%0 Journal Article
%T The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy
%A Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan
%A Minjae Kim
%A Oliver Hahl
%J American Sociological Review
%@ 1939-8271
%D 2018
%R 10.1177/0003122417749632
%X 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¡ªinformation access, culture, language, and gender¡ªare 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
%K political sociology
%K authenticity
%K electoral politics
%K 2016 election
%K norms
%U https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0003122417749632