Proximity as populist performance: A video data analysis of the 2023 Turkish elections

What kinds of relationships do populist leaders build with the people they claim to represent, and how do these relationships differ from those between non-populists and their supporters?

Research on populism has long focused on leaders themselves through their speeches, style, and public appearances. Far less attention has been paid to how voters respond. In a new article for Mediterranean Politics Professor Yaprak Gürsoy, with co-authors Dr Pelin Ayan Musil and Dr Toygar Sinan Baykan, address this gap by examining how leaders and voters interact.

They propose “proximity” as an indicator of populism with verbal, stylistic, and physical dimensions. Using Video Data Analysis of publicly available footage from Türkiye’s 2023 presidential campaigns, they compare encounters between voters and candidates and find stronger verbal, stylistic, and physical proximity between Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and his supporters than for Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu. Their analysis highlights the practices that make some leaders seem more sincere to voters and advances the analytical toolkit available to researchers of populism.

Abstract

“The performative approach to populism usually focuses on how populist leaders appeal to ‘the people’ through their speeches, stylistic choices and public appearances. Our study adopts a relational perspective on this literature by analysing the interaction between populist leaders and voters. To fully capture the relationship between populist leaders and their supporters, and how it differs from the rapport between non-populist politicians and their audiences, we study leader–voter interactions through the concept of proximity. Specifically, we compare the verbal, stylistic and physical dimensions of proximity that populist and non-populist leaders establish with their constituents, using Video Data Analysis (VDA) as our methodological tool and the 2023 Turkish presidential campaign as our case study. In doing so, our research advances the understanding of performative populism by highlighting the previously underexamined relational dynamics between populist leaders and their constituents. The case study further demonstrates how relationships between political leaders and voters, as well as populist performance, operate in practice in Türkiye.”