Video Politics – and U.S. Voters’ Attraction to CEOs Running for President

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Politics and the Media (Table 9)

Abstract

This theoretical brief uncovers and interprets a rising electoral advantage for chief executive (CEO) candidates in United States presidential elections. This pattern, while apparent from the rise of modern parties in the 1860s, gets stronger with televised U.S. politics in the mid-20th century. Out of 19 presidential elections between 1952 and 2024, here I show 11 matchups in which one nominee was, or had been, a chief executive – meaning a head of state, governor, mayor, or corporate CEO – while the opponent had never been a chief executive. The CEO candidate beat the non-CEO candidate in 9 of 11 such matchups 82% from the 1950s to 2024. By comparison the CEO’s advantage was 67% from the 1860s through the 1940s, winning 4 of 6 CEO-to-non matchups. Since the 1980s with the emergence of cable television and later, social media, CEO-to-non matchups have been presented to U.S. voters eight times in general elections for president – in which the CEO candidate has beaten the non-CEO 7 times out of 8, for a CEO win rate of 88%. The 2020 election of non-CEO Biden, beating President Trump, is the one contrary instance since the rise of cable TV and social media. To make sense of this, I draw on Max Weber’s theory of charismatic authority, Georg Simmel’s notion of sociation, C. Wright Mills’s insights on celebrity and business chiefs, and sociology of emotions from Émile Durkheim, Erving Goffman, and Randall Collins – along with other empirical and theoretical scholarship on political charisma and anti-charisma, charm, fandom, and mediatized performance of executive agency and populist style. And I propose a concept of video politics. Visual and auditory media transmit chief executive personas that the American electorate has favored in rising proportion. This may also help to explain the MAGA movement as Trump fandom.

Author

• Brian Hoeft, CUNY-Baruch College