Plain folks

The performance is built from props and signals. Common ones are clothing (shirt-sleeves, work jackets, a cardigan), food and drink (a beer, a diner breakfast, a regional dish), setting (a farm, a factory floor, a kitchen table), speech (dialect, slang, a folksy register, "folks" and "friends"), and biography (humble origins, military service, being a parent). Often the speaker's own background is selected or reshaped so that only the ordinary parts show. A second, frequent move is contrast: the opponent is cast as elite, distant or out of touch, so the performance of ordinariness also becomes an attack.

What the audience experiences is recognition. The speaker seems to be "one of us", and the message seems to come from inside the group rather than from above it. The identity claim then does the work of a warrant: the audience is invited to trust the proposal because of who seems to be making it, not because of what it contains. The message depends on the audience noticing the signals and not noticing the staging, which is why the technique usually fails once the staging becomes visible (the candidate who does not know how to hold the prop, the persona whose biography turns out to be invented).

A newer form moves the performance from a single speaker to many invented ones. Instead of a politician dressing as a worker, an operation creates accounts that present themselves as ordinary local people. Here plain folks merges with Astroturfing, since the "ordinary person" is not only staged but fabricated.

A second mechanism is group prototypicality. The social identity approach to leadership (Haslam, Reicher and Platow 2011) argues that followers support leaders who seem to embody what is typical of the group, and that leaders work to be seen as "one of us" rather than simply as competent. This builds on social identity theory (Tajfel and Turner 1979), which FRAME's Learn library covers in Social identity. Performing ordinariness is one way of claiming that prototypical status.

A third mechanism is trustworthiness. The Yale persuasion program (Hovland, Janis and Kelley 1953) separated a source's expertise from its trustworthiness. Plain folks gives up any claim to expertise and bids for trustworthiness instead: the speaker has no hidden agenda because the speaker is supposedly just like the listener. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (Petty and Cacioppo 1986) predicts that such source cues matter most when the audience is not motivated or able to examine the argument closely, which describes much everyday political and commercial messaging.

The limits are worth stating plainly. Similarity effects are robust in laboratory settings, but how much a candidate's likability or "common touch" actually moves votes, compared with party loyalty and economic conditions, is debated among political scientists. The technique can also backfire when an audience detects the staging, since perceived inauthenticity lowers trust.

NSDAP campaign photograph, Mecklenburg, 21 June 1932. Bundesarchiv, Bild 146-1983-122-01A, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 3.0 DE. The party's uniformed men are shown as guests of an ordinary rural household.

Boris Kustodiev, "Town: Manufactured Goods; Village: Bread" (Soviet Union, 1925). Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. Two smiling ordinary people stand in for the town and the countryside.

"The Chappaqua farmer", lithograph by D. Chalmers (Springfield, Mass., 1872). Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division. Public domain. The candidate is presented through his farm.

Gandhi spins khadi while addressing a crowd during the 1930 Civil Disobedience movement. Wikimedia Commons, scan via Frances Pritchett, Columbia University. Public domain in India (1930 publication).