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The London School of Economics and Political Science Ideology in the age of mediatized politics: A study on the aesthetics and politics of charisma, ordinariness, and spectacle from the 2015 election advertising campaigns in the UK and Greece Angelos Kissas A thesis submitted to the Department of Media and Communications of the London School of Economics for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, London, January 2018 1 Declaration I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the MPhil/PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work other than where I have clearly indicated that it is the work of others (in which case the extent of any work carried out jointly by me and any other person is clearly identified in it). The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without my prior written consent. I warrant that this authorisation does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party. I declare that my thesis consists of <90,265> words 2 Abstract This thesis seeks to explore the place and role of ideology in political communication under conditions of mediatization. Exploring the place of ideology, as I will argue, involves exploring the ways political meaning is produced through the mediatic practices of personalisation, conversationalisation and dramatisation, while exploring its role involves exploring the ways political power is exercised through these practices. Particularly, the thesis builds upon an analytics of mediatization according to which ideology lies in, the textually-discursively organised and ordered, performative capacity of mediatic practices to recall and rework institutional symbolisms from the past serving the institutional exercise of power in the present, or the recontextualizing dynamic of media performativity . To operationalise this analytical approach, the thesis employs a paradigmatic case study ; the study of political advertisements produced by the two major political parties in Greece and the UK in the run-up to the January and May 2015, respectively, General Elections. The empirical analysis seeks to demonstrate that central to all the ideological mediatic practices is the fusion of the private with the public through different aesthetic regimes, such as the authenticity of charisma, the intimacy of ordinariness, and the ritualism of spectacle, each emerging invested with its own recontextualizing dynamic – the politics of mission, everyday life and belonging. Each, in other words, has its own capacity to emotive-cognitively and spatiotemporally rework institutionally symbolic meanings from the past enacting different forms of institutional agency (e.g. partisan or cross-partisan) and ordering (e.g. displacement, temporalisation or eternalisation) in the present. The overarching contribution of this analysis is to argue/establish that we cannot gain a full understanding of how political parties’ ideology is renegotiated nowadays without a critical interrogation of the recontextualizing dynamic of mediatic performances. Nor can we 3 gain a full understanding of how parties and other political institutions ideologically deal with the pragmatic challenges of the present without a critical interrogation of the aestheticity and affectivity of (mediatized) political discourse. 4 Contents List of tables 7 Acknowledgements 8 Introduction: Political communication, mediatization, and the question of ideology 10 Politics and political communication 11 Political communication and mediatization 13 Theoretical and analytical interpretations of the ideological status of political communication 16 Case-study based empirical analysis and its contribution to understanding the ideological potential of political communication 20 1 Conceptualising ideology: From exclusionary and inclusionary paradigms to an integrationist approach to the study of ideology 24 The rise of the exclusionary paradigms 26 The fall of the exclusionary paradigms: postmodernism and pragmatism 33 The rise of inclusionary paradigms 36 Towards an integrationist approach: ideology as discursive practice of recontextualization 43 Conclusion 56 2 Conceptualising mediatization: Evolutionist, intended or imagined transformation of political discourse? 58 Evolutionist transformation of politics 62 Intended transformation of politics 68 Imagined transformation of politics 75 Conclusion 86 3 Methods for analysing the ideological potential of political communication The analytics of mediatization 88 Multimodal analysis 91 Critical discourse analysis 96 Conclusion: responding to some potential critiques 105 4 A paradigmatic case for the study of the ideological potential of political communication: Political advertising in recent election campaigns of the major parties in the UK and Greece 113 Political advertising as paradigmatic platform of political communication 117 5 Major political parties as paradigmatic institutional settings 119 UK and Greece as paradigmatic institutional genealogies 121 Conclusion: recent election campaigns as paradigmatic historical context 131 5 Personalisation in the leader’s talking head: Mediatized charisma and the politics of mission 136 The authenticity of the ordinary leader and the compassionate politics of mission 141 The authenticity of the disciplined leader and the disciplinary politics of mission 149 The authenticity of the defiant leader and the defiant politics of mission 161 Conclusion 169 6 Conversationalisation in the testimonial: Mediatized ordinariness and the politics of everyday life 172 The intimacy of the demotic imaginary and the demotic politics of everyday life 177 The intimacy of banal sentimentality and the banal politics of everyday life 191 The intimacy of self-disclosure and the confessional politics of everyday life 201 Conclusion 211 7 Dramatisation in the cinéma-vérité and neutral reporter: Mediatized spectacle and the politics of belonging 215 The ritualism of (schooling and football-playing) public pedagogy and the pedagogical politics of belonging 220 The ritualism of the political rally and the ironic politics of belonging 231 The ritualism of the (imminent and avoided) disaster and the apocalyptic politics of belonging 244 Conclusion 256 Conclusion: Ideology in the age of mediatized politics and mediatization in the age of ideological politics 259 Conservatives: the change that never happened? 264 Labour: moving on from or with New Labour? 268 New Democracy: towards a new ‘old’ Right? 273 SYRIZA: radical Left or meta-Left? 277 Epilogue: advancements, limitations, and avenues for future research 282 Notes 287 Bibliography 296 6 List of tables 4.1 Research questions as concrete analytical questions 114 4.2 Election broadcasts for each genre from each party 135 7 Acknowledgments February, 2012: few months had passed since I moved to London and it was time to choose a topic for my MSc dissertation. It was back then that the whole idea behind this thesis was born. It was in that dissertation that I attempted a first-incipient theoretical, analytical, and empirical exploration of the place and role of ideology in contemporary political communication. A ‘synthesis’, as I called it, between ideological and mediatized politics, between what political parties ‘believe in’, openly and covertly, and what they seek to achieve electorally, directly and indirectly, between their symbolic past and their pragmatic present. The current thesis could be seen, therefore, as an enriched expansion on that dissertation; couple of thousand more words and, primarily, few more years of reading and analysing, drafting and redrafting, publishing and presenting: all around this very same problematic. Indispensable part of this enrichment and expansion, and of invaluable contribution to all my research-related activities, have been my supervisors, Prof Lilie Chouliaraki and Dr Nick Anstead, to whom I owe my sincere gratitude. Without their critical insights and thoughtful feedback, I would not have been able to find my way forward the moments I lost it during these last four years. Additionally, a warm thank you is owed to my thesis committee chairman, who also acted as advisor in the first year of my doctoral studies, Prof Nick Couldry, for his guidance in the early, quite reluctant and frantic steps of this endeavour. I would also like to thank Prof Natalie Fenton for her insightful comments on the presentation I gave at the 2015 ‘BreStoLon’ meeting, the organising committee of the conference marking the twenty years of the Journal of Political Ideologies (Nottingham, 2015) for the opportunity it gave me to share my work with other students of political ideology, and to also publish it as a journal article, and all the anonymous reviewers of the journals where I have attempted, successfully or not, to publish relevant articles for their constructive feedback 8 and critiques. All this commentary, feedback, and liaising has significantly contributed to the development and maturing of the research project that constitutes the backbone of this thesis. Finally, I could not leave unacknowledged the daily support and encouragement from my family, my close friends and my partner. Thank you all for always being there for me, offering this ‘non-expert’ insight into my work which keeps reminding me that knowledge unable to be communicated is ineffective knowledge. Towards the completion of my doctoral studies, I have been granted