Charisma is a label applied to winners after the fact

The argument

A second argument that charisma does not influence campaigns is about the concept rather than the evidence. Proponents of this position argue that charisma has no agreed content: it is not defined in advance, cannot be measured independently of the response it is supposed to explain, and is attributed to candidates of entirely opposed manners, the warm and the austere, the fluent and the halting alike. A term applicable to any style of presentation, they argue, identifies no property of the candidate; it names the fact that some audience responded, which is the thing requiring explanation rather than the explanation itself. The second observation is that the response varies with the audience and the moment. The same performance is described as commanding by those already inclined to the candidate's side and as hectoring by those who are not, and a manner that appeals in one period can be unelectable in the next. Proponents argue that this is what one would expect if the perceived quality is produced by the relationship between a candidate and a particular electorate's expectations, rather than being something the candidate carries into the room. The conclusion is that explanations invoking charisma do no work. They cannot say in advance who will win, they are revised after each result to fit it, and they divert attention from the things that can be examined beforehand: the state of the economy, the record of the incumbents, the organisation on the ground, the shape of the electorate. Proponents argue that treating a label applied to winners as a cause of winning is a way of restating the result rather than accounting for it.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Those who hold that charisma matters reply that difficulty of definition is not absence of a phenomenon: attention, trust and persuasiveness are hard to specify and are studied and measured all the same, including through surveys taken before a vote in which voters rate candidates on exactly these qualities. They add that audience-dependence is expected rather than damaging, since appeal is a relation between a speaker and particular listeners, and a factor can be real while being specific to its context. Being hard to define in advance, they argue, is a problem for the research rather than an argument that nothing is there.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Attention, trust and persuasiveness are difficult to define and are measured all the same, including in surveys taken before a vote in which voters rate candidates on precisely these qualities. [Rejecting P2] Variation with the audience is what an appeal between a speaker and particular listeners would look like, so the premise describes the phenomenon rather than dissolving it. [Rejecting P3] That commentary on charisma is often retrospective and glib is a criticism of the commentary, not of the underlying factor, which can be studied prospectively instead. [Rejecting C] The premises establish that charisma is hard to define and is often invoked lazily, not that it has no influence.