Thread by @mariliacout

1) "“It’s an interesting and thoughtful paper,” says Paul Sackett, a management professor at University of Minnesota, who was not involved in the research. “

scientificamerican.com/article/why-pe…

2) "To me, the right interpretation of the work would be that it highlights a need to understand what high-IQ leaders do that leads to lower perceptions by followers,” he says. “The wrong interpretation would be, ‘Don’t hire high-IQ leaders.’ ”

3) "The study’s lead author, John Antonakis, a psychologist at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, suggests leaders should use their intelligence to generate creative metaphors that will persuade and inspire others—the way former U.S. President Barack Obama did."

4) "“I think the only way a smart person can signal their intelligence appropriately and still connect with the people,” Antonakis says, “is to speak in charismatic ways.”"

5) Those were the highlights. Two questions come to mind: (1) since Weber, do we have any consensus about what charisma is? (2) If we accept it as personalization of political communication, does it mean that populism is inevitable?

cambridge.org/core/journals/…

6) If we hypothesize that there is a rise in "charismatic politics", one, it's easier to understand how the USA could go from Obama to Trump. Two, it may shed some light on the global rise of the far right.

tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.275…

7) All the explanations gravitate towards two types of explanation: populism as the consequence of economic insecurity and populism as a consequence of cultural backlash.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

8) To say it "caught the world by surprise" is an understatement. Social scientists are eating the humble pie of their lives (me included). We didn't see this coming.

books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr…

9) I insist that we need to understand economic inequality more than insecurity. It's not about crises, big recessions but about increasing inequality (see @BrankoMilan ). Through this light, cultural backlash (see @DavidNeiwert ) makes much more sense.

10) It is not going to be easy to fix this. Maybe it can't be fixed and it's game over (there's always this possibility, but we don't know what probability is associated with this outcome). If we have any chance, it's by looking up and down:

11) Looking up (macro) to understand global economic trends in increased inequality and looking down (micro) to understand case by case, how the far right got empowered.

12) That's what bothers me in the insistence that Trump, Bolsonaro or Brexit are "epiphenomena": it's a conspiracy of election manipulation.

13) Sure it happened. But with or without the Russian bots, Bolsonaro would still be president, Brexit would happen and maybe, just maybe trump wouldn't be elected but the polarization in the USA would be exactly what it is.

people-press.org/2016/04/26/a-w…

14) Either we learn to unlearn and look at this elephant together, or insisting on "we, the people" is actually playing into the doomsday agenda.

15) As a political marketing and symbolic item, Roberts is right: the nation state is very much alive. But it doesn't really exist and interest and cultural heterogeneity are part of this whole mess.

papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

16) I have no idea how many people understood what I wrote but I really don't care. Those who matter will get it. When I write educational pieces, it's different. This is not an educational piece.

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