Populist leaders: between Psychologist’s Hammer and Clinicist’s Anvil
https://doi.org/10.31249/poln/2025.04.08
Abstract
The increasing level of personalization of politics after 2000 is seen as a harbinger of threats to democracy from populist leaders introducing irrational elements into politics. The article gives an overview of the state of contemporary debate on personality traits of populist leaders. It examines political-psychological and psychodiagnostic approaches to the analysis of the personalities of populist presidents, using psychobiographical methods and methods of content analysis. The article reviews the potential of psychology and clinical psychiatry in the field of studying the personalities of politicians and the tools for remote profiling of their personalities. Current studies of the personalities of populist leaders and their supporters on the basis of socially desirable traits of the Big Five Inventory and the aversive traits of the Dark Triad are analysed. The sentiment analysis of populist speeches confirms the main negative populist emotions to be fear and anger. The article evaluates the potential and limitations of using chat GPT to analyse politicians’ speeches in order to identify positive and negative personality traits. The article reveals that the personality of a populist leader matters, and the electoral success requires not only a “thin-centered ideology” but an extraordinary individual presenting it. The research confirms that populists differ from mainstream politicians by the presence of pronounced traits of the “Dark Triad”, disagreeableness and emotional instability. The article concludes that scholars need to reevaluate the populist personality as a pathological norm (in Mudde’s logic), in which extreme manifestations of aversive personality traits distinguish populists from mainstream candidates and ensure voter support.
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