Populist leadership and charismatic following. An empirical analysis of social media interactions between leader and followers.

Caprioli, Mauro Ugo;Versailles, Alban
(2018) 5th Interim Conference Political Sociology Research Network 32 of the European Sociological Association — Location: Prague (2.November.2018)

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  • Caprioli, Mauro UgoUCLouvain
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  • Versailles, AlbanUCLouvain
    Author
Abstract
Successful populist leaders are frequently described as charismatic, theoretically implying followers who unconditionally support and believe in the leader’s extra-ordinariness and mission. Many scholars have criticized the charisma-thesis, however, it is often ignored that charisma instead of being a trait of the leader, resides in ‘the eye of the beholder’. Considered as such, notwithstanding that in the literature populist leadership is often portrayed as charismatic, it is often overlooked that a charismatic bond is only one of many possible outcomes of subjectively, interactively, and interpretatively constructed leader-follower relationships. Hence our question: If and under which circumstances populist leadership obtains a charismatic following? Social media provides us with a yet underexplored empirical possibility to study populist leaders’ discourse and followers’ reactions. Therefore, we analysed data from Belgium’s most popular self-managed political facebook-page, Theo Francken’s, secretary of state for migration and often accused of ethno-populism.
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Caprioli, M. U., & Versailles, A. (2018). Populist leadership and charismatic following. An empirical analysis of social media interactions between leader and followers. 5th Interim Conference Political Sociology Research Network 32 of the European Sociological Association, Prague. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/56827