Parties as Disciplinarians: Charisma and Commitment Problems in Programmatic Campaigning

We study how parties balance the benefits of disciplined programmatic campaigning with the electoral appeal of charismatic but potentially unfaithful candidates. We incorporate the well-known collective action problem arising from candidates’ inability to fully internalize the fruits of programmatic brand building. Although parties may strategically use promotions to induce brand building efforts, we show that the party may be unable to commit to such a promotion scheme when the electoral returns to candidate charisma are high. We further demonstrate how electoral volatility and parties’ ingroup loyalties shape their commitment to reward brand building. Volatility increases the focus on candidate charisma and decreases programmatic campaigning, but only among parties with weak group attachments. Parties with loyal partisans place emphasis on both candidate charisma and programmatic messaging. Empirical analyses of crossnational data and quantitative and qualitative case studies in Brazil, Austria, and Spain are consistent with our predictions. Verification Materials: The data and materials required to verify the computational reproducibility of the results, procedures, and analyses in this article are available on the American Journal of Political Science Dataverse within the Harvard Dataverse Network, at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AWSQTW. Charisma, understood as a quality of one’s personality that is appealing to others and can inspire loyalty and following toward oneself (Willner and Willner 1965), provides political purchase. Charismatic politicians create strong emotional bonds with voters (Andrews-Lee 2019) that go beyond the support established through persuasion (Dumitrescu, Gidengil, and Stolle 2015), and appear better able than less charismatic politicians to weather criticism and poor performance (Madsen and Snow 1991; Merolla and Zechmeister 2011). It thus seems that office-seeking parties would do well to nominate as many charismatic candidates as they can. The recent personalistic turn in the politics of many countries is suggestive of the electoral value of political charisma. Yet, charismatic politicians seem also less inclined to toe the party line than their less “inspiring” counterparts. Recent examples can be found across regional, ideological, and institutional contexts. After the 2018 U.S. Congressional elections, media-savvy James R. Hollyer, Benjamin Evans Lippincott Associate Professor in Political Economy, Department of Political Science, University of Minnesota, 267 19th Ave. S. , Social Sciences Building 1414, Minneapolis, MN 55455 (jhollyer@umn.edu). Marko Klašnja, Assistant Professor, School of Foreign Service and Government Department, Georgetown University, 3700 O St. NW, ICC 593, Washington, DC 20057 (marko.klasnja@georgetown.edu). Rocío Titiunik, Professor, Department of Politics, Princeton University, 001 Fisher Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544-1012 (titiunik@princeton.edu). For helpful comments and suggestions we thank Royce Caroll, José Antonio Cheibub, Kevin Deegan-Krause, Dominik Duell, Danny Hidalgo, Phil Keefer, Herbert Kitschelt, Horacio Larreguy, John Marshall, Monika Nalepa, Natalija Novta, Carlo Prato, Nita Rudra, Milan Svolik, Emily Sellars, Margit Tavits, Joshua Tucker, Erik Voeten, Peter van der Windt, participants at the 2015 and 2016 annual APSA meetings, the 2015 and 2017 EPSA meetings, and participants at seminars and workshops at Columbia, Essex, Georgetown, Harvard, Higher School of Economics, Duke, Fundação Getúlio Vargas Sao Paolo, Institute For Advanced Study Tolouse, Juan March III Madrid, Michigan State, Minnesota, NYU, Oxford, Peking, Texas A&M, Chicago, Yale, and UTH Zurich. We also thank Karen Ferree, Michele Kuenzi, and Scott Mainwaring for generously sharing their data. James Hollyer thanks the Lippincott Foundation and the Niehaus Center on Globalization and Governance for research support. Many thanks also to Molly Dunn, Ryan Atkinson, and Andrea Roos for excellent research assistance. American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 66, No. 1, January 2022, Pp. 75–92 ©2021, Midwest Political Science Association DOI: 10.1111/ajps.12638