Xavier Márquez. Politics, Religion, and Ideology. Volume 19, Issue 3. September 2018.
Introduction
Personality cults of political leaders can be conceptualized in one of two different ways: as propaganda that portrays the leader positively, or as rituals of leader worship. The first model stresses the forms of communication that make possible the transformation of bureaucratic state power into charismatic (extra-bureaucratic) authority, while the second emphasizes the forms of participation that make possible the construction of charismatic authority in micro-interaction contexts. These two ideal types are not mutually exclusive, since leader-focused propaganda and rituals of leader worship can interact and amplify each other. But each of these ideal types has distinctive origins and political consequences. Moreover, each conceptualization leads to distinctive scholarly emphases: on the persuasive aspects of cult messages, on the one hand, or on the diversity of reasons for participation in rituals and the signaling function of such participation, on the other hand. In this paper I argue for a greater focus on the signaling and ritual aspects of leader cults, and show how it pays dividends in understanding these multifaceted phenomena. I illustrate this argument with a case study of the cult of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.
Ruler cults, personality cults, cults of personality, leader cults: these are all terms for poorly defined but striking phenomena involving the apparent worship of political leaders. Such cults are not uncommon in history—practices of ruler worship can be found in many pre-modern monarchies—but they are puzzling when they occur in modern contexts that stress the equality of citizens and the role of the people as the only source of legitimacy for political order, as happened in much of the Communist world during the twentieth century. And despite a great deal of historical scholarship on these phenomena, we lack general models of their emergence and development.
In this paper, I describe and evaluate two implicit models of modern leader cults found in both scholarly and popular writing: a ‘propaganda’ model and a ‘ritual’ model. Many accounts of modern leader cults stress their propagandistic aspects: the construction of images of the leader, the saturation of public space with these images, the hyperbolic praise of the leader in official print or broadcast media. They focus on the processes through which leader representations are produced and the effects they are designed to have in particular contexts.
From this point of view, the essential functions of a leader cult are, loosely speaking, persuasive or rhetorical. They are political ‘marketing’ activities to ensure that a population has a high degree of affective attachment to a leader, and they are carefully crafted to communicate a specific image of the leader stressing his or her legitimacy as a ruler. Accordingly, leader cults are meant to transform bureaucratic power—the power to direct propaganda departments, hire artists, plaster entire cities with posters, commission biographies and textbooks, mass-produce and sell leader busts, and censor unapproved representations—into a sort of ersatz charisma by multiplying the positive representations of the leader, producing displays of praise, and preventing the production of alternative representations or displays of displeasure. Leader cults are thus to be primarily analyzed as strategies of symbolic legitimation for particular regimes and their leaders.
But there is a different way of thinking about leader cults that stresses their cult character: as a set of rituals of leader worship or veneration, ranging from great mass meetings to regular ceremonies in schools or workplaces and improptu events where people display their loyalty to the leader. From this point of view, what is most striking about leader cults is not the production or over-production of particular positive representations of the leader, the exclusion of alternative images, or even the excessive praise addressed to the leader in official media, but the degree to which many people participate in rituals of leader worship, where they are expected not merely to consume leader propaganda passively but to act in ways that credibly indicate high levels of respect, or even adoration, for the leader. Here, as we shall see, the key function of a leader cult as a political strategy is coordination, and the main question of interest concerns the way in which participation in such rituals signals support or enhances commitments to the leader or some larger group, including the state.
These two conceptualizations of leader cults are not mutually exclusive. Leader propaganda and rituals of leader worship have coexisted and interacted in complex ways in particular historical examples, as we shall see below in more detail. Leader images and forms of propaganda characteristic of personality cults need not be produced in a centralized way, or as part of a conscious political strategy, but may instead emerge from rituals of worship. Conversely, rituals of worship have often been intentionally produced as part of strategies of symbolic legitimation, and served as forms of persuasive communication to audiences within and beyond them. Much scholarly work is increasingly sensitive to the ritual dimensions of leader cults. But cults as propaganda and cults as ritual are nevertheless analytically distinct phenomena, with different logics, origins and consequences. In particular, propaganda models of leader cults entail a (primarily, though not exclusively) ‘top-down’ logic of social agency, whereas ritual models of leader cults put greater stress on the participation of the ‘cult public’ in the process of cult construction. I argue in this paper that greater attention to the differences between propaganda and ritual, as well as a greater emphasis on the study of the ritual aspects of leader cults, is warranted, and illustrate the payoffs of this approach to the study of leader cults with examples from several twentieth- and twenty-first-century political leaders.
Some (partial and incomplete) evidence for two more specific claims about the functions and mechanisms of leader cults is also advanced. First, I suggest that, by itself, increases in leader-focused propaganda often indicate little more than the consolidation of a leader’s power within a narrow elite, and need not produce genuine popular legitimation. I hypothesize that while such propaganda can have a marginal effect on popular attachment to a leader or a regime, in general transformations of bureaucratic power into charismatic authority appear to be remarkably inefficient; their main outcome in the absence of rituals of worship seems to be ‘preference falsification,’ not emotional connection and popular legitimation. By contrast, I hypothesize that the widespread emergence of rituals of worship typically signals a more profound change in the relationship between regime and society. And while ‘cults as propaganda’ are typically found only in highly authoritarian regimes, ‘cults as ritual’ can develop even in relatively open political contexts.
