How Elites Build Founding Leader Cults by Humanizing the Nation

Why Founding Leader Cults Matter

Founding leader personality cults are central to how some states tell stories about themselves and sustain popular loyalty. Paul Schuler, Trung-Anh Nguyen, Yongfeng Tang, and Mohammad Khan examine how these highly visible national narratives originate, asking whether cults always follow from a leader’s personal grab for power or can be intentionally created earlier for collective legitimation.

The Puzzle and Argument

Existing political science accounts tend to link personality cults to late-stage personalization of power, when a leader consolidates control and coerces loyalty. The authors argue for a different pathway they call "cults of legitimation": rival elites sometimes promote an idealized image of a founding leader before full personalization occurs. These elites use the leader’s persona strategically to bind ordinary people to an abstract political community—the nation—rather than simply to the leader’s office.

Psychology: Anthropomorphizing the Nation

Drawing on social psychology, the paper argues that attaching a human face to an otherwise abstract national entity—anthropomorphizing the nation—strengthens emotional attachment more effectively than symbols alone. That emotional attachment helps elites secure broader loyalty without immediate reliance on coercive personalization.

Process Traces From Three East Asian Cases

The authors process-trace the emergence of founding-leader cults in Vietnam, China, and Indonesia to assess the plausibility of their argument. Their historical and documentary tracing follows how rival elites, state institutions, and public campaigns shaped leader images and national narratives prior to or alongside later personalization.

Key Findings

• Rival elites can and do promote founding-leader images intentionally as tools of legitimation, not only as a by-product of a leader's domination.
• When leaders are used to represent the nation, the nation becomes more emotionally salient to citizens through anthropomorphism; symbols by themselves are less effective at producing this attachment.
• This early, elite-driven promotion of leader imagery helps explain why personality cults sometimes emerge without immediate consolidation of personalized power.
• Comparative process tracing across China, Vietnam, and Indonesia shows common mechanisms and variation in timing and institutional strategies.

What This Suggests for Studies of Authoritarian Rule

By reframing some personality cults as instruments of elite legitimation rather than only as consequences of personalized rule, the paper highlights an understudied route by which regimes build durable national narratives and mass attachment. The study encourages scholars to pay closer attention to elite competition, symbolic strategy, and psychological mechanisms when tracing the roots of leader cults.