GOOD FAITH BETWEEN DISCOURSE AND PRACTICE: THE POPULIST LEADER IN HIS EGOCENTRIC NETWORK
GOOD FAITH BETWEEN DISCOURSE AND PRACTICE: THE POPULIST LEADER IN HIS EGOCENTRIC NETWORK

Summary/Abstract: In this paper we propose a fresh perspective for analysing an ever-strong phenomenon, that of the populist leader. The populist leader is the candidate that discursively positions himself as the representative of the good ‘people’ against the established and corrupted elite. But how pure is the populist leader himself, does the moral discourse match his actual social network? The object of study is the populist leader in his egocentric network and we study it from the perspective of a juridical concept, that of bona fides. In order to analyse the good faith of the populist leader in his egocentric network, we designed a methodological tool inspired by sociometry, a matrix that allows us to observe the coherence between the ego and the alters in the egocentric network of the candidate. Two main dimensions of bona fides are, since Cicero’s time, the honesty of words, and the integrity of action. These two dimensions are operationalised in our simple matrix, and the populist leader that feeds the matrix is Călin Georgescu, a meteoric candidate in the Romanian presidential elections, that emerged unexpectedly and won more than twenty percent of votes in the 2024 presidential elections. The result of the analysis shows incoherence between what the leader says about people in his egocentric network, and how the alters in the egocentric network position themselves toward the populist leader. We believe that our conceptual and methodological approach is scalable, and be put to testing whether a populist leader can ever be of good faith.

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