The Rise of Charisma in the USA:Barack Obama and the Politics of Hope and Change (original) (raw)

The 2008 Presidential elections was a watershed in American politics and historic in many ways. It was one of the few times in recent history that a member of the upper house-the US Senate was assured election as the chief executive, Commander in Chief and President of the nation. It also pitted one of the oldest persons to run for the presidency, Senator John McCain, and one with some political and legislative experience with one of the youngest and someone with rather limited portfolio skills in this arena. And also at one point, in the quest for the democratic nomination for the Presidency, a female candidate had a serious chance to capture the party's nomination as Hillary Rodham Clinton and the famed and thought to be impregnable Clintonian political machinery battled fiercely with Barack Obama for this signal honor-a task for which she would ultimately fail. But clearly, the event that captured the imagination of the nation, and indeed many in the far flung reaches of the world-even those who count themselves as America's enemieswas the candidacy of Barack H Obama Jr and his almost flawless campaign to capture the American presidency-the first seriously hopeful campaign for a person of color and one who identified himself as an African-American. In this paper we attempt to interrogate and analyze a number of issues to determine how this process was successfully concluded and to do so we utilize the paradigm of Charisma and Charismatic leadership to better comprehend what transpired in contemporary American society In this endeavor we utilize the frame of Charisma and Charismatic leadership, as developed by German sociologist Max Weber, and from this we extrapolate a six step formulaic criteria and try to see 1) how close a best of fit we can replicate, and 2) if this helps us better comprehend what happened in Obama's meteoric rise to power, and what lessons can be drawn from his tenure in office. Weber's notion of charisma has been criticized by many social scientists and intellectuals, each of whom draws upon some inconsistency and then attempts to analyze it(1). It is suggested that the conception best be explained by identifying certain criteria that are characteristic of leaders or historical figures. But even then the problem of relating this to social change remains. As one writer states, "charisma is crucial to Weber's system of analysis as the basis for an explanation of social change. Weber's other types of authority are stable systems within which it is conceivable that change will take place only at a micro level. The problem for Weber was to account for large-scale social change and the concept of charisma provided what Bendix calls a "sociology of innovation' "(2) In order to ascertain the relation between charisma and social change, one has to identify the psychological and sociological components of charismatic leadership and then attempt to see what social change is implemented by the leadership. The stages of charismatic leadership throughout its development and decline can thus be traced. Such an approach to the concept of charisma is consonant with sociological concerns and underscores the concept's importance in explaining social change. For the political sociologist , especially in an advanced polity such as the USA with its separation of powers and mixed ideal typical systems of authority, the problem is compounded, for one has to pay even closer attention to the political culture and the formidable systems already in place to blunt meaningful social change.

Political Charisma Revisited, and Reclaimed for Political Science

This paper, initially prompted by the puzzles raised from the atypical emergence of charismatic politics in the otherwise ordinary political system that our contemporary democracy is supposed to be, seeks to bring political charisma back into the study of comparative politics by reconstructing the concept and rendering it applicable to empirical research. Unlike previous approaches, which have suffered from either individual or structural reductionism, the present study examines charisma as a pure power term by focusing on what makes it appear in ordinary democratic politics as an extraordinary phenomenon, namely, its personal (as opposed to impersonal) character of leadership and the pursuit of a politically radical (as opposed to moderate) program. Accordingly, political charisma is defined as a distinct type of legitimate leadership that is personal and aims at the radical transformation of an established institutional order. Such an understanding of political charisma enables us to further analyze the core features of charismatic leadership and construct an “index of charismaticness” ready to be put under comparative empirical investigation. Sampling from postwar and contemporary European politics, a number of charismatic leaders are examined and then contrasted to non-charismatic ones. It is argued that, once reclaimed for political science, charisma may prove a useful concept with surprising analytical potential. Renewed interest in political charisma is expected to offer valuable clues in such important research areas as political leadership, populism, and contentious politics.

