The Language of Legacies: The Politics of Evoking Dead Leaders

Abstract

How can leaders recover public trust and approval when government performance is low? We argue politicians use speeches evoking images of deceased predecessors to reactivate support temporarily. This distracts supporters from the poor performance and arouses empathy and nostalgia among them, causing them to perceive the current leader more favorably. We test this argument by scraping for all speeches by Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. We identify all instances when she referenced Juan Perón—the charismatic founder of the Justice Party. We find that as Kirchner’s approval rating decreases, the number of Perón references increases. To identify the causal mechanism and to ensure that endogeneity is not a concern, we employ text analysis and a natural experiment—courtesy of LAPOP. The results provide robust evidence that leaders reference their dead predecessors to evoke positive feelings. However, while doing so can improve public opinion, the effects manifest only in the short term and among supporters.

Minority Language Recognition and Political Trust in Authoritarian Regimes

“…What explains political trust? Whether the focus is on government performance (Andrews-Lee and Liu 2020; Askvik, Jamil, and Dhakal 2011; Chanley, Rudolph, and Rahn 2000; Espinal, Hartlyn, and Kelly 2006; Morris and Klesner 2010; Wong et al 2011); citizenship participation (Freitag and Bühlmann 2009; Newton 2001; Rothstein and Stolle 2008); or institutional designs (Hoddie and Hartzell 2003; Kittilson and Schwindt-Bayer 2010; O’Leary 2019), one common denominator among these works is the exclusive focus on democracies (c.f., Hu 2020; Ricks 2020). Yet, political trust is by no means democracy-specific.…”

Authoritarian Legacies and Partisan Bias in Corruption Voting

“…In post-authoritarian democracies, the nostalgic rhetoric of politicians has provoked repeated political tension while also soliciting popular support from nostalgic voters, using the issue of authoritarian evaluation as a key political cleavage (Andrews-Lee and Liu 2021; Kim 2014). Nostalgic intellectuals have attempted to reshape and reconstruct the former dictatorship under more favorable narratives by publishing academic articles or revising history textbooks (Yang 2021).…”

Personality traits, democratic support, and authoritarian nostalgia

“…While fluctuations in economic status may shift the sentiment and support for the former dictatorship, studies have also found that this nostalgia functions as a source of social cohesion and security and has lingering effects on voter attitudes. In maturing democracies where historical perceptions of the former dictatorship have fueled recurring political tension, with many political leaders and intellectuals evoking the past and reintroducing autocratic evaluation as a key political issue (Andrews‐Lee and Liu 2021; Yang 2021), sharing similar perspective of the past serves as a key source of social connectedness among voters (Wildschut et al. 2014).…”