[…] Vote for Daddy Bernie, bitch.
-Cardi B1
Some people follow Beyonce because they hear her sing. More people follow Beyonce because they hear her sing and because some people follow her, which generates interest in everything Beyonce does. Soon springs to life an industry talking about Beyonce👏 Getting👏 Groceries👏. Then, people get paid to wear makeup and sit in studios talking about Beyonce Getting Groceries, and teens buy magazines that tell them how they can Get Groceries Like Beyonce in five easy steps.
But this much seems perhaps a touch predictable.
None of us has any reason whatsoever to think Beyonce knows anything about politics any more than Dennis Duffy does. She has no relevant expertise. She obviously has no relevant expertise. And yet, everyone wants to hear her opinion on who the next US president should be. And not just the Committee for Beyonce Getting Groceries. Even Hillary2 wants you to know who Beyonce thinks the next US president should be.
In a rational world, Beyonce endorsing Clinton for president wouldn’t matter. Voters would factor in her lack of relevant expertise, and so her endorsing Clinton would hold about as much weight as Shanaya sitting in a SoBo cafe saying people should, like, really vote for her ya. Come on you guys.
In our world, Bernie Sanders wants to talk healthcare with Cardi B, and Narendra Modi wants to fly kites with Salman Khan, even when he ends up in the endorsement equivalent of a friendzone.
In our world, we have whatever the fuck this is. In all its glory. All three minutes and twenty-two seconds of it.
So let’s talk about an extremely frivolous, extremely fascinating aspect of politics: celebrity endorsements of political candidates, and how they may work.
“I didn’t have to bring J-Lo or Jay Z,” Trump told a crowded rally Friday night in Hershey, Pennsylvania. “I am here all by myself. Just me. No guitar, no piano, no nothing.”3
Campaigns seek out celebrity endorsements in large part because they get more media coverage, increase awareness, and maybe sway some support - and they’re pretty cheap. Celebrity endorsements in politics haven’t been studied extensively4, and most of the framework used to think about them is carried over from research into celebrity brand endorsements5 (page 52).
Of course, politicians aren’t exactly products. When you buy a Pepsi - whether or not Disha Patani got you to buy it - you’re not trying to help it win; you’re sure you’ll get a Pepsi when you pay for one; and somehow, ‘Pepsi drinker’ just doesn’t have a way of sticking to someone’s identity the way ‘Modi voter’ does. But just how much?
In the 2008 Democratic primary, Oprah Winfrey endorsed Obama for president, after having talked about him for over a year6. In late 2007, when he was still considered a long shot, she organised rallies for him, giving him sorely needed visibility7. Oprah was at the peak of her popularity at this point. She had never endorsed a political candidate before. This was a historic candidacy for the first-ever African-American president. If there was ever an endorsement that was important, it was this one. “Does her formula work beyond the Oprah bubble?” The New York Times wondered8. “Can she translate her powers of suggestion - for a book, a hairstyle, an attitude toward life - into votes?”
She could. In a fascinating study, Garthwaite and Moore tried to gauge the impact of the endorsement by analysing Obama’s support in counties with higher per-capita sales of Oprah’s magazine and the books recommended in her book club. Controlling for socioeconomic factors - race, gender, education, income - and negating other explanations, they estimated that Oprah’s endorsement contributed more than a million votes to Obama9. With how close the 2008 primary ended up being, this was the whole ballgame - Oprah’s endorsement effectively clinched him the nomination.
It’s incredibly difficult to gauge this kind of an impact for most endorsements, to the point where it’s fair to question whether they have any at all. Even Garthwaite acknowledges that. “The question we really have to ask,” he says talking about the paper10, “is whether the fact that Oprah is such a powerful celebrity means that the magnitude of her endorsement is greater than others’, or if it means that only her endorsement, and no one else’s, would have an effect.”
