Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Politicians have to appeal to a majority of people in order to get elected. What is the best way of doing this? Do they need to talk? Do they need to spend millions to promote themselves? Or, do they just need to act in order to bring about the virtuous life in the citizenry, as Aristotle, the Greek philosopher defined in the third century BC? Using correlation analysis, the researcher aims to answer these questions by examining the relationship between politicians’ “Talking”, “Spending”, and “Acting” and their “Popularity and Voting Increase.” Data were collected from forty-six Members of the Nordic Parliaments. The results show that “Acting” has a statistical strong positive effect on politicians’ popularity and voting increase. “Talking” and “Spending” were not found statistically significant, though “Talking” has a relatively strong positive impact on politicians’ popularity and voting increase. Contrary to the above findings, “Spending” campaign money has a moderately high negative impact on politicians’ popularity and voting increase. Not only in theory but in practice also, these preliminary results may facilitate elected politicians and political candidates to realize the degree of influence of “Acting”. Nowadays it seems that voters are not interested in public talks and costly campaigns. Voters need to see their politicians “doing” things to make their life easier and more comfortable. Further implications and interesting directions for future research are also provided by this study.