Making sense of populist hyperreality in the post-truth age:

Evidence from Volodymyr Zelensky's voters

Kostiantyn Yanchenko

Department of Journalism and Mass Communication

University of Hamburg, Germany
kostiantyn.yanchenko@uni-hamburg.de

THIS IS AN AUTHOR’S ORIGINAL VERSION OF THE ARTICLE (AOM)

THIS VERSION IS DIFFERENT FROM THE FINAL PUBLISHED VERSION

The version of Record of this manuscript has been published and is available
in Mass Communication and Society, August 2022,
http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/15205436.2022.2105234

How to cite: Yanchenko, K. (2022). Making sense of populist hyperreality in

the post-truth age: Evidence from Volodymyr Zelensky’s voters. Mass
Communication and Society, Article 15205436.2022.2105234. Advance online
publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2022.2105234
Making sense of populist hyperreality in the post-truth age: Evidence from

Volodymyr Zelensky's voters

Building upon the literature on new information environments, this article explores how

citizens make sense of hyperreal politics. To that end, it turns to the particularly illustrative

case of Volodymyr Zelensky's 2019 presidential campaign, characterized by the complex

fusion of fact and fiction, unclear truth statements, and prevalence of populist narratives.

In 25 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, the article examines how Zelensky's voters and

viewers of the Servant of the People – a television comedy series featuring Zelensky in the

role of the Ukrainian President – interpreted the populist hyperreality of the series, navigated

between various mediated representations of Zelensky, and evaluated him and his fictional

counterpart after the former became the President of Ukraine in reality. The findings show

that the populist hyperreality of the series affected not only its viewers' desire to vote for

Zelensky, but also their overall perception of the Ukrainian politics by highlighting some of

its aspects and ignoring others. The obtained data also suggest that for most interviewees,

there was no strict demarcation between the images of Holoborodko, Zelensky-actor and

Zelensky-politician. The study points to the need to reassess our understanding of informed

citizenship in the new information environments.

Introduction

Research on new information environments (van Aelst et al., 2016) and media regimes

(Williams & Delli Carpini, 2011) has become central to our understanding of many defining

political communication phenomena in the twenty-first century. This is true for the study of

populism (Nadler, 2019), mediatization (Strömbäck & Esser, 2014), and post-truth politics

(Waisbord, 2018), among other things. Against the backdrop of the growing range of

approaches to examining these new information environments, it seems unfortunate that the

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once widely cited and influential concept of hyperreality (Baudrillard & Poster, 2001)

receives less attention in the newer literature, even though its relevance for the

comprehension of contemporary political communication has only increased. This article

revisits hyperreality by taking an audience perspective and exploring how citizens navigate in

the increasingly hyperreal settings. To that end, we turn to the case of Volodymyr Zelensky's

rise from a popular showman to the president of Ukraine, which is sometimes linked to the

impact of the Servant of the People – a political comedy TV series featuring Zelensky in the

role of the President of Ukraine. In 25 in-depth, semi-structured interviews, the study

explores how Zelensky's voters make sense of the political hyperreality as constructed in the

Servant of the People but also in various other mediated narratives that they encountered

during the 2019 election campaign and throughout the first half of Zelensky's presidential

term. Separate attention is paid to the interviewees' interpretations of the campaign's populist

narratives as part of their holistic hyperreal experiences. The study contributes to the

literature on new information environments by showcasing how, and with reference to which

sources, citizens make political decisions in the conditions of unclear truth claims and blurred

lines between political reality and fiction.

Hyperreality in political communication research

The notion of hyperreality originates from semiotics and postmodern theory, where it is

defined as “a substitution of the signs of the real for the real itself” (Baudrillard & Poster,

2001, p. 170). Though not always explicitly, most texts on hyperreality address information

environments, media experiences, and communicative relationships (Merrin, 2005, pp. 1–9),

so it is no wonder that the concept has been acknowledged by the students of political

communication (Delli Carpini & Williams, 2001; Parry-Giles & Parry-Giles, 1999). For

them, hyperreality denotes a discursive world resulting from the intertwinings between actual

and “media events” (Fiske, 1996, p. 62), with the latter including not only representations of

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something that has actually happened but also partly or fully fictional events and narratives

which can, nevertheless, influence public opinion. This relates the concept of political

hyperreality to the growing body of literature on post-truth politics (Kluknavská & Eisele,

2021). In contrast to the concepts of “fake news,” “disinformation,” or “propaganda,” which

are mainly associated with strategic production of falsehoods, post-truth stands for “the

absence of [the very] conditions in the public sphere for citizens to concur on objectives and

processual norms to determine the truth as verifiable statements about reality” (Waisbord,

2018, p. 20). Thus, post-truth and hyperreality are akin in the sense that the former negates

the possibility of undivided and uncontested truth, thereby challenging the notion of a single

and objective reality.

