When Politicians Make Nice

A conversation with sociologist Julia Sonnevend about her new book, “Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics”

Sep 13, 2024

Audiences want to see politicians behaving authentically, especially when they are on stage. Here, after introducing Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate in Philadelphia, Vice President Kamala Harris gives Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff a big smooch, and Walz embraces his wife Gwen. Photo credit: lev radio/Shutterstock

The late June evening that United States President Joe Biden stumbled on the debate stage on June 27, 2024 changed the trajectory of the 2024 election. It wasn’t that he just seemed old; it was that the man who had charmed voters for half a century with his bright smile, kindness, and folksy quips seemed to have vanished. Perhaps Biden could go on being President, the reasoning went among panicked Democrats, but he couldn’t win an election.

Elections may be about issues, but winning them requires the capacity to connect with an audience. Americans talk about whether candidates and office holders are “likeable;” whether a ticket has “chemistry;” and whether a leader is someone we would “like to have a beer with.” As the party went into motion to elevate Vice President Kamala Harris, and then Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, to the national ticket, Julia Sonnevend, Associate Professor of Sociology and Communications at The New School for Social Research, added a new word to our political vocabulary. In her new book, Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics (Princeton University Press, 2024), Sonnevend explores the means by which politicians make themselves charming to us—and how we, the audience, decide whether they have succeeded.

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Claire Potter: Julia, how did you come to this topic?

Julia Sonnevend: I grew up in Hungary, so I've observed a lot of charismatic, charming politicians in a volatile political environment. Because of this, I've always been interested in charm and its influence on diplomacy and political change.

But the idea came in a faculty meeting at another institution when colleagues expressed concern about “charming” job candidates: they seduce us in the interview, then are not productive, they will not participate—and so on. I thought it was so interesting that this is what we would be afraid of, right? That somebody charming and charismatic would enter our fortress.

So, your colleagues presumed that to be charming was to be inauthentic.

There is a pervasive sense of distrust of charming people, but my research also shows that charm is closely connected to authenticity. Charm operates on the spectrum between seduction and deception. When you are charmed, when your heart is captured, it's closer to seduction. But then if you feel tricked, or perceive that the performance is fake, it's a deception. So, it depends on how the charmer manages to project authenticity.

Of course, since I'm analyzing media, the strange thing is that we all know that mediated environments are fake on some level. So, we want people to be deeply authentic in an inherently fake environment.

Following Max Weber, who you mention in the introduction, while a politician can work on their charm, it's audiences that get to decide whether they're charming or not.

Yes: and there is not only one audience, but multiple audiences, right? There can also be context collapse, when suddenly people from very different circles watch the same video. Authenticity is required in very fake, very constructed, very managed environments. The audience is fragmented and international; yet we all want this character to be just like us, a person we want to have a beer with.

So, there are two things at war when it comes to charm: seduction and deception. Now, are those bad things in politics? Good things? Or just different things?

I think we Eastern Europeans are more familiar with political seduction than Americans are, and that it can have a positive effect when there are tired, exhausted audiences, who lack attention for politics, particularly the young. If you have a charming character—well, just think about last summer’s development in the American election with Vice President Kamala Harris becoming the candidate, and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz joining the ticket. An election that was boring became interesting. A charming character can do that.

At the same time, in charm there is always the risk of deception. So, people run tests continuously. Is the candidate authentic? Real? Someone I can relate to? Or is that person cringey-fake?

Well, and as we know, thinking literally about former President Donald Trump, one person's seduction is another person's sexual assault, right?

So, you introduce the topic of trust and political preferences. We all belong to political tribes, and leaders are key members of that tribe. Depending on your political preference, you might regard a certain political performance as seductive or deceptive.

But let’s take another example: former President Bill Clinton. I've read a lot of political biographies of him; nearly all of them mentioned that even if you don't like Clinton, you go into the room, and he sucks you in like a vacuum cleaner. You are the one and only. Monica Lewinsky wrote about Clinton’s charm in her memoir and characterized it as “lethal,” a murderous form of charm.

Right. But American politics play a small role in this book: instead, you take us around the world, starting with the former Prime Minister of New Zealand, Jacinda Ardern.

Jacinda Ardern is an interesting case. She was always on stage, especially on social media. That doesn't mean she wasn’t authentic, but her self-presentation was a form of theater. And because her term was during the Trump administration, for American and Western audiences, she became the iconic anti -Trump because she put kindness at the center of her campaigns.

Pulling this off was a delicate balance because she was a leader and a politician, but she also showed everyday aspects of her life as a woman. She was available to audiences, even in the delivery room before giving birth, live on Facebook. We saw her struggle as a mother: she brought her baby to the UN while she gave a big speech—a version of everyday difficulties many of us experience. It was a powerful, very gendered message to put on a global stage.

Let's put that gendered message in tension with your chapter about another woman leader, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who was authentic without being charming at all.

I included Merkel because I wanted a counter-case. Social scientists want to show examples that make the argument stronger because they seem wrong or stand out. For Merkel, I looked at Instagram because I thought that if there is a platform that is about charm, it’s Instagram. It's very visual, very spectacular.

