The Language of Legacies: The Politics of Evoking Dead Leaders

Abstract

How can leaders recover public trust and approval when government performance is low? We argue politicians use speeches evoking images of deceased predecessors to reactivate support temporarily. This distracts supporters from the poor performance and arouses empathy and nostalgia among them, causing them to perceive the current leader more favorably. We test this argument by scraping for all speeches by Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. We identify all instances when she referenced Juan Perón—the charismatic founder of the Justice Party. We find that as Kirchner’s approval rating decreases, the number of Perón references increases. To identify the causal mechanism and to ensure that endogeneity is not a concern, we employ text analysis and a natural experiment—courtesy of LAPOP. The results provide robust evidence that leaders reference their dead predecessors to evoke positive feelings. However, while doing so can improve public opinion, the effects manifest only in the short term and among supporters.