One of the key assumptions of political hyperreality is that for the vast majority of

citizens, contemporary politics is largely a mediated experience (Bennett & Entman, 2012).

This is true even for political elites who, despite having firsthand experience of politics, are

still dependent on the given media situation and tend to adjust their actions and

communication accordingly. As Williams and Delli Carpini put it, “there simply is no

independent, objective, and unmediated position from which we can determine what is and is

not political reality” (2011, p. 130). The problem of virtuality of politics (especially at

national and international levels) is not new, but it is becoming more relevant with the

increasing mediatization and technologization of politics. In the digital age, media coverage

and public discussion of politically relevant events and their subsequent citation,

multiplication, and fictionalization through various channels are so instant that “events no

longer have time to take place” (Glynn, 2009, p. 218). Furthermore, as mediatization

amplifies the impact of the media logic on political process (Strömbäck & Esser, 2014), it is

not uncommon for media events to actually precede and condition the “real” events.

Prominent examples include an episode of Fox's animated series Family Guy triggering a

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public debate about the representation of people with disabilities in the U.S. (Itzkoff, 2010) or

cast members of NBC's political drama The West Wing agitating for the then Democratic

presidential candidate Joe Biden by appealing to the political images and ideas from The West

Wing and making use of their association with those images and ideas, in the eyes of the

citizens (James, 2019). The possibility of such bilateral interactions between the fact and

fiction creates uncertainty about the value and hierarchy of real events and their mediated

representations and undermines our ability to clearly distinguish between the two, “except in

the most mundane or limited ways” (Fiske, 1996, p. 62).

The outlined view of hyperreality bears two important research implications. The first

one concerns the just mentioned hierarchy dilemma: When reality and mediation are hardly

separable, “we can no longer work with the idea that the ‘real’ is more important, significant,

or even ‘true’ than the representation” (Williams & Delli Carpini, 2011, p. 129). Therefore,

the units of analysis of hyperreal politics are not events or facts in traditional understanding

but rather “media events” (Fiske, 1996, p. 62) and “social facts” (Williams & Delli Carpini,

2011, p. 152), regardless of their relation to the reality. The second implication concerns the

need to reconsider our understanding of the range of political communication sources

deserving scholarly attention. Particularly, if one accepts the assumption that both reality and

appearance have sociopolitical ramifications, the conventional distinctions between news and

entertainment content or politically relevant and irrelevant sources of information become

meaningless (Holbert, 2005). The study of political communication in the spirit of

hyperreality requires an integrated analysis of the discourse that people encounter while

shaping their understanding of the sociopolitical world, irrespective of whether this discourse

originates from the traditional news media or from any other information channel, including

the whole universe of forums for entertainment and popular culture. For scholars following

this approach, it is legitimate to inquire, for instance, about the norms that guide journalism in

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a computer-generated alternative reality (Brennen & dela Cerna, 2010) or about the

depictions of governmental law enforcement agencies in a popular video game (Ruch, 2021),

because without answers to these questions our understanding of the process of public

opinion formation would be incomplete.

The role of narratives in hyperreal politics

Narratives are the oxygen of political hyperreality. They contribute to it by structuring the

fragmented messages and images from political reality and fiction into a coherent, mediated

whole. Narratives also allow us to state that what we call “political hyperreality” actually

exists, as certain features of political narratives reveal the more general processes taking

place in contemporary information environments. For instance, the analysis of information

sources influencing public and media agendas or scrutinization of the origin of “facts” and

“events” that make up specific political narratives help us to detect the above-mentioned

intertwinings between the actual and mediated that are in the essence of political hyperreality.

This partly explains why most studies addressing political hyperreality are effectively

examinations of narratives (George W. Bush's Mission Accomplished speech on the aircraft

carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (Glynn, 2009); the story of Jessica Lynch's rescue from

Saddam Hospital in Iraq (Kooijman, 2008); the media coverage of the Clinton-Lewinsky

scandal (Delli Carpini & Williams, 2001), etc.).