The paper is structured as follows. In the first section, I describe the propaganda model of leader cults. I then provide evidence for the idea that leader propaganda is generally inefficient at transforming bureaucratic power into mass legitimacy on a ‘charismatic’ basis. To the extent that it is adopted as a conscious political strategy, it seems to operate by increasing the pressures to ‘signal’ support for the leader and accentuating coordination problems among potential opponents, without producing much by way of genuine attachments. I then show how the notion of ‘signaling’ links models of cults as propaganda to models of cults as rituals, since propaganda messages can help coordinate costly signals of support for leaders within rituals of worship. In the ‘ritual’ model, a cult is a set of interaction rituals focused on leader symbols, whose widespread emergence tends to be associated with social upheavals that provide incentives for people to clearly identify with particular groups. The final section illustrates the argument through an examination of the cult of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela.
Cults as Propaganda
By propaganda I mean the systematic production and dissemination of representations of the world by powerful agents for the explicit purpose of changing the beliefs of a large group of people. Propaganda differs from other forms of persuasive communication insofar as it is intended to affect the beliefs of large groups of people through the manipulation of information. Propaganda in this sense is also typically (but not exclusively) produced and disseminated by agents of the state and meant to be consumed passively instead of being part of a two-way process of communication.
Leader cults can be conceptualized as forms of propaganda designed to legitimize both a leader and a regime that emerge when official agencies produce and disseminate (or encourage the production and dissemination of) an unusually high volume of carefully-crafted representations of a leader as a charismatic figure. The mere presence of leader propaganda is typically insufficient to speak of a cult, since almost all stable political regimes produce or encourage the production of positive images of their leaders. The ‘cult as propaganda’ model requires that such representations (1) dominate the public space to an unusual extent (‘high volume’) and (2) give the leader an atypically high and positive status relative to the rest of society, that is, portray the leader with qualities that are supposed to grant him ‘charisma’ in the Weberian sense: a set of exceptional, even superhuman qualities that, if believed by the audience, grant the leader authority.
At present, we do not have good measures of when the production of positive propaganda about a leader by state agents shades into the production of a ‘cult’, and it is possible that no such measures exist, since what counts as ‘excessive’ glorification may well depend on contingent cultural and historical factors. Nevertheless, simple measures of the degree to which a leader monopolizes specific forms of media (e.g. number of mentions of the leader in newspaper headlines) and of the ‘sentiment’ associated with these mentions have been used as a proxy for what we might call the ‘propaganda effort’ on behalf of a leader. For example, the number of headlines mentioning the rulers of North Korea (Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, and Kim Jong Un) on the Japanese-hosted website of the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) during the 1997-2014 period was not only orders of magnitude larger than the number of headlines mentioning any other political leaders, but comprise a high absolute percentage of the total number of headlines (more than 20% of all headlines over this entire period), all of them highly positive in sentiment. Similar quantitative evidence of ‘cultic’ propaganda (though not always nearly as strong) could be adduced regarding the number the mentions of Mao in Chinese media during the 1960s, pictures of Stalin in Pravda during the 1929-1953 period, mentions of Mobutu in Zairian newspapers, especially during 1974-1975 (when ‘for one period of several weeks in early 1975 official media were forbidden to mention by name any other figure but Mobutu’), or mentions of Franco in Arriba (the newspaper of the Falange) in the early 40s.
In all these instances, the term ‘cult’ is used by scholars due not only to the unusual degree of prominence of representations of a political leader in diverse media, but also to the high status these representations give him. This is most obvious in the case of communist leaders, whose status in propagandistic representations seemed to be prima facie incompatible with the theoretical basis of communist ideology, as indeed many communists recognized, leading to attempts to rationalize their cults in terms compatible with Marxism-Leninism. Indeed, most republican systems of rule have difficulty accommodating theoretically leaders of unusual status and prominence. By contrast, in most non-republican political systems the ruler (the king, emperor, emir, tsar, etc.) already possesses a singular status; whether, therefore, it is useful to speak of a ‘leader cult’ in such contexts might depend more on the existence of rituals of veneration (see below) than on the presence (even the omnipresence) of positive representations of the ruler.
The basis for the high status of the leader in these representations varies. All these representations nevertheless attribute qualities to the leader that are typically extraordinary, and thus represent the (alleged) basis of the leader’s charisma (the ‘gift of grace’ legitimating his authority). On the conception of the cult as a form of legitimizing propaganda, however, it is necessary to ask the question of whether these portrayals of the leader are persuasive: in what sense, and under what conditions, must regime propaganda be credible to its audience if it is to successfully produce the charisma of the leader and thus legitimate the regime?
