The paper explores the connection between political capital and political charisma. Although the concepts share the aspect of distinguishing persons as political representatives, Bourdieu differentiates between political capital, personal capital and charisma. His notion of political capital is based on the trustworthiness of political actors and is dependent on forms of collective representation. Political capital signifies both the clout and gravity of a political organization and a politician’s reputation and is as such a fragile capital. At its core, it is generated via the authenticity of an actor and felicitous performances of being a representative. In this understanding it partially overlaps with Weber’s conceptualization of charisma. The paper explores these convergences of Bourdieu and Weber and introduces a critical reformulation of charisma as a group phenomenon.
I argue that charisma is based both on individual performances that generate a “pecking order” of authority and on collective projections in which a group takes an individual as a person who represents the minority of their best – and thereby ascribes charisma to the person. As a public figure, this person gains acceptance as a symbolic representative of the group and is placed into opposition to other groups that are ranked as lower in status and locked in their lower status by pejorative stereotypes. An assessment of charisma thus has to take such relational aspects into consideration and can approach the operationalization of the concept via communicative dynamics: ascriptions of praise and blame. Positive campaigning and branding of public figures as embodiments and representatives of a group’s values and virtues usually go hand in hand with negative campaigning against opponents. How such communication can be measured and integrated into the LCI is an important question that is addressed in the paper’s conclusion.