Political hyperrealities encompass diverse kinds of narratives, each with its peculiar

relation to the reality. Some of such narratives may be outright fakes, like the most popular

story on Facebook during the 2016 UK Brexit campaign about “the European Union planning

to kill off the National Health Service” (Morris, 2021, p. 322). Others are so-called narratives

with “a special interest in the real” (Pedler, 2009), e.g., documentaries, campaign films,

exclusive interviews, etc. These and similar genres play on our obsession with discovering

“the real truth” about political figures and events. However, what they offer in practice is

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usually a carefully staged and assembled “representation of ... [already] representational

politics” (Parry-Giles & Parry-Giles, 2002, p. 55). In the context of this study, particularly

interesting are those narratives that explicitly claim to be fiction yet still represent sources of

political insight. Many of such narratives have been found to affect citizens' perceptions of

the real-world politics at different levels. For instance, Boukes and colleagues (2020) showed

that four episodes of Borgen – a popular political fiction series – had a significant impact on

the public agenda in Denmark, manifested in people looking for the information on those

episodes' topics in search engines shortly after the exposure. Another study revealed that

watching The West Wing – the already mentioned NBC's political drama – was associated for

the viewers with the more positive perception of the U.S. presidency and the specific real-life

individuals related to the office, because of the way the institution of the presidency was

depicted in the series (Holbert et al., 2003).

The examples of Borgen, The West Wing, and, as we will see further, Servant of the

People point to the principal challenge faced by the citizens in the situations when fully or

partly fictional narratives penetrate politics. This challenge concerns the questions of whether

and to which extent lessons from such narratives are to be integrated into the system of one's

politically-relevant knowledge. We know, for example, from the literature on narrative

persuasion that it is not necessary for a narrative to be anchored in the reality to affect

people's real-world attitudes and beliefs (Bilandzic, 2012). We also know from the theory of

parasocial interaction (Giles, 2002) and from the literature on celebrity politics (Lawrence &

Boydstun, 2017) that people tend to develop a kind of “social relationships” with various

media figures, such as presenters, celebrities, and actors, and also with characters played by

those actors, often with only fuzzy boundaries between all these personas. It is still unclear,

however, how citizens combine political narratives and images from disparate mediated

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worlds into a single hyperreality and how such hyperrealities guide them in the process of

political decision-making. These topics are to be examined in the present article.

Hyperreality and populism: the case of elective affinity?

Empirically, this study rests on the people's accounts of populist narratives and, consequently,

of populist hyperreality, so it is important to briefly comment on the relations between these

concepts. But first, a working definition of populism is needed. Being a contested concept

itself, populism has been approached from numerous theoretical perspectives, with different

scholars viewing it as an ideology (Mudde, 2004), a political strategy (Weyland, 2001),

a rhetorical style (Jagers & Walgrave, 2007), etc. Since this study's objective is to explore

citizens' interpretations of political hyperreality through the analysis of their interaction with

narratives, which are empirically located in the discourse, a discursive definition is adopted

here. According to it, populism is a discourse “invoking the supremacy of popular

sovereignty to claim that corrupt elites are defrauding ‘the People’ of their rightful political

authority” (Aslanidis, 2016, p. 96). Thus, pieces of discourse building upon this assumption

will further be referred to as populist messages while actors disseminating such messages

systematically – as populists.

Despite almost nothing has been published on the relations between populism and

hyperreal politics, the available literature on the links between populism and post-truth

(Hameleers, 2021; Hameleers & Minihold, 2020; Waisbord, 2018) allows us to make some

useful inferences. The central of such inferences is that populist actors tend to thrive in

hyperreality and to prefer it to more traditional media regimes, where the relations between

the actual and mediated are less obscure. Thus, Waisbord argues that “post-truth

communication is exactly where populism wants politics to be – the realm of divided truth,

binary thinking, and broken-up communication” (2018, p. 30). Such information

environments provide populist actors with opportunity structures resulting from the

8
transformation of public discourse into “a contest between competing versions of reality”

(Waisbord, 2018, p. 30). Empirical data also suggest populist actors actively engage in

challenging and reconstructing political realities. For example, a large-n automated content

analysis of social media posts in Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands showed that in these

countries, “right-wing populist politicians are more likely to construct discourses of

(un)truthfulness than mainstream politicians” (Hameleers & Minihold, 2020, p. 18). The

“(un)truthfulness discourse” included politicians' framing of their own interpretations of

political reality as honest and authentic and labelling others' versions of political reality as

deliberately distorted and misleading.