Charisma, Value and Political Vocation: Max Weber on the 2016 US Election

Max Weber’s political sociology provides a powerful framework for interpreting the defeat of Hillary Clinton as a crisis of legitimacy and the election of Donald Trump as an example of charismatic leadership. Even so, the effectiveness of Trump’s demagoguery places in grave doubt Weber’s normative analysis of political leadership, which depends on his understanding of charisma. This application and critique hinges on the links between institional charisma and charismatic legitimacy, on the one hand, and on the links between political vocation and personal charisma, on the other. Marc B. Sable, Study of Comparative Culture (Morioka University, Japan). No. 27, pp. 5-19 (March 2017).

Winning Charisma and Losing the Presidential Election1

Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1997

This study focuses on voters' perceptions of presidential candidates' charismatic leadership. Competing hypotheses draw from performance-cue and decision-making literatures. Results from the panel data indicate that voters' perceptions of the winning candidate remain ...

Charisma and political leadership

Political Studies, 1964

I N this paper I propose to argue that the notion of 'charisma' as used to describe and explain certain types of leadership-and, at times, even the

Charisma: from divine gift to the democratic leader-shop

Modern Leaders: Between Charisma and Trickery -- by A. Horvath, A. Szakolczai and M. Marangudakis (eds.) (Routledge) , 2020

This chapter argues for the centrality of ‘charismatic domination’ among Weber’s ideal-types of legitimate authority and emphasizes its vital importance for our understanding of political life and modern democracy. It achieves this by providing an anthropological interpretation of charisma as a symbol of order expressing the classical Greek and Christian outlook on existence as metaxy. The argument exposes the errors involved in the application of positivist and critical methodologies to charisma and then elaborates the anthropological approach by linking charisma with the experience of liminality and with the political. In this context, charisma properly understood is identified as a restorative quality aimed at safeguarding against depersonalization processes and the corruption of gift relations. Charisma attains this by pointing towards right relations among three active powers characteristic of political life and the anthropological condition: the one, the few and the many. The chapter closes with a few reflections on the strains emerging between the practice of modern democracy and charisma. By introducing a fourth active power – the incommensurable all – modern democratic politics symbolically transforms the citizen body into a charismatic people, hence corrupting our understanding of charisma through reducing it to a mere electoral leader-shop, of puritan genesis.

The Power of Charisma: Investigating the Neglected Citizen–Politician Linkage

Journal of Politics in Latin America

Charisma has long been considered a powerful tool for leaders worldwide to rise to greatness. Yet we have given less attention to the way in which charismatic leaders develop deep, unmediated emotional bonds with their followers. I propose a compact theory that explains how charismatic attachments form, overwhelm alternative linkage types, and facilitate the development of powerful and potentially enduring political movements. To illustrate the theory, I turn to Hugo Chávez’s Bolivarian movement in Venezuela. Firstly, the analysis of a 2007 survey from the Latin American Public Opinion Project demonstrates the disproportionate influence of charisma on citizens’ attachments to Bolivarianism relative to competing factors. Next, six original focus groups conducted with Bolivarian followers in 2016 illustrate the mechanisms underlying the followers’ surprisingly resilient loyalty, not only to the leader but also to his overarching movement. The results suggest that affective political a...

Introduction to the Special Issue on 'Charisma'

Journal of Religion in Europe 12, 2019

The introduction to the special issue on ‘charisma’ offers a very brief overview of the development of the concept in the social sciences and various critiques and intersecting debates. It casts a close look at Max Weber’s sometimes contradictory use of the concept and the different ways he conceptualized it in his sociology of religion and his sociology of domination. It then examines alternative theoretical approaches to ‘charisma’ that emerge in the course of the twentieth century before outlining this special issue’s contribution to the conceptual debate and the individual articles’ operationalization of the term by viewing charisma as relational, communicative, procedural, as well as related to ideas, practices, and objects.

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Charisma in Theory and Practice

The Anthropology of Religious Charisma: Ecstasies and Institutions. Ed. Charles Lindholm. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan., 2013