Special powers? The role and impact of celebrities in the policy process

It is becoming increasingly common to read media reports of how this or that celebrity has caused a change of policy. In the UK, press stories have told of how the footballer Marcus Rashford forced a u-turn in government policy on free school dinners; or how the chef Jamie Oliver changed the menu of those dinners. In the US, Kim Kardashian was credited with persuading Donald Trump to release a prisoner. And at the level of international government, rock star Bono is alleged to have changed the minds of G8 leaders, among others. But are these accounts in any way accurate? Do celebrities have this kind of influence? And if so, does this represent a distinct form of power, one that is not enjoyed by other lobbyists, but is a consequence of their media and celebrity status? This paper is an attempt to answer these questions. It does so by looking closely at a series of comparative case studies, including those mentioned above, and draws primarily on the documentary accounts provided by the key actors and others. These case studies are used to assess whether indeed celebrities have ‘special powers’ that are not available to other political actors, under what conditions. Where the latter include the issue area, the political context, the celebrity’s claim to authority or representation, and, crucially, the role media play in the constitution of celebrity ‘power’. The paper will, I hope, contribute in particular to the questions raised in the Panel description about whether other elites – in this case celebrities – are being empowered by new forms of media practice and discourse, and what impact they may be having on the policy process. There are two main sets of literature that frame this research. The first is that of policy studies. Here the question is how the ‘celebrity’ might (or might not) be incorporated into the differing approaches adopted by policy analysts (and the importance they attach to media and culture more generally). The other field is that of celebrity politics, in which attention has been focused on the impact of celebrities on popular opinion and on media agendas, and to a much lesser extent on the impact of celebrities on policy-making itself. This paper offers tentative contributions to both these fields, and raises the possibility that celebrities have a distinctive form of power that, in certain circumstances allows them greater influence than is allowed to policy activists. And further, that this power derives in part from the familiar form of media power (setting agendas etc) and of mediated charismatic power.