The Inefficiency of Cult Propaganda for Legitimation
A simple functional theory of leader cults as legitimizing propaganda would suggest that political elites invest resources in such propaganda to the extent that it actually does legitimate the leader and the regime for specific target audiences, that is, enhances their normative commitments to accept the authority of political elites. Indeed, in studies of leader cults the claim is sometimes made that ‘states beset by economic failure and by social conflict invariably respond by seeking to strengthen symbolic legitimation.’ To this extent, regime propaganda about the leader must be at least credible and in fact believed by some fraction of the intended audience in order to actually legitimate the regime, especially if other sources of legitimation are not producing the desired effects. By the same token, this functional theory implies that regime propaganda should not be generally unbelievable or ridiculous, and leaders will attempt to discourage cult manifestations that are easily disproved or ‘over the top’, since leader propaganda that is not actually believed or internalized by enough of the target audience cannot legitimate the regime.
There is evidence that at least some cult-building efforts responded to legitimation crises. For example, the beginning of Stalin’s cult is conventionally dated to his 50th birthday celebrations in December 1929, at the height of the collectivization drive, when the legitimacy of the regime would have been imperiled but before Stalin’s authority was fully consolidated within the Politburo. The Mao cult in the 1960s seems to have been in part a reaction to the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the failures of the ‘Hundred Flowers’ campaign, which damaged the legitimacy of both Mao and the regime he led. And the Franco cult in the 1940s emerged under conditions of severe scarcity after the Civil War.
Moreover, in at least some prominent historical cases, leaders tried to limit the more ridiculous manifestations of the cult, and the kinds of leader representations that many cults authorized were not immediately falsifiable, tending towards the identification of the leader with vague narratives of national unity. And while systematic public opinion data is non-existent for most regimes where we can speak of leader cults, historians’ qualitative judgments do suggest that at least some of these leaders became genuinely popular, probably partly as a result of their positive representations in multiple media.
One key assumption of this simple model of symbolic legitimation is that most people exposed to cult rhetoric find the representations of the leader embodied in such messages credible, even when the leader acts in ways that are detrimental to their interests or when the representations of the leader are highly implausible, perhaps because they are not exposed to alternative messages or frames, or because they trust the source of the message. But the psychology and political science literature on persuasion and belief change contains only limited evidence for such ‘strong gullibility.’ Most experimental research on persuasion suggests that individuals tend to reject information that does not fit their prior beliefs and do not blindly accept implausible messages, especially if accepting such messages implies engaging in costly behaviors that go against their interests. In particular, trust in messages from authority figures (including the state) is reduced when these messages do not fit people’s experience or strongly held prior beliefs. We should thus expect cult propaganda to be limited in its ability to ‘legitimate’ a leader in the absence of specific achievements that can be plausibly attributed to the leader.
Accordingly, wherever systematic evidence of the effectiveness of ‘legitimizing propaganda’ in authoritarian states exists, it typically finds that its direct effects are small or non-existent. For example, careful survey work in contemporary China suggests that people more exposed to regime propaganda are not more likely to support the regime than people who are less exposed, though they may be more likely to think that the government is ‘strong’ (and hence not worth opposing). More generally, people living in authoritarian regimes do not necessarily trust the source of ‘legitimating’ messages; indeed, the need to induce trust in the government’s messages is a recurrent problem for authoritarian systems where the default assumption is that the government can lie with impunity. And in any case many people can misinterpret, ignore, or tune out the content of these messages as boring, formulaic, or simply inaccessible as they have been doing since ancient times: much propaganda is ‘without viewers’, as the historian Paul Veyne once noted, and hence simply cannot ‘legitimate’ anything in any interesting sense.
The qualitative historical evidence of the effectiveness of leader propaganda in legitimating leaders across a broad fraction of the population is in any case at best mixed. Where cult representations conflict with lived experience (such as, for example, in 1980s Romania, or in the countryside in 1930s Russia, where the realities of economic privation and the brutal policies of collectivization could not but conflict with the symbolic legitimation of the leaders as great and caring geniuses), they seem to be less effective. When Stalin declared in 1935 that ‘life has become better, comrades, life has become more cheerful,’ this could not have improved the overall credibility of cult rhetoric among those for whom life had not become better. And there is only limited evidence that Mao was able to use his ‘charismatic’ authority to direct the course of events during the Cultural Revolution; everyone referred to Mao’s extraordinary gifts but did not necessarily behave in ways contrary to their own perception of their interests.
Even charismatic leaders (in the sense of leaders with a talent for generating emotional connections in mass situations, or what Randall Collins has called ‘frontstage’ charisma) require real successes (‘success’ charisma) if they are to maintain high levels of support; pure propaganda cannot easily substitute for general improvements in living standards, victory in war, or other visible achievements. Even support for Hitler seems to have ebbed after the final defeat of the German armies at Stalingrad. Conversely, there is some evidence that Stalin’s cult was more successful in the 40s due to his association with Soviet victory in the war. Charisma, as Max Weber argued, is in part due to perceptions of genuine success, and the ability to saturate the public space with representations of the leader cannot compensate for a lack of such successes. Cult propaganda by itself, in the absence of other sources of support, thus at best enhances the appeal of existing sources of legitimation, but seems to be ineffectual when it conflicts with existing values too much.