But, perhaps, the most studied case illustrating intersections between populism and

hyperreal/post-truth politics is Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and his

subsequent term in the office (2017-2021). Unlike previous U.S. celebrity politicians who

mainly used their entertainment status to enter the world of politics, Trump “continued to

operate by the rules of entertainment” (Lawrence & Boydstun, 2017, p. 47) even after his

election as a president, systematically favoring populist aesthetics and performance over an

accurate representation of political reality. The analysis of Trump's tweets during the

government shutdown revealed that his construction of the image of “pure people” and

attacks on political and media elites were usually accompanied by the relativization of truth

and “the use of emotional and negative language instead of an emphasis on factuality and

knowledge” (Kluknavská & Eisele, 2021, p. 14). Likewise, the study of Trump's rhetoric

during the 2016 campaign showed that the discourse of authenticity and popular truth, rather

than that of objective truth, was a cornerstone of his appeal to the voters (Montgomery,

2017). The mounting evidence of affinity between populism and hyperreal/post-truth politics

make the study of populist hyperrealities especially relevant.

Zelensky as a hyperreal candidate: Introducing the study's case and research questions

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Before becoming internationally one of the symbols of Ukraine's resistance to the Russian

military aggression, Volodymyr Zelensky had already been a hero for the millions of

Ukrainians – first, as a fictional president Vasyl Holoborodko, a protagonist of the political

comedy show Servant of the People (2015–2019), and then as an actual President of Ukraine.

The 2019 election, in which Zelensky defeated the then president Petro Poroshenko in the

second round, was a milestone for many reasons. This was the first time in Ukraine when a

candidate managed to secure victory almost across the whole country, to politically mobilize

the youth, and to enter the highest echelons of power without any previous experience in

politics (Mashtaler, 2021). However, the 2019 election also makes up a textbook example of

hyperreal politics, even though this aspect has so far been overlooked in the literature. This

section will discuss in which ways and at which levels Zelensky's political rise is illustrative

of the concept of political hyperreality. Three phases identified during this analysis

(see Figure 1) will provide the basis for the study's research questions.

[Insert Figure 1 about here]

Figure 1 depicts a timeline, with the three phases representing distinct stages in the

development of Zelensky's political image. The timeline also includes some key media events

determining each phase's characteristics and, as a result, the assumed features of the

audiences' hyperreal experiences. It should be noted though that Zelensky's informal

association with the political realm had begun long before his appearance as a president in the

Servant of the People. For 14 years, Zelensky had been a star and co-producer of the popular

comedy show Vechernii Kvartal (2005–), which has played an important role in shaping the

Ukrainians' understanding of politics (Ryabinska, 2020) but also their perception of

Zelensky's political profile. Although the period prior to the end of 2015 is not in the focus of

this study, it provides some important context for the understanding of Zelensky's success.

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 Phase I begins with the premiere of the first season of the Servant of the People and

ends with Zelensky appearing in the poll of one of the largest Ukrainian sociological agencies

as a potential candidate in the 2019 presidential election. From the audience's perspective,

this phase covers the period between their first contact with Zelensky in the image of a

president and the point in time when they learned about his potential nomination for real. To

make assumptions regarding the audience's experience during this phase, some detail about

the series is needed. First, Servant of the People was a highly populist narrative (Yanchenko,

2021, pp. 211–212). The plot of the series evolves around the election of Holoborodko –

a school teacher played by Zelensky – as the president of Ukraine. When in the office,

Holoborodko begins a fight against oligarchs and their puppets in the Ukrainian government,

remaining a decent and honest person himself – a true servant of the people. Another

remarkable feature of the series was its verisimilitude. Servant of the People explicitly

depicted Ukraine rather than some abstract state, with many scenes filmed in Ukraine's

government quarter and numerous references made to topics close to the Ukrainian voter.

Thus, during Phase I, the series' audience and future Zelensky's voters were exposed to the

populist hyperreality, with the real and fictional representations of Ukrainian politics

intertwined. In this respect, the study inquires:

RQ1: How did the interviewees perceive and interpret the political hyperreality of the

Servant of the People?

Phase II begins with the news about Zelensky's potential participation in the 2019

presidential election and ends with his victory in that election. During this phase, Zelensky

mainly relied on the political image shaped in the Servant of the People and his other comedy

shows. While being absent from the news media, he carried out campaigning with the help of

Kvartal-95 studio, which, among other shows, produced the above-mentioned Vechernii

Kvartal. In terms of the content of his campaign, Zelensky built it around slogans from the

11
Servant of the People and was making constant references to the series. In this connection,

the Committee of Voters of Ukraine even stated that “screening of the Servant of the People 3

during the election process should be considered as campaigning in favor of Zelensky and

should be paid from the candidate's election fund” (2019). For a Ukrainian voter, Phase II

was characterized by the coexistence of the three related images in the media discourse:

Holoborodko, Zelensky as a comedian, and Zelensky as a politician. Thus, the study asks:

RQ2a: How did the interviewees make sense of the interaction between Zelensky's

various mediated representations during the election campaign?

