A Follower-Centric Approach to Trump’s Election

To the extent that leadership scholars examine Trump as a leader, followers play a significant role in studying Trump and leadership. This post continues that theme. Carsten, Bligh, Kohles, and Wing-Yan Lau analyze how Trump’s rhetoric may have attracted followers with certain characteristics.

Trump’s rhetoric and behavior leading up to his election bewildered many people. Dictionary.com added the phrase “fake news” into its lexicon for the first time largely based on Trump’s usage of that term. Some see in Trump’s election the full-blown advent of the “post-truth era.” Truth blurs into falsity and vice-versa in this era. Emotions and one’s personal beliefs become more important than hard facts. In such times, whether one becomes designated as a leader may depend “more on followers’ emotions, beliefs, and personal characteristics than the objective qualities of the leader.”

The authors center their study on the characteristics of Trumps’ followers and their beliefs as they may relate to their attributing to Trump (1) charisma and (2) effectiveness as a leader. They accomplish this by examining the content of Trump’s rhetoric.

Charisma and rhetoric

Few of Trump’s followers have had direct contact with him. Therefore, the extent to which they perceive him as charismatic depended largely on his rhetoric. Some research on leadership suggests that followers will perceive a leader as charismatic when the leader uses “language that demonstrates contempt of the status-quo, personalized power, personal cost or risk, and is unconventional or counter-intuitive.”

Carsten et al. analyzed 7 speeches each for Trump and Clinton. The speeches were comparable (for example, the nominating acceptance speech of each candidate, three general election debate transcripts, and so on). They analyzed each speech using a software program, DICTION 7.1.3, designed for political discourse. The analysis resulted in a comparison of 11 speech constructs that were statistically significantly different between the two candidates.The most significant differences include:

• Familiarity – Clinton’s speech content used familiarity more than Trump’s (example Clinton’s “millions of people across our country are standing up and saying: We believe in an America that is great because it is good.”)
• Certainty – Trump’s speech content expressed more certainty (example Trump’s “Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”)
• Blame – Trump’s content expressed more blame (“So if you want to hear the corporate spin, the carefully crafted lies, and the media myths the Democrats are holding their convention next week. Go there.”)
• Optimism – Clinton’s speech content focused more on optimism (“let’s look to the future with courage and confidence.”)
• Activity – Trump’s speech content stressed more activity (“When innocent people suffer because our political system lacks the will, or the courage, or the basic decency to enforce our laws . . . I am not able to look the other way, and I won’t look the other way.”)

Briefly, the other terms or constructs in which scores were significantly different included Clinton scoring higher on communality, cooperation, and passivity and Trump scoring higher for denial, hardship, and aggression.

In sum, “Trump’s rhetoric contained significantly more blame, denial, and aggression than Clinton’s” but also used activity and certainty rhetoric.

Followers

The research used a sample of 440 respondents between the ages of 18 and 69. Forty percent self-identified as Democrats, 24% as Republican, and 37% as Independents or other political affiliations. The authors controlled for gender, age, and general political knowledge.

Using well know measures, the research identified for each respondent the following: (1) self-esteem, (2) romance of leadership, (3) attitudes toward gender, (4) communal values, (5) perceived threat of social groups, (6) attributed charisma, and (7) expected effectiveness.

Hypotheses

Carsten et al. develop five hypotheses for their study. Their results supported two of the five hypotheses.
The following three hypotheses found no support:

• Followers with high self-esteem would not (1) attribute charisma to Trump and (2) associate effectiveness with Trump. Put another way, followers who have low self-esteem (i.e. people who do not have a strong concept of self) will see Trump as an effective and charismatic leader.
• Followers who have a romance with leadership (that is, people who believe leaders have a great deal of agency and can just about solely by themselves determine outcomes) will attribute Trump with charisma and see him as an effective leader.
• Followers with high communal values – people who promote collaborative partnerships and relationships and look to others for solidarity, friendliness, and intimacy – will not see Trump as a charismatic leader or as an effective leader.

The paper’s research supported the following two hypotheses:

• Followers who have negative attitudes toward female political leadership will see Trump as a charismatic and effective leader.
• Followers who perceive other social groups as threats are more likely to see Trump as charismatic and effective than if they saw no threats in other social groups. In other words, followers who have a sense of crisis due to their perception that other social groups threaten them will more likely see Trump as a charismatic and effective leader.