Cult Propaganda and the Production of Flattery
Propaganda can nevertheless induce behavioral conformity—and in particular, signals of support or adherence to the regime—without ‘belief’ in its content. In particular, both rational-choice and computational (agent-based) models suggest that if enough people have motivations to conform with norms others seem to accept (e.g. if they expect punishment for violating the norm), only a small minority needs to believe for everyone to act ‘as if’ they believed. From this point of view, not much genuine legitimation needs to be produced by explicit leader propaganda in order for nearly unanimous signals of support to be expressed by a target audience.
Propaganda here serves less a persuasive than a coordination function: it describes what people need to be seen to believe to avoid social sanction, and thus the kinds of signals of support for the leader that need to be produced by particular audiences in response to propaganda. Moreover, propaganda can itself be produced as a signal of support for a leader by elites who have reason to fear that others will denounce them for insufficient loyalty. Not all signals of support for a leader should be described as propaganda (since they are not necessarily produced in a centralized way or by agents of the state), though if they are public and pervasive they amplify ‘official’ propaganda messages, and they can establish norms for others to follow in producing their own signals of support.
These signals of support can be called ‘flattery’, given their typically insincere and excessive character. Rulers therefore have good reason to distrust them. In order to be credible as a signal of loyalty, flattery needs to be costly, binding the flatterer reliably to the leader in ways that cannot be easily disclaimed, even if this cost is measured only in terms of a loss of status for the flatterer. We should therefore expect that when power is highly personalized and intra-party competition for leadership-allocated resources is fierce, flattery will tend to become even more excessive and insincere, since the fact that everyone else is flattering the leader means that ‘ordinary’ praise tends to be devalued as ‘cheap talk’ and discounted accordingly. Flattery ‘inflation’ should lead to typical cultic phenomena.
In accordance with this expectation, much cult production in both the Soviet Union and China seems to have been driven by incentives to flatter leaders in the context of poorly institutionalized party structures riven by patronage. Career concerns and intra-party competition drove (and still, in some cases, drive) lower-level cadres to compete in offering ever more elaborate flattery to superiors. They had multiple reasons (ranging from fear of denunciation for insufficient loyalty to expectations of patronage) to send telegrams of congratulation on birthdays, rename factories or cities, produce monumental statues, display portraits of the leader in visible spaces or wear badges bearing the image of the leader, give ‘stormy and prolonged applause’ during official speeches by the leader, and so on. Individual, decentralized flattery thus helped to construct the leader cult in its most typical manifestations.
The need for credibly signaling support under conditions of incomplete information about the beliefs and motivations of others also explains some otherwise puzzling features of at least some personality cults, in particular the use of propaganda that is literally absurd, or praise for the leader so over the top that it cannot be believed. For example, Hafiz al-Assad was said by cult propagandists to be the country’s ‘premier pharmacist,’ while Rodong Sinmun published an article in 2006 claiming that Kim Jong-il had mastered teleportation to avoid being tracked by American satellites, and in Zaire in 1975, Mobutu was hailed as a new ‘Prophet’ and ‘Messiah’, and proposals were made to replace crucifixes with his image. While such propaganda should be counterproductive from the point of view of mass legitimation (since it is, ex hypothesi, unbelievable or ridiculous), creating and repeating extreme representations of the leaders serves as a relatively costly and very public signal of support for the regime, if only to the extent that the person making such extravagant claims suffers a loss of dignity.
Moreover, the fact that the regime can compel such displays in turn serves as a credible signal of the strength of the leader, and induces others to engage in similar displays to avoid being seen as disloyal. For example, flattery of both Stalin and Mao ramped up as they increasingly consolidated power within the top leadership, and decreased whenever their position came under threat. In both cases, the intensification of the cults was promoted primarily by figures within the top leadership of the party (Kaganovich in the Soviet case, Lin Biao in the Chinese case) as part of struggles for position, and used (especially in the Chinese case) to eliminate potential opponents (by accusing them of insufficient loyalty to Mao Zedong thought, for example). But this strategy was made possible because the leader’s position was becoming unassailable at the time; the lack of any plausible alternatives for leadership meant that ‘loyalty to the leader’ could be used as a weapon in intra-party struggle.
Increases in leader-focused propaganda thus need not stem from the need for mass legitimation in conditions of social conflict (though this may, of course, also happen, even simultaneously), but can occur when factional conflicts within the top leadership of a political regime are resolved by coordinating on a single figure as having the highest status. Such cult propaganda is best understood less as an attempt to legitimate the regime than as itself a signal that power is becoming consolidated in a particular figure.
The view of cults as produced by decentralized flattery is nevertheless incomplete, since it assumes that threats of state coercion or career concerns within ruling parties always provide the main mechanism for the production of cult symbols or praise. But the production of cult paraphernalia—Leniniana, Staliniana, Putiniana, Chaveziana, and the like—or cult rituals is in many cases not controlled or directed by state agents, and at least some forms of cult participation are not driven by fear of social or official sanction, or by expectations of patronage in exchange for loyalty. Many of the cults of the leaders of communist parties in Western Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, or the posthumous cults of Tito in parts of the former Yugoslavia and of Thälmann in East Germany, cannot be fully explained by these signaling mechanisms. As we shall see in more detail in the discussion of the cult of Hugo Chávez below in the mid-2000s, leader cults can emerge in relatively open political systems, where the signaling mechanisms discussed here do not seem to apply. This is where the ‘cults as ritual’ view provides additional analytic power.