Initially, Merkel’s social media team played around a little bit, trying to show her in a kind of charming light. Then it just became Angela Merkel, herself, in this regular way, but on Instagram. So, you have different jacket colors each time--that's about all the difference that you see.

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What that did though, was communicate predictability. You might have a global pandemic going on, or a huge international crisis, but it’s Angela Merkel, just being there for you.

I also emphasize in that chapter that she’s a unique case since here’s where context matters. Because of Hitler, Germany had an exceptionally bad experience with charisma, so there is a pervasive, very deep, sense of distrust about that among the German voting public. That doesn't mean there aren’t charming characters in German politics, but there is a higher level of audience skepticism.

Let's shift to a case that you are most familiar with: Viktor Orbán of Hungary, an autocrat who has been elected repeatedly. What can we learn from Orbán's charm?

That chapter came from my annoyance with the American media coverage of Orbán. I felt it was simplistic, often two-dimensional. Yes, he's an authoritarian; yes, he's an illiberal leader. Yes, you can present him as a strong man or a mini-Mussolini. But if you do only that, you miss core political dynamics. He did win four consecutive elections in a—yes, tweaked, and complicated format. Nonetheless, there is a core set of real believers, and I wanted to understand better why he resonates with Hungarian audiences.

What I found looking at Instagram—and particularly Facebook, the most important platform in Hungary—is that Orbán is a more personable, more relatable character on social media if you're Hungarian. He tries to be the most essential representation of the Hungarian nation.

In July, 2024, Viktor Orbán posed for a selfie with a Hungarian family at an annual summer camp and university in Tusnád that promotes ethnonationalism. Photo credit: Facebook

It's important to note that when he's doing that, he's also deliberately excluding people. For instance, when he's displaying pictures of his very heterosexual white family, or he's diapering his grandchildren, there is a message, not just about charm, but about how LGBTQ Hungarians are outside the national community.

Orbán’s strategies include something you examine in other chapters too, the idea of the charm offensive. That charm has ramifications for foreign policy as well as domestic policy.

Political scientists have shown that the last 30 years have been marked by increasing political personalization. Charm offensives are brief, short public relations campaigns in which countries try to shift their international image through a charming political leader. They are particularly popular with authoritarian regimes that need a quick image makeover.

We simply pay more attention to personalities than to institutions, values, or even facts. If you think about the international context, we are often talking about countries Americans know very little about. And when there is a relatable political character, or a character who we really dislike, it is easier to put the country in a box.

Charming political leaders function as cognitive shortcuts, a simplified, condensed forms of their countries. And scholars of political communication show that if people like a political leader, they are more likely to visit the country, buy their products, and so on.

There are international figures who aren't explicitly political, who are only charming, such as the English royal family.

Don't get me started: I'm a royal family newsreader.

So, when the royal family goes into crisis, is it because they cease to be charming?

Think about Prince Harry and Meghan Markle: if you have these charming, more commercial, celebrity-like royal characters, the rest of the Institution tends to freak out. Then, they respond with charm offensives. Think about popular athletic and cultural events Prince William attends, and their attention to climate change. The everyday life of the Royal Family is an ongoing series of charm offensives.

Six-year-old Prince Louis of Wales lets it all hang out on the balcony of Buckingham Palace at the 2023 Trooping of the Colors. While some commenters demand that he behave, others found his antic refreshing. Screenshot by author/Prince Louis Instagram

Then there’s little Prince Louis, who is always doing goofy things in public. Some people say: that is a bad child. Other people, like me, think it’s authentic and refreshing to see a Windsor do something goofy, even if it’s a six-year-old.

I really look for the moments when he's annoying Kate. Those are my favorite scenes.

So, to return to politics: I want to pick up on what you said earlier about certain kinds of political maneuvers requiring charm. And there’s some shock among pundits, me included, that the Trump campaign is refusing to do what it needs to do to charm more moderate voters. Why?

I’m curious about this too. What we are looking for in politicians is basically this next-door neighbor character, and being charming is very much about projecting that you are “one of us.”

That’s complicated for a political party that draws such sharp boundaries between “them” and “us,” and you know, most Americans are moderates. That's the constituency Trump tries to communicate with. At the same time, if you look at Trump’s events, there are attempts at charm. Wearing a red baseball hat with a suit is not something he would likely do in his everyday life. It is an attempt to create a tribal identity by appearing to be a regular kind of everyday American.

What are your thoughts?

I think the GOP had a plan before Biden stepped back: consolidate the base and hope that the Democratic vote would be depressed because his voters were depressed. Now, they're having trouble pivoting from that.

The other thing is that JD Vance genuinely may not know how to do this stuff. Early in his candidacy, an interviewer tossed him a softball question: What makes you smile? All American politicians know the answer to that: My family makes me smile.

And he just blew it. I mean, he just tossed out this policy thing. So, that makes me think that some people have charm, and some people don't.

It's hard for a social scientist to admit that might be the case. But one of the things I wanted to do in this book is to poke social science, okay? Because we tend to measure things and define things and pin down things and often murder, you know, the best parts of social life by doing so.

Charm is very complicated to pin down in such a way. It will have different manifestations and forms and shapes, and that's okay. There is an unpredictable element in it. So, can you learn charm?

Or is it part of who you are?

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