The Construction of Charisma and Populist Appeal: Modi and Xi Jinping in Comparative Analysis

Political scientists conceptualize populist politics as a political strategy whereby a leader claims to be the people’s sole true representative reaching voters directly bypassing established intermediary organizations (Wayland 1999, 381) and as such, the populist actor him/herself becomes the crucial element (Ernst, Engesser, Buchel, Blassnig, Esser, 2017). Not surprisingly, one of the key constitutive elements of populist movements is a focus on a charismatic, often, narcissistic and intolerant party “leadership” (van Kessel, 2011; Wayland, 1999; Heinich 2008; Linden, 2008). Political scientists define charisma as a distinct type of legitimate leadership that is personal and aims at the radical transformation of an established institutional order (Pappas, 2011). While the construction of charisma has been a subject of analysis in political communication, salience of the media’s role in manufacturing charisma, particularly, in this age of “mediatized populisms” (Chakravartty and Roy, 2017) has been underexplored.

This paper illuminates the similarities and differences in the use of media to construct a personal appeal by the leaders of the world’s two most populous countries - India and China – across different political systems. Both Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Modi have carefully crafted and drawn on personal appeal to consolidate their hold over authority. Xi Jinping has been described as China’s first populist president (Babones, 2017) as he has projected himself as both as the affable “Xi Dada” unleashing the popular anti-corruption crackdown while burnishing his strongman credentials through the “rule of fear”. (Chang and Ren, 2017). The incumbent leader, Modi’s historic parliamentary majority was ascribed to his charismatic personality. The Modi’s “charismatic” leadership is attributed to have fashioned a new hegemonic bloc by reconstituting the voting public pulling together contradictory strands of tradition and modernity, capitalists and the working class, upper and lower castes, rewriting electoral success (Sinha, 2017; Chakravartty and Roy, 2017).

Both the states have significantly differing political systems but their political leaders bear a striking similarity in their embrace of digital technologies at the heart of propaganda, public opinion and social control work (Creemers, 2016). A discourse analysis of Modi’s Twitter account and the nearest Chinese equivalent, a public Weibo account of People’s Daily about Xi, titled Xue Xi Wei Pi Tai will be undertaken over a six month period preceding their elections to examine the manufacture of charismatic appeal and personal image and the constitutive elements of it. The research seeks to examine and outline strategies adopted by populist leaders like Modi and Xi Jinping, who have always exerted tight control over media coverage of themselves (Ohm, 2015), used to manufacture political charisma adopting the Weberian idea of it being socially and politically constructed (Keller, 1999).

Given the inextricable link between charisma and populism, analyzing the process by which political charisma is constructed is crucial to our understanding of the mechanisms of populist politics (Gurov and Zankina, 2013) and its implications for deepening authoritarianism across political systems.