Endorsements affect different segments of voters in different ways, serve different functions for different campaigns, and their effects can differ to a huge extent depending on the particular celebrity and candidate involved.
So how do celebrity endorsements of politicians work?
I think they work in three different ways.
First and obviously, they work in some measure how all endorsements are supposed to work: by getting you to associate some of the really positive meaning you associate with Beyonce with Clinton11. If you’re the kind of person who pays a lot of attention to your voting choice, who analyses all candidates and their policy positions to make a decision, the endorsement is unlikely to affect you much - but then, you’re really not the target audience. The people an endorsement may affect are the people who, when (if) they Pokemon Go to the polls, are making a casual voting choice based on the vibez they get12. If they’ve thus associated a lot of positive feelings with one candidate, they may end up pulling the lever for them.
Second, they indicate viability. The big difference between buying a product and voting for a politician is this one - that ultimately, you’d like to actually get the politician. Nobody - not least the kind of person who learns about a campaign from an endorsement - wants to vote for a losing candidate13. And celebrities are social elites14, after all: approval from them is a signal that this thing is legit and might actually go somewhere. This is especially necessary for a non-mainstream candidacy, like a young, unknown Senator with a funny name. A study conducted just after Oprah’s endorsement, and before she conducted rallies for Obama, found that hearing about the endorsement didn’t have a significant effect on likability, but it made respondents slightly more likely to vote for Obama, as well as judge him more likely to win the Democratic nomination15. (here’s the pinch of salt: differences found were small, and the study was conducted with mostly-white undergraduates - neither extremely representative, nor the audience with the most expected effect).
But these two mechanisms don’t explain the entirety of the tribal identity nature of politics in particular. They can’t explain why, for example, a majority of voters say they would be less likely to be a fan of a celebrity if they endorsed someone from the other party16. As a study found in 2008, when they hear Jennifer Aniston donates to Democrats, Democrats’ opinion of Jennifer Aniston improves, and Republicans’ opinion of her declines17. This suggests to me that an aspect of identity is involved.
Sitting alone on stage at a grand piano, the Oscar- and Grammy-winning singer [John Legend] also worked through his first hit, “Used to Love U” and last year’s Meghan Trainor collabo “Like I’m Gonna lose You,” telling the audience, “you can’t take your loved ones for granted, right? And we can’t take this election for granted Cincinnati, am I right?”18
One of the weirdest ways social media have amplified human behaviour is by enabling on an industrial scale what are called parasocial relationships19: one-way relationships where thousands (millions) of people feel like Jennifer Lawrence is practically their childhood friend, while she doesn’t even know they exist. The more she shares about her life, the stronger this ‘relationship’ gets. Over time, people trust what she says as they would a friend, and they start identifying with her. When she says something political they disagree with, it damages their ‘relationship’ - unless the issue isn’t really important to them, in which case they change their mind20 to agree with her. This has all the hallmarks of identification.
So, third: a celebrity endorsement, I think, is also support for the feeling of “People like me vote for Hillary Clinton”. When the relatability of “people like me” isn’t that strong, the second part doesn’t matter that much. If not voting for Clinton is that important to me, it can even change the definition of who is ‘people like me’.
For someone who is such a huge fan of Elizabeth Banks that they’ve watched Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008) (hey, I was in college! the title has the word porno!), remember the one time she retweeted a gif they shared, and in general think Elizabeth Banks is like totally me, haha, her endorsement of Clinton and that video masterpiece up there is a positive signal about voting for Clinton. For people who think of themselves as Democrats first, Banks’ endorsement of Clinton improves their opinion of Banks. For people whose identity is based around not being a Democrat, it’s an even stronger signal that Elizabeth Banks is not people like them. (Thought experiment: If Taylor Swift, Jane Fonda and Alec Baldwin all endorsed Ron DeSantis for President in 2024, how would that change Republican support for him? Discuss.)
