Populism, Brexit, and the manufactured crisis of British neoliberalism

Abstract

The recent rise of populism has threatened to undermine the stability of international economic integration. Using the case of Britain's 2016 vote to leave the European Union, we challenge prevailing accounts explaining populism as political response to neoliberalism's negative impact on voters. This conceptualisation does not sufficiently explain voter support for populist political actors advocating the further entrenchment of neoliberal policymaking. Using a descriptive analysis, we develop a constitutive theory explaining how the antagonistic ‘people’ vs. ‘elite’ relationship at the core of populism has been mobilised by opposing British political actors as a discursive frame to generate voter support for their own policies. We show how the Liberal Economic Nationalist and Democratic Socialist policy paradigms used the 2016 referendum to challenge Britain’s debt-driven neoliberal growth model by framing it as being detrimental to ‘the people’ and benefiting ‘the elite’. Conversely, their respective export-oriented neoliberal growth model or socialist policies are framed as resolving these issues through their prospective benefits to ‘the people’. Therefore, we argue that focusing on the deployment of the populist frame offers a compelling means for the field of International Political Economy to conceptualise how global populism emerges to challenge the stability of international economic integration.

Keywords:

• Populism
• policy paradigm
• crisis
• neoliberalism
• Brexit
• constructivism
• growth model

Acknowledgements

We thank the editors of RIPE for their advice and the anonymous reviewers for their comments; both of which have significantly developed the article. We also thank Jeremy Green, Tiago Ramalho, Matthew Donoghue and Tiago Carvalho for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We are particularly indebted to Jason Sharman for providing a great deal of constructive advice on several drafts throughout the review process. All responsibility for any errors and omissions made in this paper must lie solely with the authors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

James D. G. Wood

James D. G. Wood is a Teaching Associate in Political Economy in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, where he is also a member of the Fellowship at Trinity Hall. His research on financialisation has been published in Comparative European Politics, New Political Economy and The British Journal of Politics and International Relations. James is also a co-convenor of the Political Studies Association’s British and Comparative Political Economy specialist group.

Valentina Ausserladscheider

Valentina Ausserladscheider is a PhD candidate at the Sociology Department of the University of Cambridge and her thesis investigates the rise of economic nationalist ideas in political elites’ discourse. Valentina undertook her undergraduate degree in sociology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria (2010–13) before completing her MSc in Economic Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (2013–14) and MPhil in Sociology from the University of Cambridge (2014–15).