Cults as Ritual and the Amplification of Emotion
Following Randall Collins, I understand a ritual as any practice involving (1) a group of co-present people who (2) interact while jointly focusing on some particular object or symbol and (3) generally having common knowledge of their attentional focus. ‘Ritual’ here has thus a much broader meaning than formal ceremony; many informal practices qualify as rituals, from everyday conversation to sports games and work meetings. In contrast to other definitions of ritual, this account thus does not emphasize the ‘formal’ character of a practice, but the extent to which a group interacts while jointly focusing their attention on some particular set of symbols. To be sure, actual rituals may vary in the degree to which participants have common knowledge of their attentional focus; participants may be distracted, or they may be too young to fully understand what is going on around them. Some rituals are also partly mediated (e.g. broadcast over television), preventing complete joint interaction. The definition is thus presented as an ‘ideal type’, which individual rituals may approach to a greater or lesser extent.
From this point of view, a leader cult exists wherever there are frequent, if not necessarily regular or fully formalized, rituals of worship or veneration focused on the leader or on leader-related symbols. These rituals can be very diverse, ranging from mass gatherings (e.g. the Nuremberg rallies, the eight ‘Mass Receptions’ of the Red Guards in Beijing) to regular ceremonies at work or school (e.g. the workplace ritual of ‘asking for instructions’ of a picture of Mao at the height of the Cultural Revolution) to small-scale occasional rituals of adoration. All of them, however, express the exalted status of the leader in relatively public ways, and they constitute ‘chains’ of interaction where leader-related symbols circulate in a variety of media as focal points of attention.
The fact that leader cult rituals publicly affirm the exalted status of the leader means that participants by definition signal support for him, but not all signals of support (for example, writing a leader’s biography or sending congratulatory messages) are expressed in ritual settings, even if they are ‘ritualized’ in the sense that there may be rigid norms governing how or when to send such signals. By the same token, leader cult rituals are distinctive less because of the signals of support for the leader that are expressed there than because participation in rituals also signals membership in a particular community and such rituals act as amplifiers of emotion relative to a set of leader symbols. We might say that leader cult rituals can constitute particular communities united around leader symbols that come to be charged with significance through their being the focal points of interaction.
Not all rituals ‘work’; rituals can misfire and produce boredom or alienation, and participation can be seen as a burdensome duty. But when rituals do work, they produce a sense of belonging in a community united around a set of symbols, occasionally accompanied by experiences of sufficient emotional intensity and significance to be called ‘sacred.’ Processes of rhythmic entrainment operating at the physiological level produce, if the ritual ‘works’, what Durkheim called ‘collective effervescence,’ enhancing the ’emotional charge’ of the focal symbols of the ritual, and perhaps even increasing dispositions to cooperate afterwards with members of the group. Leader rituals are not an exception here, as at least some modern leader cult rituals have produced such feelings and experiences.
Cult rituals can be designed, and to that extent they can be conceptualized as a form of ‘active’ propaganda, whose explicit messages can also be broadcast to non-participants. And they can also be made compulsory, insofar as state agents are able to monitor participation or encourage attendance. For example, participation in the rituals of mourning after the death of Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung was reportedly ensured by members of the Inmiban (neighborhood committees), and at least some people who did not feel particularly well disposed towards the dead leaders felt enormous compulsion to participate, to the point of forcing themselves to cry for the sorts of signaling reasons discussed in the previous section. During the Stalin era, Communist Party cadres exhorted factories and schools to send participants to mass festivals (including cult rituals) and monitored absences, even if sometimes ineffectively. And a wide range of pressures, from purely social sanctions to the threat of formal denunciation, could be applied to people to participate in the ‘quotation gymnastics’ or ‘loyalty dances’ (both unofficial rituals of loyalty to Mao) during the Cultural Revolution.
But compulsory participation in regime-designed rituals does not appear to be always effective as a mechanism of emotional amplification and community integration. Though the historical evidence is unclear, it seems reasonable to conclude that most coerced ritual participation does not fundamentally change the attachments of citizens to leaders, even as they publicly establish status conventions that citizens learn to respect. The more spontaneous rituals of veneration for Lenin in the early 1920s seem to have expressed more genuine attachments to the leader than the more compulsory ceremonies of the 1930s, even if the latter were not without emotional power for at least some people. Without voluntary participation, the represented charisma of leader iconography may remain inert in ritual settings; in a sense it is only in successful rituals that the charisma of the leader is actually recognized by followers.
Nevertheless, people sometimes participate in regime rituals (compulsory or not) with enthusiasm, and if the ritual is routinely successful, it produces experiences of belonging to a community united around a series of symbols. Moreover, ritual participation can enhance ‘conformity motivations’ even among those who do not feel particularly drawn to the leader. Because rituals involve emotional amplification, they can enhance the positive affect of free participants towards the focal point of the ritual, viz., the leader in a cult of personality. Thus, for those people who are predisposed to attachment to a particular leader, regular participation in such rituals enhances and strengthens their commitments to the leader and the group for which the leader is a focal point of interaction.