RQ2b: Which sources of information did they rely on?

Phase III begins with Zelensky's inauguration and ends in December 2021, when the

respondents were interviewed for this study. This phase was characterized by the gradual

formation of Zelensky's political image independent of Holoborodko and a decrease in the

influence of the series' hyperreality on the public perception of Zelensky. After winning the

election, Zelensky ceased his participation in all comedy shows and concentrated on the

service. However, his communication strategy was still reminiscent of the one employed

during the election campaign. For example, he continued actively using social media to

appeal to his voters without intermediation. When it came to a traditional interview dedicated

to the hundred days of the presidency, Zelensky gave it to a fellow actor, who played the role

of the prime minister in the Servant of the People, rather than to professional journalists. His

key political initiatives, such as immediate dissolution of the Ukrainian parliament elected in

2014, promotion of the laws on referendums and deoligarchization, or a large infrastructure

project for the roads repairment, were all reflected in the series more or less explicitly.

Nevertheless, it is assumed here that the image of Holoborodko was gradually losing its

relevance. So, in regard to Phase III, the study inquires:

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 RQ3: How do the interviewees view Zelensky and his fictional counterpart

Holoborodko as Ukrainian presidents?

Before proceeding further, it is important to pause and reflect on how the properties of

the selected case comport with the larger phenomenon of political hyperreality. The potential

danger here is to treat the case per se as an ultimate object of the inquiry, as doing so would

result in limiting the relevance of any findings exclusively to those cases when celebrities

starring in television series as politicians decide to pursue a political career in real life.

Instead of such literate reading of the case, it is more useful to focus on the kind of the

information environment it has enabled. Working from the assumption that all contemporary

democracies are characterized by hyperreality to a certain degree, Zelensky's political rise

with its completely blurred edges between fact and fiction represents an extreme case of

hyperreal politics in general and hyperreal election campaign in particular. The theoretical

merit of such a case is that it provides a sufficient “concentration” of hyperreality

manifestations to thoroughly examine this phenomenon. At the empirical level, it also

provides a concrete framework for the analysis – a set of media events and narratives familiar

to a wide audience, hence allowing for the exploration of citizens' hyperreal experiences with

reference to specific examples. In fact, in terms of its extremeness, the case of Zelensky is

very similar to the Clinton-Lewinsky case – a classic reference in many discussions of

hyperreality (Balkin, 2009; Delli Carpini & Williams, 2001; Williams & Delli Carpini, 2011).

While both Zelensky's political rise and Bill Clinton's impeachment after a protracted and

heavily publicized sex scandal are examples of extraordinary situations, these cases turned

out to be particularly instructive for the understanding of the already acknowledged yet not

always equally salient features of contemporary hyperreal politics.

Methodology

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The empirical part of the study draws on 25 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with the

Ukrainians who voted for Zelensky in both rounds of the 2019 presidential election and had

watched at least the first season of the Servant of the People by 2019. The respondents were

between the age of 20 and 41 at the time of the interview (18 and 39 at the time of the

election). Zelensky received the greatest support among the people of this age group, partly

because they used social media significantly more than older Ukrainians, hence could be

better targeted by Zelensky's campaign messages. It was assumed that the media experiences

of this age group would be the most revealing in terms of Zelensky's hyperreal campaign (for

the detailed demographic profile of the Zelensky's voter, see Ilko Kucheriv Democratic

Initiatives Foundation, 2019). Residence-wise, the interview participants represented five big

cities each belonging to a different Ukrainian macroregion with its specific sociopolitical

features: Chernihiv (north of Ukraine), Kharkiv (east of Ukraine), Lviv (west of Ukraine),

Odesa (south of Ukraine), and Vinnytsia (center of Ukraine). Each city was represented by

five persons. The rationale behind sampling respondents from such diverse settings was not

to compare cross-regionally, but to uncover the commonalities between the accounts of

hyperreal politics provided by different people. There were 13 females and 12 males among

the respondents. The interviewees were recruited with the help of the Ukrainian market

research company that conducted the search using its regional panels.

