Political charisma — why is it both powerful and perilous?

Over the last decade, large majorities of voters in advanced democracies like the United States, the UK, France, Germany and Australia have come to feel that their elected representatives are not responsive to their needs, do not put the interests of people over politics, are not capable of delivering on their promises, are not truthful, and are, generally speaking, “corrupt”, or at least “in it for themselves”. (Compare, for instance, the remarkably similar findings in the OECD’s 2026 “Trust in Government” survey, the recent “Australian attitudes towards government and democracy” report commissioned by the Centre for Policy Development, and ANU’s “Political and policy attitudes in an age of pessimism” report from March this year.)

This trend has led even some democratic theorists to conclude that the problem with modern politics is, well, politicians. It’s an easy sentiment to sell, and its appeal has been a boon for those “political entrepreneurs” who are particularly adept at harnessing underlying popular resentment and disrupting the status quo, only to find themselves subject to the same laws of electoral gravity when in government.

Before taking the leap and advocating for citizen rule by means of “lottocracy” or some other form of sortition, it is worth asking ourselves what we actually want from politicians. Is competence and effectiveness in the delivery of vital public services enough? Or do we both expect and need more? For there seems to be a troubling paradox lying beneath the popular discontent: either politicians function as idées fixes, as mere things upon whom the people can obsessively heap blame for all that has gone wrong, who are exempt from ordinary human consideration and thus “fair game” for harassment, abuse, even violence; or politicians bear a weight popular expectation that verges on the messianic. In other words, there is a tendency to view politicians as either sub-human or super-human.

This is where the fraught question of the nature of political charisma comes to bear. While there have been occasions where voters have reverted to normalcy, stability, a “safe pair of hands” after a period of mercurial or chaotic governance — the obvious examples here would be Joe Biden in 2020, Anthony Albanese in 2022 and Keir Starmer in 2024 (with the pandemic being a major factor in each case) — by and large the direction of electoral traffic has gone toward the more strident, passionate, “authentic”, disruptive, norm-busting, in a word