This sort of integrative effect is especially clear in the veneration rituals of the leaders of Western communist parties in relatively open societies. For example, the cult of Maurice Thorez (leader of the French Communist Party [PCF]) in the post-war years cannot be explained simply in terms of the need for party members to produce flattery to avoid strong social sanctions, or to legitimize a ruling group in the eyes of a population, simply because the PCF was not in power, the main sanction for violating cult norms would have been exclusion from the community, and Thorez could not legitimate the PCF in France (especially given his absence from France during the war years). Instead, participation in cult rituals seems to have been driven by the fact that the PCF was an ‘oppositional microsociety’ within France, whose integration depended in part on rituals of loyalty to the leader figure. By participating in such rituals, party members affirmed their belonging together in the face of a hostile external environment.
We do not have a systematic theory about the circumstances in which free participation in leader-focused rituals gives rise to a leader cult. But it seems plausible to think that in moments of crisis certain leader symbols ‘resonate’ with larger sections of a population (for example, if the leader is credibly seen as the destroyer of a discredited establishment), so that the leader is therefore recognized as ‘charismatic’ in the strict Weberian sense of the term. What we call the ‘charisma’ of a leader is in this case simply the fact that the leader comes to represent some important hope or value of a group of people (embodying the party, the revolution, or the people); and this charisma may in turn be subject to a process of emotional amplification for those who participate in rituals focused on the leader. Leaders can in turn exploit these charismatic connections to try to change the relationships between state and society (as Mao did during the Cultural Revolution, not necessarily successfully), but they cannot simply create them out of whole cloth: charisma is a social, not an individual phenomenon.
Whenever leaders come to represent deep hopes or other important values of particular groups in society, cult rituals can emerge as mechanisms of group integration even in the absence of sanctions for non-participation. Communists outside the Soviet Union and the Eastern block ritually recognized Stalin’s authority as the leader of international communism on the occasion of his 70th birthday. Ritual practices focused on Mao (e.g. lighting incense in front of a picture of Mao) continue today among small groups in today’s China, despite a lack of official encouragement and no penalties for nonparticipation (and even some embarrassment for participants). And even in reasonably democratic societies, observers sometimes note that the levels of adoration bestowed on political leaders during election rallies and other ritual occasions approach ‘cultic’ levels. What these practices have in common is the fact that leader symbols come to embody certain values or hopes for particular communities even in the absence of substantial propaganda efforts or sanctions by governments.
Cult Rituals in Chávez’s Venezuela
The view of cults as rituals thus helps account, in conjunction with the signaling view, for the emergence of personality cults in reasonably democratic contexts where the state cannot fully control the media or uniquely provide benefits to participants for signaling loyalty. Consider the case of Venezuela. Even before coming to power in 1993 Hugo Chávez was nurturing a renewed cult of Simón Bolívar, the nineteenth-century leader of Venezuela’s independence movement, on which he consciously modeled himself and from which he drew some of his own self-legitimation. After being elected president, Bolivarian symbols were put into renewed circulation through such actions as changing the name of the country to ‘Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela,’ commissioning a new likeness of Bolívar, staging a mass ceremony where a large crowd repeated the words of a famous oath by Bolívar, and disinterring Bolívar’s remains to conduct a televised ‘autopsy’ to determine whether or not Bolívar (who is thought to have died of tuberculosis) had instead been murdered. Chávez presented himself as the legitimate heir of Bolívar, but there were at first no obvious attempts to encourage a distinct cult of his own person, even if his self-identification with Bolívar tended to promote a certain conflation of the two.
Nevertheless, the ritual context provided by constant campaigning (there were 13 major elections in Chávez’ 14 years in power, including elections to a constitutional assembly, a recall referendum, and a referendum on several important constitutional amendments), and Chávez’ constant presence in the Venezuelan media (partly through his legal ability to force private TV stations to air his broadcasts) inevitably put Chávez-related symbols into circulation and amplified their emotional charge. Chávez was visible in shows such as ‘Aló Presidente’ (a call-in show lasting sometimes as much as six hours, where Chávez took calls from ordinary people, gave orders to his ministers, discussed ideas, and sometimes sang or recited poetry); in his theatrical denunciations of other world leaders in international forums, which attracted wide coverage in domestic and international media; on Twitter; and above all in the mass meetings typical of electoral campaigns. Some of these practices, such as ‘Aló Presidente’, had important ritual aspects (including participation from both ordinary citizens and government officials) but also amplified leader-focused propaganda (since they were broadcast widely).
Electoral rallies in particular are especially well-suited to producing charged symbols of identity, especially in the hands of a skilled practitioner like Chávez, who was routinely described as ‘charismatic.’ Chávez’ charisma, from our perspective here, was simply his ability to reliably produce intense interaction rituals by drawing on pre-existing symbols of communal identity and credibly embodying the hopes for change of large sections of the Venezuelan electorate, who had come to see the existing political elite as terminally discredited. And as the focus of such rituals, he inevitably became an object of intense affection, even adoration, among a subset of participants, especially after major crises like the 2002 coup that nearly pushed him out of power.