The interviews were semi-structured and ranged between 60 and 90 minutes in length.

All of them were conducted by the author via Zoom conferencing service in the first half of

December 2021. Interviews were held in either Ukrainian or Russian according to the

respondents' wishes. Each interview consisted of three blocks corresponding to the three

research questions of the study. As the blocks concerned specific periods of the timeline (see

Figure 1), it was made sure that the respondents could easily understand each question's

temporal position. To that end, the three parts of the interview were clearly separated from

14
one another, and when needed, questions contained a specification of which period they

referred to. In addition, two short videos were used as stimuli before the first and second parts

of the interview. The first video was a trailer of the Servant of the People and the second one

was a Zelensky's campaign video, where he challenged Poroshenko for a debate. These

stimuli were intended to serve as “cognitive anchors” and elicit respondents' memories about

their perception of the series and Zelensky's campaign, respectively. All respondents were

compensated with 200 UAH (approx. 6.5 euros at the then exchange rate) for their

participation in the study. The protocol, consent form, and interview guide are available as

Supplementary Material.

The interviews were transcribed in entirety and uploaded to MAXQDA for further

analysis. The material was approached qualitatively using an inductive thematic procedure

summarized by Braun and Clarke (2019). The analysis included describing the participants'

ideas with first-level codes, and then identifying broader themes and interpretation patterns.

In line with the phenomenological approach, special attention was paid to how the

respondents explained their experiences and how their answers to different questions related

to each other (Bevan, 2014). The quotations provided further in the article were translated by

the author and attributed using anonymous codes in the following format: interview number –

participant's sex (male/female) – participant's age – participant's city of residence

(Chernihiv/Kharkiv/Lviv/Odesa/Vinnytsia), e.g., “Int1-F-25-K.”

Findings

Servant of the People and its contribution to the formation of populist hyperreality

At the beginning of the interview, respondents were asked to recall circumstances under

which they first watched Servant of the People, and after that, to talk about their initial

impressions. On the whole, all respondents felt positive about the series, describing it as

enjoyable, funny, relaxing, and light. Further elaborations suggest two main reasons for such

15
accounts: the series' perceived truthfulness in depicting Ukrainian politics and its ability to

give hope for the improvement of Ukraine's political and economic situation.

As far as truthfulness is concerned, the majority of interviewees recognized the

populist messages of the series as accurate depictions of the Ukrainian political reality. These

mainly included depictions of oppressed ordinary people and privileged conspiring elites yet

presented in a comic rather than dramatic way:

[Interviewer: Was the series similar to what you know from the real life?] Sure thing!

Well, especially about corruption, those episodes about oligarchs' meetings, how they

gather and settle everything. I mean, on the one hand, [the series] is comic but, on the

other, it shows everything from inside, all that hidden from the ordinary people. [But

how can you know it's so if it's hidden?] That's how we imagine it. That people

discuss some important issues behind closed doors, and then it all comes down to us,

to ordinary people. That's how it is. (Int13-F-30-K)

Along with diagnosing problems of the Ukrainian society, the series offered a deus ex

machina solution – a “people's president” Holoborodko. In many respondents, Zelensky's

character elicited optimism and hope that a “populist scenario” is possible:

I don't think we've had such a format before. Because… well, take Kvartal 95

[Vechernii Kvartal]: They ridiculed political problems but did not offer any solutions.

And here [in the series], perhaps, it was a bit childish but, at the same time, we were

shown that these problems can be actually solved… the pressing problems that worry

each of us: wages, corruption, utility rates. (Int3-M-21-C)

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 [The series] gave me faith, hope that this is how it'll be in reality when we elect a new

president. (Int4-M-22-L)

In evaluating Holoborodko, respondents provided quite idealistic characteristics, with

the biggest emphasis made on his personal traits, e.g., fairness, incorruptibility, simplicity,

and straightforwardness. When specifically asked about negative characteristics, respondents

tended to mention naivety and political incompetence. However, in most cases, those

shortcomings were immediately justified by attributing them to Holoborodko's status outside

of politics and his proximity to the people:

Holoborodko himself is an ordinary person … He knows nothing about big politics,

he's just getting to know what's going on in the “big game.” He thinks like all people

and wants to convey this to Verkhovna Rada [Ukrainian Parliament] and to all other

people who are at the top, who live in the parallel universe. (Int24-M-26-V)

The populist hyperreality of the series has informed not only the interviewees'

accounts of Zelensky, butalso their interpretations of the Ukrainian political developments

preceding the 2019 elections. For instance, for some interviewees, the series provided “a

resource for reflections” (Int3-M-21-C) by highlighting certain aspects of the Ukrainian

politics:

I didn't use to pay attention to many problems that were shown [in the series] … they

didn't affect me. But when they were demonstrated in the series, I realized that those

problems really remained and that the then government didn't cope with them and

didn't pay attention to them at all. And I kind of understood that if he [Holoborodko?