Discussion

The authors state that “the aggressive and blaming language used by Trump may have sparked emotions among followers, thereby increasing perceptions of attractiveness and making them more attentive to the unconventional solutions he advocated . . . Both the dissatisfaction with the status quo (blaming) and the arousal of his speech (aggression) are directly related to charismatic leadership perceptions.”

Trump’s rhetoric also connected with another aspect of charismatic leadership. It stirred controversy and was unconventional. He accomplished this in part by blaming certain social groups (Muslims, immigrants, Democrats) for causing problems. This attracted voters who were not politically correct but spoke out loud while others didn’t. Followers who perceived immigration and terrorism as major threats generally attributed charisma and effectiveness to Trump.

In a finding that reinforces much other literature on Trump’s supporters, the authors note that voters who saw “foreign newcomers as threatening American culture were heavily in favor of protecting America from foreign influence.” They add that their study also suggests “that voters who felt this way, and subsequently attributed charisma and effectiveness to Trump, were higher in self-esteem, higher in the romance of leadership, and held negative gender attitudes.”

Finding that Trump supporters were higher in self-esteem contradicts most of the literature, which suggests just the opposite. They explain this finding by the greater importance to these voters of their perceived threat of other social groups. This, they say, suggests that the more positive these voters, primarily white working-class voters, felt about themselves and their status, the more they perceived a threat by outsiders. Trump gave voice to their feelings by degrading and blaming outsiders for their troubles.

The research findings suggest that those followers who believe leaders essentially are the “source of power, knowledge, and expertise” may have been more influenced by Trump’s blaming rhetoric. Because these followers see the social groups identified by Trump as causing problems, they then see Trump as the person who has the best solutions to solve those problems. The authors point out that “leaders try to manage the interpretations of important constituencies and stakeholders through the manipulation of retrospective, causal accounts.”

The research results indicate both direct and indirect connections between followers’ less favorable attitudes toward women politicians and followers’ attributing both charisma and effectiveness to Trump. The authors suggest that the direct effects “may be due to the negative and misogynistic rhetoric used by Trump.” They opine that in such instances “followers are more attracted to leaders who say publicly what they feel and believe privately.”

Relative to the indirect effect, the authors say that each gender comprises a different social category, with each category having different attributes and expected behaviors. Thus, followers who see women in traditional, nurturing and motherly roles may have seen Clinton as a threat. And seeing her as a threat may have facilitated followers seeing Trump as a charismatic and effective leader.

Finally, contrary to expectations communal values did not foster attributions of charisma and effectiveness. But the authors point out that some research shows that authoritarian followers are not necessarily less communal per se. However, authoritarian followers (that is, followers of autocratic and agentic leaders) seek communion with those who share their beliefs and values. These values may be different than the values of society at large. In other words, how the study measured values may have led to this finding.

Leadership

Relative to leadership scholarship, the authors identify two theories worth future research. First, social identity theory may affect leadership. This theory suggests that as group membership becomes more important and members more strongly identify with the group, followers seek leaders who seem prototypical to the group. In this theory, the higher one’s self-esteem, the more likely that one will endorse and defend the group with which one identifies. Consequently, members of such a group will probably attribute charisma and effectiveness to a leader who seems to represent the qualities or properties of the group.

Second, they focus on the role of perceived threats to social groups. Here, people who perceive threats from other groups see their identity as threatened. They will support a prototypical leader who they believe can save them from the threat. Their threatened identity provides a context of crisis. They then attribute to a prototypical leader charisma and the potential effectiveness to resolve the crisis.

As they review their own findings, Carsten et al. make some final observations.
In a “reciprocal and symbolic manner, as the leader influences followers, the followers also influence and reward the leader.” The idea that leadership is in the eye of the beholder seems evident in their study. “Our results support the importance of continuing to study follower characteristics and beliefs as an important enabler of leadership attributions and leaders themselves.”

They wonder about the role of emotional contagion in the Trump campaign. “If charisma is a consequence of attraction and arousal, to what extent were the followers’ reactions to Trump largely emotional (as opposed to rational) in nature, and was this emotion amplified by other Trump followers?”

