TY - JOUR
T1 - The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue
T2 - Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy
AU - Hahl, Oliver
AU - Kim, Minjae
AU - Zuckerman Sivan, Ezra W.
PY - 2018/2/1
Y1 - 2018/2/1
N2 - We develop and test a theory to address a puzzling pattern that has been discussed widely since the 2016 U.S. presidential election and reproduced here in a post-election survey: how can a constituency of voters find a candidate “authentically appealing” (i.e., view him positively as authentic) even though he is a “lying demagogue” (someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to non-normative private prejudices)? Key to the theory are two points: (1) “common-knowledge” lies may be understood as flagrant violations of the norm of truth-telling; and (2) when a political system is suffering from a “crisis of legitimacy” (Lipset 1959) with respect to at least one political constituency, members of that constituency will be motivated to see a flagrant violator of established norms as an authentic champion of its interests. Two online vignette experiments on a simulated college election support our theory. These results demonstrate that mere partisanship is insufficient to explain sharp differences in how lying demagoguery is perceived, and that several oft-discussed factors—information access, culture, language, and gender—are not necessary for explaining such differences. Rather, for the lying demagogue to have authentic appeal, it is sufficient that one side of a social divide regards the political system as flawed or illegitimate.
AB - We develop and test a theory to address a puzzling pattern that has been discussed widely since the 2016 U.S. presidential election and reproduced here in a post-election survey: how can a constituency of voters find a candidate “authentically appealing” (i.e., view him positively as authentic) even though he is a “lying demagogue” (someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to non-normative private prejudices)? Key to the theory are two points: (1) “common-knowledge” lies may be understood as flagrant violations of the norm of truth-telling; and (2) when a political system is suffering from a “crisis of legitimacy” (Lipset 1959) with respect to at least one political constituency, members of that constituency will be motivated to see a flagrant violator of established norms as an authentic champion of its interests. Two online vignette experiments on a simulated college election support our theory. These results demonstrate that mere partisanship is insufficient to explain sharp differences in how lying demagoguery is perceived, and that several oft-discussed factors—information access, culture, language, and gender—are not necessary for explaining such differences. Rather, for the lying demagogue to have authentic appeal, it is sufficient that one side of a social divide regards the political system as flawed or illegitimate.
KW - 2016 election
KW - authenticity
KW - electoral politics
KW - norms
KW - political sociology
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85041488466&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85041488466&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1177/0003122417749632
DO - 10.1177/0003122417749632
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85041488466
VL - 83
SP - 1
EP - 33
JO - American Sociological Review
JF - American Sociological Review
SN - 0003-1224
IS - 1
ER -