Moreover, throughout its time in power, the Chávez government encouraged the formation of a number of popular organizations that, intentionally or not, provided a fertile context for the emergence of Chávez-related interaction rituals. For example, early during his time in office, Chávez called for the formation of ‘Círculos Bolivarianos’ (Bolivarian Circles), each consisting of around 10-20 people (though some were much larger) sworn to defend the revolution in light of the ideals of Simón Bolívar. These ‘Circles’ engaged in community work (e.g. brokering access to government services) as well as political work—demonstrations, participation in mass meetings, etc.—for Chávez, and most members strongly identified with him; they joined in response to his call, and were unified primarily by loyalty to him. Later on, similar groups known as the ‘Unidades de Batalla Electoral’ and the ‘Battalions of the Miranda Campaign’ played an important role in the 2004 recall referendum and the 2006 presidential election, respectively. Members of these groups did not typically control large patronage resources that could be used to force others to participate in the cult, but observers did note very high levels of attachment to Chávez-related symbols among group members, including the spontaneous use of religious language to describe their relationship to Chávez.
Ritual amplification interacted with material resources to promote the cult in a number of other organizations created by the Chávez government, such as the well-known ‘Misiones’ (social programs) providing literacy classes (‘Misión Róbinson’) health services (‘Misión Barrio Adentro’) and subsidized goods (‘Misión Mercal’). There is some evidence that these goods were preferentially allocated to groups and areas that signaled loyalty to Chávez. For example, Hawkins, Rosas, and Johnson report that the location of Misiones was highly correlated with areas of electoral support for Chávez and the PSUV (and not correlated with the socioeconomic status of potential recipients). Moreover, non-supporters of Chávez were at the very least made to feel uncomfortable enough by committed participants to exclude themselves from participation in many of these programs. Finally, most of the teachers in the ‘Misión Róbinson’ were committed supporters of Chávez and the ‘Bolivarian revolution,’ and many used class time to promote the movement, turning the program into another set of interaction rituals where Chávez-related symbols circulated among an audience that was already predisposed to support Chávez.
In other cases, cult displays grew as a result of signaling dynamics driven by the competition for scarce material goods. For example, community radio stations (whose formation was encouraged by the Chávez government after the 2002 coup) that aligned themselves with the Chávez government (praising him and his movement) found it easier to obtain resources from the state, while stations that maintained a non-partisan attitude or welcomed non-Chavistas have been subject to social pressure, attacked as ‘escuálidos’ (‘squalid ones’, a derogatory term for opposition supporters) or simply viewed with suspicion by other Chavista organizations. More generally, there is also evidence that at least some people who signed the recall referendum petition against Chávez in 2004 were punished by the loss of jobs or the denial of state services, and some anecdotal evidence that in communities that benefited greatly from government programs, expressions of gratitude to Chávez were expected, and people suspected of being opposition supporters found themselves socially pressured to show evidence of loyalty.
But it is worth noting that since the social programs in question already tended to target likely Chávez supporters, and levels of coercion in the Venezuelan public sphere were not very high (public criticism of Chávez and the ‘proceso’ was common; even among Chavistas criticism of Chávez’ government policies was possible and even common among some sectors of the movement, though criticism of Chávez himself by self-identified Chavistas was much harder to find), the growth of the Chávez cult was not driven primarily by the need for the state to legitimate itself, or the signaling dynamics within a single party. With free entry and exit into rituals, devoted supporters of Chávez tended to gravitate to precisely those organizations where Chávez-related symbols circulated with a positive valence (and where their feelings for Chávez were further amplified), while people who did not identify with Chávez and his revolution tended to gravitate to organizations and ritual contexts where such symbols circulated with negative valence. The result was polarization over the divisive Chávez symbols, not the monopoly over public space characteristic of the cults of Stalin or Mao, for example.
Nevertheless, after Chávez disclosed that he was sick with cancer in 2011, and especially after he left for Havana on 10 December 2012 to seek treatment for the last time (after winning the 2012 presidential election but before taking the oath of office), many observers (including some people sympathetic to the broader goals of the Chavista movement, like the Venezuelan historian Margarita López Maya) began to note that a process of ‘deification’ of Chávez seemed to be underway. There were videos in heavy rotation on state TV where Chávez exclaimed that he ‘demands absolute loyalty’ because ‘he is not an individual, he is an entire people,’ or where people provided testimonials of their gratitude for Chávez and identify themselves with him (‘yo soy Chávez’). United Socialist Party of Venezuela (PSUV) militants (including senior party members, like Maduro, Disodado Cabello [then president of the National Assembly], Tareck El Aissami [then Aragua state governor], and Elías Jaua [then foreign minister]), issued statements declaring that they were the sons and daughters of Chávez, that they owed everything to him, and that they were eternally loyal to Chávez. Large numbers of ordinary Chavistas tweeted their loyalty and concern for Chávez’ health, referring to him as ‘mi comandante’ (my commander) and emphasizing their subordination and absolute loyalty. The government even staged an entire ‘inauguration’ ceremony where thousands of Chavistas ‘took the oath’ for the absent Chávez, symbolically embodying him; and, once Chávez died, the government organized a spectacular funeral where hundreds of thousands of people mourned him. The mausoleum where Chávez is interred immediately became a site of pilgrimage, with government encouragement; several public Chávez shrines appeared in Caracas, one of them in the headquarters of the state oil company; and statues of Chávez, previously unknown, started appearing in many places.
