The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy

• Published in: American sociological review Vol. 83; no. 1; pp. 1 - 33
• Main Authors: Hahl, Oliver, Kim, Minjae, Sivan, Ezra W. Zuckerman
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publishing 01.02.2018; SAGE Publications; American Sociological Association
• Subjects: Authenticity; Candidates; Constituencies; Constituents; Cultural differences; Cultural factors; Deception; Demagoguery; Elections; Experiments; Illegitimacy; Internet; Legitimacy; Lying; Norms; Partisanship; Political systems; Politics; Presidential elections; Sociocultural factors; Suffering; Truth; Violations; Voters; political sociology; 2016 election; norms; authenticity; electoral politics
• ISSN: 0003-1224; 1939-8271
• DOI: 10.1177/0003122417749632

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.