17
 Zelensky?] paid attention to those [problems] in the series, he [Zelensky] would

definitely pay attention to them in his work… most likely. (Int12-F-21-V)

As implied by the last sentence of the above quote, there was not always a clear-cut

distinction between the images of Holoborodko and Zelensky in the public discourse. Some

interviewees explained this with the similarities between Holoborodko's political views and

Zelensky's campaign promises, while others pointed to Zelensky's communication strategy

that did not allow voters to forget about Holoborodko up until the election day:

Anyway, somewhere in subconscious you made some, well, not analogies, but you

remembered him, this Holoborodko … You know, somehow [Zelensky] did all the

same in his life [what Holoborodko did in the series] … Everyone probably thought

that in the film, [Zelensky] showed his [political] program, his aspirations, what he

wants to do. (Int9-M-33-K)

I'm telling you, when I watched this series, I thought, “God, God, let him become a

president!” Those thoughts did not leave me for a long time. And then [Zelensky’s

team] kept feeding us up with something: first, a new season, then [Zelensky] said he

would run [for president], and then this election campaign! There was simply no way

to forget it, to get it out of the head! (Int16-F-38-O)

Sourcing political information in the conditions of hyperreal election campaign

When responding to the question about sources of information about Zelensky as a

presidential candidate, most interviewees said they had mainly relied on social media, namely

Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and Telegram. For those people, the lion's share of election-

18
related information was coming directly from Zelensky's team or non-/quasi-journalistic

actors. It was also typical for the respondents to get exposed to political information

accidentally rather than to look for it purposefully:

There was some page on Instagram, and everyone was posting something there. Plus,

there was a lot on my [Instagram] feed… my peers were posting many stories in favor

of [Zelensky]. [Interviewer: What kind of stories?] Well, selfies on a green

background or in a green sweater [green was Zelensky's campaign color], or just a

text saying that they support “Ze” [Zelensky]. (Int12-F-21-V)

Despite the fact that Zelensky had hardly spoken out on political issues in traditional

media, the vast majority of respondents said they had not felt a lack of information about him

as a presidential candidate, with some even complaining about a surplus of information. Most

often, interviewees were content with Zelensky's communication on social media and did not

feel the need to do research on his background or political program because they generally

trusted him as a person:

[Interviewer: Did you always have enough information about Zelensky as a

presidential candidate?] Well, what did I need to know, except that he was almost my

age, that he was from Kryvyi Rih [Zelensky's hometown], that he was an actor and an

adorable person? (Int16-F-38-O)

Well, yeah, I don't go into much detail. For me, what he promised was enough.

Maybe, If I were a political scientist, I might have dug deeper, but for an ordinary

person, there was enough information. (Int17-F-39-K)

19
 Many respondents have cited Zelensky's comedy shows as an important source of

information about his political opinions. For example, one person said he first quitted

watching Servant of the People after some three episodes because the show seemed boring to

him. However, after having learned that Zelensky was running for president, he decided to

watch all available seasons of the series “to find out [Zelensky's] attitude to various situations

in the country” (Int24-M-26-V). A comedy show Vechernii Kvartal was the most highly

mentioned specific source of information about Zelensky as a presidential candidate:

[Interviewer: You have mentioned Vechernii Kvartal as a source of information about

Zelensky. Could you please explain what you mean?] I mean that Kvartal is a

constant satire on politics, and I expected that a person, who was constantly joking

about the political system in the country, would manage not to go down that road

himself [not to repeat the mistakes of the former politicians]. (Int6-M-22-O)

Despite the above presented media consumption patterns, 16 out of 25 respondents

said they had no difficulties in distinguishing various images of Zelensky during the election

campaign. When explaining what helped them to maintain demarcation, most respondents

appealed to the common-sense theme, e.g.: “It seems to me that a sane person should

somehow delimit professional activity, works of art, and the real life” (Int2-M-24-C). Some

respondents also relied on various formal clues, such as the language Zelensky spoke