These mechanisms are often complementary, and act on different segments of the population differently. An endorsement from a local newspaper is a signal from the (local) elite. An endorsement from Brad Pitt helps associate with Biden some of the feelings you associate with these abs. An endorsement from a local Instagram influencer you relate to is a signal that people like you are voting for Modi, almost as if a friend were telling you - except for the mass-produced, oneway nature of the friendship. An endorsement from Oprah can be anything, everything, depending on how you associate yourself with Oprah.
Perhaps there is a trend to these things: in an era when celebrities were faraway beautiful people with great singing voices, their approval was mostly a signal of viability from the social elite. In an era when celebrities are people you can tweet at and easily form parasocial relationships with - and as we go from celebrity culture to influencer culture - the identity and relation-based mechanism holds more sway. Influencers’ business is built on the strength of their parasocial relationships21. They’re more trusted as sources of information than celebrities when it comes to product endorsements, because they’re easier to relate to22. There’s no reason this wouldn’t be useful politically, and of course I’m not the first to see that. Both US parties tried to use social media influencers extensively in their 2020 election23. This is only going to grow.
Perhaps, in the next election, instead of Shankar Mahadevan24, BeerBiceps will tell you whom you should vote for.
About a week after he flew kites with Narendra Modi, Salman Khan sat down for an interview with Barkha Dutt25. The banner read Salman Flies Modi Kite: Strings Attached?
The ensuing week had seen a political controversy about the optics of the aforementioned kites, and Congress leaders had talked about how Modi was courting Salman’s endorsement to appeal to a ‘particular community’.
“This is bakwaas [bullshit]”, he said. “And I was thinking, am I really really that important? That if I say I think - say, he’s a friend of ours - that Milind Deora should be the Prime Minister of the country. Do you think they would actually listen to me and make him the Prime Minister of the country?”
[on suggestions that this got more attention because of his religion] […]“They want me to answer on that line of questioning, and I don’t think that’s important at all. I think I’ve gone there to promote my film as an actor, as a human being, and that market, that Gujarat belt is a huge belt for us, the girl in the film is actually a Gujarati, so we need to go there and promote. I need to get my film tax free.”
“For whom?” he said in the same breath. “For the people.”
https://www.vox.com/culture/2016/11/5/13533830/beyonce-hillary-clinton-endorsement-performance
https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/donald-trump-celebrity-supporters-hillary-clinton-jennifer-lopez-jay-z-beyonce-7565705/
http://ac-journal.org/journal/pubs/2011/summer/brubaker_Proof.pdf
https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5269&context=gradschool_dissertations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oprah_Winfrey%27s_endorsement_of_Barack_Obama#:~:text=Oprah%20Winfrey's%20endorsement%20of,even%20declared%20himself%20a%20candidate.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2007/12/13/oprah-boosts-obamas-visibility/
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/world/americas/02iht-oprah.1.8557142.html
https://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/garthwaite/htm/celebrityendorsements_garthwaitemoore.pdf
https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/the_oprah_effect
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2489512
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elaboration_likelihood_model#:~:text=The%20elaboration%20likelihood%20model%20(ELM,their%20outcomes%20on%20attitude%20change.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1017/s0022381613001126
https://www.sociostudies.org/journal/files/seh/2012_1/124-153.pdf
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1940161208321948
https://morningconsult.com/2020/02/11/nearly-9-in-10-people-said-no-celebrity-endorsement-would-sway-their-vote/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1532673X11429371
https://www.billboard.com/music/rb-hip-hop/john-legend-plays-ohio-club-show-for-hillary-clinton-7534341/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasocial_interaction
https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1088&context=comm_articles
http://proceedings.emac-online.org/pdfs/A2019-8411.pdf
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02650487.2019.1634898
https://mediaengagement.org/research/social-media-influencers-and-the-2020-election/
https://www.change.org/p/facebook-appeal-by-907-artistes-to-elect-the-new-government-without-any-pressure-and-prejudice