The fall of political leaders reflected in gaze-following behavior of their voters

Gaze-following is a pivotal social behavior that albeit automatic, is permeable to high-order variables like political affiliation. In a previous study we showed that gaze-following is stronger when right-wing participants faced their in-group political leader (vs. the out-group's), namely Silvio Berlusconi (SB), who, dominated the Italian political landscape and had a massive popularity at the time of data collection. This effect paralleled the perceived-similarity between the voters’ and SB’s personality. Since the popularity of the former Prime Minister dramatically dropped down from the year in which we collected those data to the period in which he had to resign, we explored if changes of popularity were reflected in changes of perceived-similarity and gaze-following behavior. We recruited a representative subsample of the original group (N= 15, mean age= 26.73), and split it, on the basis of self-reported ideology and recent voting behavior in two groups (liberals and conservatives). We found that the political fall of SB was mirrored in a significant decrease of the attracting power of his gaze on the voters' gaze. Importantly, our data suggest that the perceived-similarity mediates this relationship. We tested the same hypothesis on a representative group of electors of the former governor of 'Regione Lazio' who also had to resign. A preliminary analysis on perceived-similarity speaks in favor of its prominent role in mediating the attracting power of a political leader. Thus, voters’ proneness to political leaders’ gaze is modulated by real societal changes.