Journal Article

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

Hahl, Oliver, Kim, Minjae, Sivan, Ezra W. Zuckerman

2018

Overview

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.

• Publisher: SAGE Publishing,SAGE Publications,American Sociological Association
• Subject: Authenticity / Candidates / 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