Populist leadership and charismatic following. An empirical analysis of social media interactions between leader and followers.

Successful populist leaders are frequently described as charismatic, theoretically implying followers who unconditionally support and believe in the leader’s extra-ordinariness and mission. Many scholars have criticized the charisma-thesis, however, it is often ignored that charisma instead of being a trait of the leader, resides in ‘the eye of the beholder’. Considered as such, charisma is one of the possible outcomes of subjectively, interactively, and interpretatively constructed leader-follower relationships. Hence our question: If and under which circumstances does populist leadership gather a charismatic following? Social media provides us with a yet underexplored empirical possibility to study populist leaders’ discourse and followers’ reactions. Therefore, we analysed data from Belgium’s most popular selfmanaged political facebook-page, Theo Francken’s, secretary of state for migration and often accused of ethno-populism.