In recent years, celebrity culture has merged with politics as stars increasingly leverage their platforms to endorse political candidates. From Twitter/X shout-outs to campaign events, these endorsements are viewed as powerful tools for shaping public sentiment.
However, recent election outcomes have left many surprised and may reveal that celebrity endorsements often fail to capture the broader political landscape. While celebrity voices bring attention to particular issues, they frequently miss the diverse and nuanced viewpoints across the electorate, creating a partial and sometimes misleading picture of democracy.
It’s essential to consider how messages are shaped and distributed within mass communication frameworks. Agenda-setting theory, for example, posits that the media doesn’t dictate what people should think but rather which issues they should prioritize (McCombs & Shaw, 1972).
In endorsing certain candidates or ideologies, celebrities help set the agenda by highlighting specific issues from their own perspectives. This influence is further explained by Bandura’s social cognitive theory, which states that people learn behaviors and attitudes by observing influential role models (Bandura, 1986). As celebrities endorse political candidates or policies, they effectively encourage their followers to adopt similar viewpoints, thus shaping discourse around these topics.
While these endorsements highlight key issues, they may skew public perception by amplifying a narrow set of values relevant primarily to the celebrity or their industry. This amplification of personal viewpoints aligns with the “spotlight effect,” a social cognitive bias in which individuals overestimate the impact of their actions on others (Ross et al., 1977).
In this context, the "spotlight effect" essentially means that when a celebrity endorses a candidate or a policy, they may believe that their endorsement will significantly impact their followers and the general public, when in reality, this impact may be more limited. This can lead to a “false consensus effect,” in which celebrities—and their followers—assume........