Communication and Populist Appeal of Chatbot Politicians

This study explores the persuasiveness of chatbot politicians by situating their communication at the intersection of populist communication (Moffitt, 2016) and the ongoing mediatization of political communication (Strömbäck and Esser, 2014). It argues that chatbot politicians emerge at a moment in which political communication increasingly values personalization, immediacy, interactivity, and perceived neutrality—qualities these actors explicitly claim to embody. At the same time, their rise coincides with a populist zeitgeist (Mudde, 2004) that prioritizes “the people” over allegedly corrupt political elites and values direct, unmediated forms of political interaction. The study theorizes chatbot persuasion operating across three interconnected and mutually reinforcing dimensions. First, interactional persuasion emerges through conversational exchange itself: continuous interaction produces trust, a sense of being heard, and perceived responsiveness. Second, epistemic persuasion is enacted through claims of neutrality, data-driven rationality, and technical efficiency, framing the chatbot as a credible and competent political authority. Third, populist persuasion operates through communicative elements that emphasize chatbot’s proximity to the people Drawing on classical rhetorical concepts alongside media and populism scholarship (Aristotle, 2005), the study shows that chatbot politicians persuade not only through claims of objectivity and technical rationality, but also through performances of credibility, empathy, and responsiveness enacted within conversational interfaces and personalized communication. The dialogic format itself becomes persuasive: the act of “listening,” responding, and adapting generates trust independently of substantive political content. Rather than asking whether chatbot politicians are more persuasive than human politicians, the paper argues that they reproduce and intensify dominant persuasive logics of contemporary mediatized politics, thereby reshaping how persuasion, political authority, and representation are communicated under conditions of deep mediatization.