The increase in Chávez-related propaganda was made possible, in part, by the much greater ‘hegemony’ of the government over the media by 2013 relative to the earlier part of Chávez’s time in office; but it also reflected the struggles over succession taking place at the time. Many observers noted a division—the extent and nature of which is a matter of some controversy—between different factions within Chavismo, one of them conventionally associated with then-National Assembly president Cabello, who had roots in the military wing of Chavismo and was seen as more pragmatic, and another conventionally associated with now-president Maduro, who had connections to the labor movement and the ‘civilian’ wings of the Chavista movement and was often seen as more ideological. With Chávez incapacitated (and soon dead), a struggle was underway to define the future of the movement and the aims of the revolution. But under the circumstances, there was no one who could credibly arbitrate between potentially disparate goals and visions of socialism or revolution. The cult provided the only unifying framework for the party to maintain the support of the grassroots and prevent public divisions; accordingly, all top militants had to dramatize their loyalty to Chávez in sometimes extreme ways.
This was not, however, contrary to the conventional analysis offered in the Venezuelan press and elsewhere, an attempt to secure the ‘legitimacy’ of Chávez’s successor Maduro, whose legal claim to the office of President had been questioned by the opposition. Chávez-related symbols were too divisive in Venezuelan society to secure any sort of acceptance on the part of people who were not already committed to them, especially given Chávez’ absence. Moreover, many of the manifestations of the Chávez cult—for example, Chávez-themed mural painting in poorer areas, the creation of Chávez chapels, visits to the Chávez mausoleum—seem to have been spontaneous, led by people who renewed their commitments in rituals with Chávez at their center. The intensification of the cult was driven by the exogenous threat to group identity represented by Chávez’ impending death and the intensified circulation of these symbols, but it could not legitimate the regime among the 40 percent or so of society who rejected Chávez and his ideological project. At best, it could marginally strengthen the identification of Chavistas with the government.
In sum, it is a mistake to see the emergence of the Chávez cult in the mid to late 2000s primarily through the lens of propaganda. Though propaganda played a role for some manifestations of the cult, in general Chávez worship was the result of processes of ritual amplification at a time of social crisis. Signaling processes also played a role (especially within the PSUV), but in the absence of large sanctions for violating cult norms, people gravitated to rituals that supported their existing commitments, deepening the polarization of Venezuelan society along pro- and anti-Chávez camps.
Cults as Ritual vs. Cults as Propaganda
The propaganda and ritual aspects of leader cults can either complement or contradict each other. Propaganda—in the sense of a conscious strategy for the saturation of public space with images of a leader—can fuel the growth of rituals of leader worship when the leader symbols credibly embody some form of group identity or important social hopes, and these rituals in turn can increase the effectiveness of propaganda. But propaganda can also dampen the success of such rituals if leader symbols do not credibly embody any forms of group identity (as in late Soviet times, for example). The ‘success’ of leader cults (from a pragmatic-political standpoint) thus turns on the credibility of their ‘representativeness’: leader charisma is effective insofar as it is a form of representation.
Moreover, we should be able to specify, in particular cases, the specific mechanism driving the emergence of a leader cult: persuasion (in the pure propaganda model), signaling (in the context of quasi-coercive or socially sanctioned patronage relationships), ritual amplification (when sanctions for conformity are weak), or some mixture of these. Scholarship on leader cults cannot be content with pointing out that leader cults as political strategies attempt to legitimate leaders, but must also indicate the ways in which such legitimating strategies can fail, either because cults end up working primarily via signaling mechanisms or because their growth has little to do with any conscious political strategy and is instead due to the ‘bottom-up’ development of rituals of worship.
In particular, the distinction between cults as ritual (driven by both ritual amplification and social signaling dynamics) and cults as propaganda (driven mainly by conscious strategies of legitimation) helps clarify the differences between phenomena like the Mao cult during the Cultural Revolution, when spontaneous rituals of adoration developed in response to pervasive social conflict and were further amplified by enormous social pressures to participate, and the so-called ‘cult’ of Xi Jinping in contemporary China, which is essentially a byproduct of Xi’s consolidation of power within the CCP. Voluntary rituals of worship are the fuel that helps cults grow in potency; in their absence, personality cults are little more than advertising campaigns, even if these are sometimes accompanied by coercive mechanisms. Both conceptualizations of cults, however, put in doubt the too-easy functional interpretation of cult phenomena as ‘legitimizing’ strategies: while cults can legitimize, they sometimes work without legitimation, and can produce effects beyond legitimation.