From eloquence to credulity ‐ A study of ‘demagogy’in a political message

Abstract

Abstract. This study aims at exploring the notion of demagogy in the process of political communication in order to understand the relational processes between a politician and the public. The central concern was whether demagogy should be considered as a political phenomenon, or as a concept in the psychological definition of the word. Knowing that the political context and the notification of political involvement have changed, demagogy can be integrated in the communication process either as an attribute of an observed politician, or as an attribute of the observer. Furthermore, the question was raised whether demagogy can be linked to other personality scales. Finally, issues such as the knowledge of demagogy and its context, the influence of political labels on judgments and the influence of the discrepancy between sender and observer ‐ with regard to their party membership and attitudes ‐ were considered. Subjects of the study were 144 members of the Flemish Socialist Party. They were shown a video‐recorded political speech about the Belgian Harbour Policy. The experiment was in the form of a 2 × 3 factorial design, controlling for party‐affiliation of the speaker and the demagogic performance of the speech. Results indicate that demagogy was not known by the public at large, but only belonged to the language code of politicians. It was found that the notion demagogy ought to be handled as a psychological characteristic, and a perceptual model in which demagogy could be seen as the convergence of several behaviour‐oriented components was proposed. In regard to the influence of the political parties of the politician on the public, results confirm the classical expectations, i.e. labels affect judgments. The author also presents a psychological process, explaining the results about the discrepancy between the politician and the public.