Since Weber's classic elaboration on the pure types of legitimate rule, charisma has been a puzzling phenomenon. As a personal quality, charisma can help political leaders forge an enduring relationship with their followers based on affective and emotional grounds. Even when it is an individual trait, followers can validate these charismatic bonds by professing an almost religious devotion to the leader. When that happens, a charismatic movement has been forged. Caitlin Andrews-Lee masterfully addresses this topic in The Emergence and Revival of Charismatic Movements.

Based on a thorough and carefully developed conceptualisation (Chapter 1), Andrews-Lee revisits the role of charisma, defying the routinisation thesis by arguing that charismatic movements can outlive their founders. One of the book's main contributions is identifying charisma's importance in building enduring political identities. By studying Argentine Peronism and Venezuelan Chavismo in depth, the author convincingly shows that the founding leader's charisma forges an enduring political identity based on affective and emotional ties that individual politicians can revive under certain (restrictive) conditions (Chapter 2).

Andrews-Lee's book also contributes to the literature on personalism, charisma and political parties. By stressing the resilience of charismatic attachments across generations, the author crafts a novel and provocative theoretical argument emphasising the importance of agency. Individual political leaders can claim to be the leader's heirs in their attempt to revive the founder's charismatic legacy. However, it is no easy task to do so since several structural conditions can favour or hinder that strategy. Additionally, not all self-proclaimed founders’ heirs have an equal probability of reviving the movement successfully. Anointed successors tend to be unsuccessful, while self-starters are more likely to succeed if some favourable conditions are met. Moreover, some conditions are not in the control of ambitious successors, such as a profound crisis leading to intolerable suffering for a large part of the population.

Methodologically, The Emergence and Revival follows a ‘pluralistic methodological approach’ (p. 10), thus relying on a variety of qualitative and quantitative techniques. The richness of the empirical evidence and the mixed-methods approach allows for testing the theoretical expectations at charismatic linkages’ demand and supply sides. Through a careful research design, the author persuasively demonstrates that the different pieces of her theoretical framework were at play in the two cases under analysis. Based on interviews, focus groups, public opinion surveys, a survey experiment, and process tracing, the author empirically addresses the causal mechanisms involved in the emergence and revival of charismatic movements.

From a demand-side perspective (Chapters 3–5), followers play a vital role in the revival of charismatic identity because they help preserve it, at least latently, until a new leader can take advantage of more favourable conditions. By maintaining and spreading the symbolic legacy of the founding leader through generations, followers help to preserve the charismatic identity.

From a supply-side perspective (Chapters 6–8), the author argues that charismatic movements can be forged or reactivated by skilled politicians who recognise people's suffering and manage to offer immediate relief. Despite their significant differences, the cases of Peronism and Chavismo illustrate how charismatic movements might follow different paths from those predicted by the routinisation thesis. Indeed, charismatic movements resist routinisation, thus leaving room for new leaders to claim the ‘founder's mantle’ and revive the movement when facing favourable conditions.

Andrews-Lee's book also contributes to the literature on democracy by questioning the routinisation thesis and its optimistic predictions, thus warning about the consequences of charismatic movements for democracy. As such, charismatic bonds deter programmatic and organisational linkages, undermining democracy by incentivising politicians to pursue short-sighted and unsustainable policies, thus negatively affecting political representation and accountability. Moreover, the author argues that charismatic leaders tend to surround themselves with cronies rather than professional advisors and experienced bureaucrats. In this regard, Andrews-Lee's book opens a potentially fertile ground for future research. Kurt Weyland has recently shown that some personalistic leaders rely on technocrats and professional experts to implement their policies (‘The Paradox of Personalism in Latin American Populism: The Surprising Reliance on Technocracy and the Military’, in Michael Bernhard et al. (eds.), Still the Age of Populism? Re-examining Theories and Concepts, Routledge, 2024).

Andrews-Lee's book also opens several avenues for future research. The author claims that new leaders seeking to revive the charismatic movement ‘must adopt the founder's personalistic style’ (p. 135). However, if charisma is an individual gift that politicians might or might not have, it is unclear how they can achieve that goal by strategically exerting it. Néstor Kirchner was not a charismatic politician, despite which he was able to revive Peronism and set the stage for his wife's two-term presidency. This distinction could be important for the formation, survival and potential reactivation of charismatic appeals since it limits the potential revivers to a restricted subset of individual politicians gifted with charismatic personalities.

On the other hand, the question of how personalism and charisma are related remains open since personalism seems to be a broader phenomenon, with charismatic politicians being a particular subtype of personalistic ones. Since Andrews-Lee's theoretical framework claims that successful successors should provide material cues to voters ‘through impressive performance’ (p. 36) to reactivate charismatic bonds, they are assumed to be in power. Additionally, the new leader must ‘enact bold, initially impressive reforms that “prove” their worthiness to the followers’ (p. 43). However, to what extent successors relied on personalistic appeals as candidates to achieve power remains in the dark. Indeed, differentiating how politicians pursued office from how they exercised power once they achieved it could allow for a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between charisma and personalism. One intriguing question the book poses is whether politicians seeking to revive charismatic appeals must be personalistic candidates (emphasising personality traits as their main electoral asset), personalistic rulers (concentrating power in their person), or both.