Politicians conceal their true views behind skillfully managed public images

Evidence

How do you find out what politicians are “really like”? They excel, after all, in impression management, and part of their craft involves disguising what they actually think and feel. If you interview them, I think you can count on getting whatever public image they want to project. You can do content analyses of their speeches, as Tetlock (1983, 1984) did of U.S. senators and British members of Parliament (MPs). But those too are public presentations, carefully “packaged.” (Tetlock’s analysis convinces one because the politicians could not have known, as they were making their speeches, that some day the complexity of their thinking would be inferred from their words.) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 3336

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on impression management and the ‘presentation of self’ tradition from Goffman. — connects to: Image and style can override corruption and policy failure in public esteem — David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An…, 2055