The Performative Presidency
Crisis and Resurrection during the Clinton Years

A cultural analysis of 1990s politics in the US, detailing the rise of performance oriented politics during Clinton's presidency.

Jason L. Mast (Author)

9781107026186, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 18 October 2012

212 pages, 6 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.45 kg

'The Performative Presidency is a clearly written and compact book on an important topic too often ignored by social scientists: the performative dimension of politics … Mast's book is a welcome contribution to the study of politics, and a fine example of the value of inter-disciplinary work. It ought to be read outside sociology by political scientists as well as media and communication scholars.' Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Media, Culture and Society

The Performative Presidency brings together literatures describing presidential leadership strategies, public understandings of citizenship, and news production and media technologies between the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Bill Clinton, and details how the relations between these spheres have changed over time. Jason L. Mast demonstrates how interactions between leaders, publics, and media are organized in a theatrical way, and argues that mass mediated plot formation and character development play an increasing role in structuring the political arena. He shows politics as a process of ongoing performances staged by motivated political actors, mediated by critics, and interpreted by audiences, in the context of a deeply rooted, widely shared system of collective representations. The interdisciplinary framework of this book brings together a semiotic theory of culture with concepts from the burgeoning field of performance studies.

1. Introduction
2. Presidential leadership under the conditions of defusion
3. Character formation: the rise of two Bill Clintons, 1992
4. The profanation of a president, 1992–4: presidential character, the 'climate of suspicion', and the culture of scandal
5. The Conservative revolution as purification and its subsequent pollution: the rise and fall of Newt Gingrich, and the fall and rise of Bill Clinton
6. Birth of a symbolic inversion: Clinton (re-)fuses with the presidential character
7. The second term: the Republicans' polluting scandal and Clinton's successful performance
8. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Media, information & communication industries [KNT], Political leaders & leadership [JPHL], Cultural studies [JFC]