Crisis, Charisma, and Consequences: Evidence from the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election

Abstract

We investigate how conditions of crisis affect perceptions of charisma and how these, in turn, affect blame attribution and self-sacrificial behavior. Our data are from a 2004 experimental study that preceded the U.S. presidential election, in which we manipulated concerns of a terrorist attack. The results show that those in the Crisis condition rated Bush higher on perceptions of charisma compared to those in the Good Times condition. The Crisis condition also directly and indirectly, via perceptions of charisma, affected whether Bush was blamed for failures in Iraq and our subjects' willingness to sacrifice their personal resources for his candidacy.

Terrorist Threat, Leadership, and the Vote: Evidence from Three Experiments

“…For example, scholars of TMT have found that individuals primed to think about 9/11 perceived Bush as a stronger leader than those in a control group (Landau et al 2004). In other work, we have shown that making terrorism salient through a media presentation caused subjects to project charisma onto George W. Bush (Merolla et al 2007). While the posited mechanism differs across studies, the end result is similar in that crises cause individuals to project relevant traits onto a person they deem capable of rescuing them from the crisis situation.…”

“…The Fall 2004 study design and manipulation check are also reported inMerolla et al (2007); we draw on that discussion here.…”

Crisis, charisma, values, and voting behavior in the 2004 presidential election

“…An article in Business Week (Smith, 2006) suggested that "Vicente Fox won the Mexican presidency in 2000 by using his charisma and marketing savvy to sell himself as an agent of change and the country's best hope of booting the corrupt Institutional Revolutionary Party [PRI] -in power for seven decades -from office" (p. 8). Merolla, Ramos, & Zechmesiter (2006) experimentally manipulated crisis (terrorist attack) prior to the 2004 elections and found that subjects in the "crisis" condition rated President Bush significantly higher on charisma than subjects in the "good times" condition. Halverston, Murphy, & Riggio (2004) also experimentally manipulated stress conditions and found that leaders of groups in the stress condition were perceived as significantly more charismatic than leaders in the no-stress condition.…”

Charismatic leadership in resistance to change

“…1111(Weber, -1112(Weber, , 1117Roberts & Bradley, 1988;Bryman, 1992, pp. 54-55;Merolla et al, 2007). However, in both cases treated here, the crisis took the form of an ongoing or imminent change that was perceived as intimidating to the group and its values and interests.…”

“…This applies to the important role of followers in enabling charisma (Howell & Shamir, 2005) and to the charisma-inducing effects of crises (Bligh, Kohles & Meindl, 2004;Merolla, Ramos & Zechmeister, 2007), powerful oratory and rhetorical devices (Awamleh & Gardner, 1999;Mio, Riggio, Levin & Reese, 2005), and leader self-sacrifice (Choi & Mai-Dalton, 1999;Halverson, Holladay, Kazama & Quiñones, 2004).…”