The electoral strategies of a populist candidate: Does charisma discourage experience and encourage extremism?
| Published date | 01 January 2018 |
| Author | Gilles Serra |
| DOI | 10.1177/0951629817737860 |
| Date | 01 January 2018 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
The electoral strategies of a
populist candidate: Does
charisma discourage
experience and encourage
extremism?
Journal of Theoretical Politics
2018, Vol. 30(1) 45–73
©The Author(s) 2017
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DOI:10.1177/0951629817737860
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Gilles Serra
Department of Political Science, Centre for Economics Research and Teaching (CIDE), Mexico
Abstract
I model an election between a populist candidate with little government experience and high
charisma and a mainstream candidate with much government experience and low charisma. Tak-
ing a step back in time, I also model the career choices of this populist candidate: he must
consider how much governing experience to acquire before running for high office, and then he
must decide how extremist his campaign platform should be. The model finds two major trade-
offs that are unfortunate for the median voter: candidates who are attractive in terms of their high
charisma will be unattractive in terms of their low experience and high extremism. The model
also finds that popular discontent, coming from an economic or political crisis, makes an inexpe-
rienced outsider more likely to win an election with an extremist agenda; this helps explain the
recent ‘rise of populism’ identified by several authors around the world. This theory is also able
to explain numerous empirical findings: I connect the model to the literature from different aca-
demic approaches (behavioral, comparative, and institutional) and different geographical regions
(the United States, Latin America, and Europe). Special reference is made to four prominent
outsiders: Donald Trump, Hugo Chávez, Alberto Fujimori, and Jean-Marie Le Pen.
Keywords
Charisma; democracy; elections; experience; populism
1. The downside of charismatic populism
What kind of leader will govern a country following a democratic election? Voters value
a number of features in their authorities, such as their competence, their communication
skills, their capacity to unify the country, their respect for the rule of law, their commit-
ment to democracy, and their responsiveness to regular citizens. However, these features
Corresponding author:
Gilles Serra, Department of Political Science, Centre for Economics Research and Teaching (CIDE), Mexico
City, Mexico.
Email: gilles.serra@cide.edu
46 Journal of Theoretical Politics 30(1)
might not be compatible with each other, and it might not be realistic to expect all of
them from a single candidate. This essay will argue that democratic competition itself
creates major trade-offs in the types of candidate available to voters, such that any elec-
tion winner should be expected to lack some important qualities. For instance, voters
may agree on the benefits of electing a chief executive who is a competent technocrat
with experience in government, who can design effective policies to resolve the nation’s
problems. They may also agree on the prudence of electing a moderate politician whose
mainstream views can unify the country by making the centrist majority of the population
feel represented. But will voters rally around an experienced moderate if she is boring, if
she seems distant, or if she comes across as elitist? Regular citizens might be swayed by
someone closer to them, someone they can connect with, and someone they believe will
defend the common folk. They might flock around an inspiring orator who promises to
liberate the masses from the self-serving elite that has captured the government through
corruption and cronyism. Some important questions then are: if this populist outsider
manages to win the election by beating the establishment candidate, will he lack the
required experience to govern effectively? And will he implement extremist policies well
beyond the median voter’s preferences? According to empirical observation suggesting a
rise in populism, these dilemmas are increasingly frequent around the world.
The theory in this paper explores the ways in which a new politician may shape
his profile with the goal of reaching high office at a future election. The main goal
of the model is to make predictions about three features that characterize a candidate:
his policies, his experience, and his charisma, which I define more precisely throughout
the paper. Concretely, I wish to explore the relationship between these characteristics to
uncover potential conflicts between them. Indeed, the results reveal two trade-offs that
are unfortunate for voters, whereby candidates with high levels of charisma will tend to
have low levels of experience and high levels of extremism. A further goal of the model
is to predict the conditions leading to the election of a populist outsider instead of a main-
stream politician, and the levels of expertise that we can expect from each. In accordance
with intuition, my theoretical model finds that popular disaffection, coming, for exam-
ple, from a severe economic or political crisis, makes the successful election of a populist
outsider more likely.More sur prisingly, such crises are predicted to decrease the relevant
experience acquired by the populist; increase his extremism; and increase the extremism
of the government.
Another contribution of this paper is to discuss and explain several important regular-
ities from the empirical literature. I demonstrate how my theoretical results are consistent
with a large number of empirical observations from different academic approaches (e.g.
behavioral, comparative, and institutional) and different geographical regions (e.g. the
United States, Latin America, and Europe). I make special reference to four prominent
outsider politicians whose biographies are consistent with my model in several regards:
Donald Trump, Hugo Chávez, Alberto Fujimori, and Jean-Marie Le Pen. The litera-
ture review will illustrate the utility of a unified formal theory to connect and organize
observations from a diversity of empirical fields.
With these goals in mind,I develop a theory about the career decisions of a new politi-
cian who wishes to compete eventually for high office.At the outset, only two parameters
characterize the politician. On the one hand, he has intense and well-defined policy pref-
erences in the left–right political spectrum; to be concrete, he will have a quadratic utility
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