Populism, Brexit, and the manufactured crisis of British neoliberalism

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.