How does public weeping affect public approval rate of a politician?

ABSTRACT

Politicians’ ways of speaking and dressing, how they address other leaders and the masses, and even the kind of gestures they use are all evaluated in detail by the media, commentators, and the electorate. Of the above, however, of particular interest to the media is when they openly cry in public. Public weeping is often regarded as a sign of weakness, and even irrationality; however, a political leader doing so publicly may be able to build a connection with the people in some instances. In this paper, I analyse whether public weeping can affect a leader’s public approval. Known for his tearfulness, Turkish President Erdogan has wept publicly twenty-seven times between 2014–2022. Based on time-series data and the autoregressive distributed lag model, it does, in fact, seem that public weeping has significantly increased President Erdogan’s public approval rate.

KEYWORDS:

• public opinion
• political psychology
• voting behavior
• emotions
• Turkey

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Diagnostics checks, additional analyses, descriptive statistics, and robustness checks can be found in the online supplemental material.