While scholarship often assumes that strong leaders and charismatic leadership play an important role in the emergence of populist politics, research has missed a closer exploration of charisma attribution to populists. Addressing this charismatic leadership hypothesis requires populism and charisma to be analysed from the followers’ perspective. This article takes a unique look at the social-psychological dynamics behind populism. Using quantitative survey data that was collected from Hungarian voters ( N = 1200), this article examines the relationship between populist attitudes as follower characteristics in modern politics and charisma attribution. To reveal how a populist worldview can affect the follower’s expectations and perceptions, we break charisma attribution down into three phases: (1) the general hunger for charisma (the romance of leadership); (2) perceptions of charismatic behaviour of the top candidates in the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary elections (i.e., Viktor Orbán and Péter Márki-Zay); and (3) emotional attachment to these leaders. Our findings show that populism makes people more hungry for charisma and more sensitive to recognising charismatic behaviour but does not necessarily create an emotional bond with specific leaders. This article also sheds light on some directions of future research to explore other distinctive characteristics of populist followers that can influence social constructions of charismatic leadership. The limitations and implications are also discussed.
To win a policy debate, political actors may apply two analytically distinct counterframing strategies, rhetoric and heresthetic. Rhetoric is when counterarguments are formulated in the original dimension of the debate, while heresthetic is using arguments in a different dimension compared to the original frame. Although both rhetoric and heresthetic are ubiquitous phenomena in the process of public opinion formation, there are no general rules to specify their efficacy. Drawing on a survey experiment carried out in Hungary in 2020 (N = 2000), this paper uncovers the factors determining the effect of the two strategies. Introducing a conceptual distinction between open and trade-off framing situations, the paper demonstrates that the structure of the situation matters. While heresthetic has a robust effect in trade-off framing situations, rhetoric may have a strong impact in open framing situations. Moreover, the effectiveness of counterframing depends on the party affiliation of respondents and the strength of their related attitudes.
Egy politikai vita megnyerése érdekében a politikai szereplők két, analitikailag különböző ellenkeretezési stratégiát alkalmazhatnak, a retorikát és a heresztetikát. A retorika az, amikor az ellenérveket a vita eredeti dimenziójában fogalmazzák meg, míg a heresztetika az eredeti kerethez képest más dimenzióban használ érveket. Bár mind a retorika, mind a heresztetika szinte mindenütt előforduló jelenség a közvélemény-formálás folyamatában, nincsenek általános szabályok hatékonyságuk meghatározására. Jelen tanulmány egy 2020- ban Magyarországon végzett survey-kísérletre (N = 2000) támaszkodva tárja fel a két stratégia hatékonyságát meghatározó tényezőket. A tanulmány bevezeti a nyílt és a trade-off-os keretezési helyzetek fogalmi megkülönböztetését, és bemutatja, hogy az eredmény függhet a keretezési helyzetek szerkezetétől is. Míg a heresztetika erőteljesen trade-off-os, addig a retorika a nyílt keretezési helyzetekben gyakorol hatást. Ezen túlmenően az ellenkeretezés hatékonysága függ a válaszadók párthovatartozásától és a kapcsolódó attitűdök erősségétől.
The paper describes a new dataset, the European Government-Opposition Voters Data Set (EGOV), which categorizes European voters and party identifiers based on their individual party preferences, dividing them into pro-government and pro-opposition groups. The dataset includes two variables that can be used to supplement the integrated data sets of the European Social Survey project, which publishes one of the most comprehensive and most widely used social scientific database covering Europe. The present data enables the recoding of (any part of) an integrated dataset containing responses from more than 420 000 respondents in 33 European countries between 2002 and 2020, covering eight data waves and 215 country-years. The EGOV Data Set facilitates research that includes the aspect of respondents’ government-opposition status either as an independent or a control variable. Being a winner or a loser in a political sense strongly influences not only political opinions but also a wide set of perceptions from subjective well-being to economic performance. This way, these data could be especially helpful for research addressing polarization, institutional trust, economic perceptions and well-being.
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