The authors acknowledge that their study illustrated a lack of direct effects between personal characteristics and attributions of charisma and effectiveness. They ask whether social or political context, group membership, or political affiliation may play a more significant role than follower characteristics in attributing charisma and effectiveness to a leader.

They believe that their findings address the importance of crisis perceptions in influencing charismatic attributions. Personal characteristics influence perceptions of a crisis and perceptions of a crisis drive charismatic attributions. This supports the idea that crisis is essential to charisma. The perception of a crisis may be more influential than personal characteristics in understanding how or when followers attribute charisma to a leader.

Comment

Leadership studies related to Trump’s election tend to highlight three concepts that most leadership scholarship seems to downplay or move to the background. These are (1) the nature and importance of followers, (2) the nature and importance of a leader’s rhetoric, and (3) the importance of recognizing and understanding the relationship between leadership and toxicity. The Carsten et al. study focuses mainly on the first two and only indirectly or lightly touches on the third. Prior posts have dealt with Trump and rhetoric, Trump and followers, and Trump and toxicity. These posts complement one another.

Emotion and group identity

The topic of followers and rhetoric plays up two points raised in the Carsten et al. paper that may be interrelated. One relates to the authors’ question about Trump’s followers and the extent to which followers’ reactions were more emotional than rational. Many commentaries suggest that Trump’s policies and actions are contrary to his base’s interests, and, therefore, that his followers’ support of Trump is more emotional than rational. The other relates to the importance of group membership or group identity in followers’ support of Trump. The authors suggest that group membership may play a more important role than follower characteristics in attributing both charisma and effectiveness to Trump.

These two points, the importance of emotion and the importance of group membership or identity, combine in the concept of “ressentiment.” Ressentiment refers to the hostility and frustration one may have toward the perceived source of that ressentiment. Frustration occurs because the person holding ressentiment feels that he or she can do nothing about it. The source of one’s ressentiment becomes seen as an enemy. A leader can emotionally mobilize people who have a common sense of ressentiment. Trump seems to excel in this tactic of generating emotionally intense followers. Future posts in this blog will further explore this notion.

In his campaign for the presidency, Trump focused on foreigners, especially Muslims and immigrants, as the cause of problems facing his potential followers. This gave his followers an explanation for the circumstance in which they found themselves in, especially relative to status and economic well-being, and an enemy at which to direct their ire. But this large set of followers was ineffectual, they could not do much of anything to address or solve their circumstances. They needed a strong, agentic leader, which Trump became.

But once elected, Trump faced a problem. He had a difficult time following through on his promises to his base. He could not eliminate the Affordable Care Act, could not build his border wall, and could not fully enact his Muslim ban. The Republican plutocratic tax legislation did not help his base much, especially compared to the wealthy and corporations. His tariffs tended to hurt his base and he had a difficult time successfully negotiating trade deals.

In order to keep his base, he had to intensify their support of him by identifying other enemies, such as the news media, Democrats, the “deep state,” the FBI, and so on. The base was perhaps not enlarged but was further aroused by Trump’s rhetoric of blame. But questions remain. How much longer could this last? How much deeper and intense could the divisions in society become?

Limitations

In looking at the paper’s data it seems that the authors’ methodology could not address several key issues. First, the median age of the paper’s sample is 25, while the average age is 29.53. Clinton won well over half of the voters aged 29 or younger, while Trump won well over half of the voters aged 50 years or more. In other words, the sample did not well represent Trump voters. Trump won over half of the white voters, while Clinton won well over half of the black and Hispanic voters. Other large divisions in voting patterns occurred with education levels and geography. Second, then, the sample did not contain information about race, education, and geography. The study findings may have been different had the sample fully represented the 2016 voters.

Finally, relying solely on transcripts prevents an analysis of non-verbal communication generated by facial expression and body behavior. Noticeably apparent at Trump rallies he is strutting, smirking, beaming at adulation, and other behaviors that stoke his oral message. Additionally, transcripts cannot show how Trump and his rally participants reinforce each other’s rhetoric and emotions. The authors briefly note this in the paper’s limitations section. One might compare the visual of Trump’s facial expressions and body behavior to video clips of Mussolini and Hitler before they took formal control of the government in Italy and Germany.

If propaganda can be defined as the use of biased or misleading information to promote a particular cause or point of view, then the chief leadership skill of Trump may be his skill at propaganda. More charitably, Trump’s chief skill is impression management or branding. He has spent most of his life focusing on branding and impression management and has a good deal of experience of what works and does not work.

