How can leaders recover public trust and approval when government performance is low? We argue politicians use speeches evoking images of deceased predecessors to reactivate support temporarily. This distracts supporters from the poor performance and arouses empathy and nostalgia among them, causing them to perceive the current leader more favorably. We test this argument by scraping for all speeches by Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. We identify all instances when she referenced Juan Perón—the charismatic founder of the Justice Party. We find that as Kirchner’s approval rating decreases, the number of Perón references increases. To identify the causal mechanism and to ensure that endogeneity is not a concern, we employ text analysis and a natural experiment—courtesy of LAPOP. The results provide robust evidence that leaders reference their dead predecessors to evoke positive feelings. However, while doing so can improve public opinion, the effects manifest only in the short term and among supporters.

Political movements founded by charismatic leaders are often considered ephemeral. Existing literature argues that because they rest on unmediated, emotional attachments between leaders and followers, these movements either fade quickly after their leaders disappear or transform into routinized parties. Yet, charismatic movements around the world have proven surprisingly resilient and have retained their personalistic core. Focusing on Argentine Peronism and Venezuelan Chavismo, this book investigates the nature and trajectory of charismatic movements from the perspectives of both leaders and followers. Using interviews, focus groups, and survey experiments, Caitlin Andrews-Lee reveals that charismatic movements can emerge, survive, and become politically revived by sustaining - not discarding - their personalistic character. Followers' charismatic attachments to the movement founder can develop into an enduring, deeply affective political identity that successors can reactivate under certain conditions by portraying themselves as symbolic reincarnations of the founder. Consequently, charismatic movements can have lasting, deleterious effects on democracy.

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Scholars have long claimed that political movements founded by charismatic leaders must undergo “routinization,” or depersonalization, to survive. Yet many such movements appear to have sustained their charismatic nature and have persisted or reemerged in cases as diverse as Argentina, Venezuela, Peru, Turkey, and China. Focusing on Argentine Peronism and Venezuelan Chavismo, this article examines the potential of new leaders to revive their charismatic predecessors’ legacies to perpetuate the movement and gain the followers’ support. Through face-to-face survey experiments conducted in both countries, the article shows that new leaders who (a) implement bold, initially impressive policies and (b) symbolically tie themselves to the charismatic founder cause citizens to express stronger emotional attachments to the movement and garner political support. The results challenge the notion that charismatic movements are short-lived and underscore the potential of these movements to impact democratic politics and party-system development long after their founders disappear.

Scholars suggest that charismatic movements must institutionalize to survive beyond the death of the founder. Yet charismatic movements around the world that have maintained their personalistic nature have persisted or reemerged. This article investigates the conditions under which politicians can use their predecessors' charismatic legacies to revive these movements and consolidate power. I argue that three conditions - the mode of leadership selection, the presence of a crisis, and the ability to conform to the founder's personalistic nature - shape successors' capacity to pick up their forefather's mantle and restore the movement to political predominance. To demonstrate my theory, I trace the process through which some leaders succeeded while others failed to embody the founder's legacy across three charismatic movements: Argentine Peronism, Venezuelan Chavismo, and Peruvian Fujimorismo. Alexander Lee, Incumbency, Parties, and Legislatures: Theory and Evidence from India Incumbent legislators in some developing countries are often thought to face an electoral disadvantage relative to challengers. This article traces this effect to high levels of centralization within the political parties and governments of these countries. In political systems dominated by party leaders, legislators face substantial formal and informal constraints on their ability to influence policy, stake positions, and control patronage, which in turn reduce their ability to build up personal votes. This theory is tested on a dataset of Indian national elections since 1977, using a regression discontinuity design to measure the effects of incumbency. Candidates less affected by centralization - those from less-centralized political parties and from parties not affected by restrictions on free parliamentary voting - have a low or non-existent incumbency disadvantage.