyn Rowe (Supervisor), Patrycja Rozbicka (Supervisor) & Patricia Correa (Supervisor)