Nonetheless, the study demonstrates the significance of a leader’s rhetoric or discourse to his or her followers and this is especially true when most of the followers cannot have personal knowledge much less acquaintanceship with the leader.

Overview note

Just about all the prior leadership posts on this blog cover scholarly articles treating Trump as a leader. Collectively, these posts highlight aspects of leadership that the scholarly literature treats minimally. This overview note begins to contrast most scholarly research studies on leadership and the analysis of trump as a leader.

The leadership posts place perhaps their most emphasis on Trump’s rhetorical power and style. Most leadership studies place little emphasis on a leader’s rhetoric or discourse. Two points may explain this. Relatively few people know Trump personally or have much experience working with/for him. Consequently, Trump, or anyone operating under these circumstances, must have a powerful way of connecting with people. Second, on the other hand, most scholarly literature on leadership assumes that the leader operates within a formal organization or institution Here rhetorical skills may be much less important because followers’ knowledge of the leader, if not personal contact, is much greater.

The analysis of Trump’s rhetoric largely makes the point that his rhetoric’s content significantly facilitates his success. Trump’s rhetorical content usually focuses on resentment, exploiting the fear or dislike people have of the other. Scholarly leadership research works contrary to this. Leaders in formal organizations must promote collaboration, cooperation, and consistency in developing common outputs and outcomes for the organization. The conscious promulgation of resentment and division harms the organization and is contrary to leadership in a formal organization. Writ large, one can suggest that the effect of Trump’s rhetoric not only intensifies the divisions within our country but increases the emotional antagonisms between those divisions.

The emphasis on followers provides a second major difference between scholarly research on leadership versus studies of Trump. Leadership studies don’t ignore followers, and a major part of leadership research focuses on the relation between a leader and his or her followers. But leadership scholarship focuses on how the relating between leader and follower takes place. Analyzing the nature of a leader’s followers, their characteristics and beliefs seem unimportant when the context is formal organizations. While the rhetoric of scholarly leadership research talks about seeing employees or followers as people, these employees and followers quickly become assets. Over time, many assets decrease in value or relevance. Are people more than assets?

Trump’s leadership behavior largely focuses on maintaining divisions within society and, as well, the adoption of values often out of the mainstream. Such behavior necessitates understanding how or why the personal characteristics, beliefs, and values of his followers lead them to support Trump. In formal organizations leaders usually try to influence or mold the behaviors and values of followers/employees to promote successful organizational outcomes. Trump, however, attempts to intensify and bring out of his followers the beliefs and values that often lie beneath their surface, behaviors and values that he believes will sustain his leadership.

Thirdly, the Trump leadership posts stay close to the topic of toxicity. This may mean concern about the dark triad of Machiavellianism, dysfunctional narcissism, or psychopathy. Or it may mean excesses, such as lack of intellectual humility, or excess hubris, or near-total reliance on intuition and making quick, solitary decisions. The leadership literature does discuss toxicity, but it usually sees toxicity as relatively infrequent or perhaps even relatively inconsequential. Often, toxicity is addressed in conjunction with ethics. But what if leadership toxicity is not at the margin? What if it is relatively common? How do organizations and followers deal with toxicity?

The scholarly leadership literature centers almost exclusively on formal organizations and how senior managers should lead or lead organizations. It suggests that once one steps outside formal organizations, leaders who deal with informal groups or large segments of society independent of managing formal organizations have little studied advice to help them become effective with positive outcomes for society.

Overall these posts to date, in my view, find that Trump lacks the fundamentals necessary to becoming an effective and positive leader. His main skill is encapsulated in his rhetorical powers, such as propaganda, branding, image management, which tend to be accompanied by finding and heightening the resentment, fear, and sense of powerlessness within his followers.

If propaganda can be defined as the use of biased or misleading information to promote a particular cause or point of view, then the primary leadership skill of Trump may be his skill at propaganda. More charitably, one can label this skill as impression management or branding. He has spent most of his life focusing on branding and impression management. He knows what works and does not work for him.

Nonetheless, the posts demonstrate the significance of a leader’s rhetoric or discourse to his or her followers. This is especially true when most of the followers cannot have personal knowledge much less acquaintanceship with the leader.