(Ukrainian in political versus Russian in non-political contexts), whether he joked or not, and

what kind of medium he appeared at. However, there were often inconsistencies in the

respondents' perceived ability to distinguish between the images of Zelensky and their

answers to other interview questions, e.g.:

20
 [From the answer to the question about sources of information]: We have been

watching all [Zelensky's] programs and films for a long time. And as experience

shows, people who play in films, they play themselves, as a rule … And in most films

[Zelensky] behaves, well, like a good guy, so, probably, that's his actual image in life:

good, kind, honest, that's what he is. (Int15-F-40-V)

[From the answer to the question about distinguishing images]: No, I always

understood where [Zelensky] played a role and where he was himself … The fact that

he is a talented professional actor is one thing, but what kind of person he is is

another. (Int15-F-40-V)

Leaving the narrative world: Holoborodko versus Zelensky as Ukrainian presidents

Most findings to be presented in this subsection follow a specific pattern, which becomes

apparent when one groups the interviewees by their attitude to Zelensky. Thus, I begin by

introducing the three respondent groups identified during the analysis and then proceed to the

findings.

The first and the largest group (15 out of 25) consists of the respondents who, after

half of Zelensky's presidential term, were highly positive about him and his policies. These

people tended to praise Zelensky's achievements, justify his failures, and express optimism

regarding Ukraine's future under his rule. When asked whether they would vote for Zelensky

or Holoborodko if both candidates competed in the actual election, all of them confidently

opted for Zelensky. The second group (6 out of 25) includes the respondents who were

strongly disappointed with Zelensky as a politician at the time of the interview. These

respondents saw hardly any positive changes in Ukraine that could be claimed by Zelensky

21
and felt themselves cheated, including by the series. When presented with Zelensky versus

Holoborodko alternative, all of them confidently chose Holoborodko. Finally, the third group

(4 out of 25) consists of the respondents who provided ambiguous assessments of Zelensky

throughout the interview. These people have not exhausted the credit of trust in the President,

despite criticizing or not understanding some of his actions. The subsequent analysis

considers the factor of respondents' overall attitude to Zelensky, especially when it comes to

his unambiguous supporters and opponents.

The vast majority of the respondents believed that in the course of his presidency,

Zelensky had been drifting apart from the image of Holoborodko. For instance, this

concerned his political communication style which, according to many, became more formal

since he had taken office. While Zelensky's opponents perceived his separation from

Holoborodko negatively, his supporters viewed it as a sign of political maturation and a

necessary adjustment to the circumstances of the “real politics,” e.g.:

[Zelensky's opponent]: Yes, he's moving away, he's started to move away [from

Holoborodko's image]. For example, it shows in the fact that Zelensky said there

would be no motorcades… Well, he does drive in motorcades, and we know that. But

why is he doing so? Holoborodko was against it. (Int7-F-38-K)

[Zelensky's supporter]: It's just that the format is different: what was shown [in the

series] for us, for ordinary people, is one thing, but how it works in the politics is

different. So, one can say [Zelensky] is moving away [from Holoborodko], but not for

the worse. Because you can’t behave in real politics the way Holoborodko behaved

[in the series]. Zelensky cannot be Holoborodko completely. (Int3-M-21-C)

22
 As seen from the above quotations, Zelensky's opponents framed his separation from

Holoborodko as a detachment from the “ordinary people.” In turn, Zelensky's supporters

tended to explain the same tendency with the inevitable mismatches between the “fictional”

and “real” politics, among other things. The similar differences in interpretation were also

apparent when the respondents were asked to discuss differences between Holoborodko and

Zelensky. While Zelensky's supporters said Holoborodko was naiver and more

unprofessional and did not face such serious political challenges as Zelensky did, his

opponents argued that Holoborodko was more effective as a politician and, unlike Zelensky,

did not betray his principles:

[Zelensky's supporter]: In the series, we see a certain misunderstanding of the

situation and of what is happening [by Holoborodko]. But now it seems to me that in

real life [Zelensky] perfectly understands where he is and what he is doing. (Int2-M-

24-C)

[Zelensky's opponent]: He was shouting in the series that he was with the people, that

he would help, that he would solve all the problems after coming to power. But, in

fact, everything stands still, only getting worse and worse. [Interviewer: Why do you

think it's so?] [Zelensky] is just a liar… He lies and doesn't even know how to blush.

(Int20-F-33-C)

Notably, when justifying Zelensky as a politician, many of his supporters tended to

rely on populist schemata clearly originating from the Servant of the People, including the

one about Holoborodko's/Zelensky's proximity to the people. For example, some respondents

23
employed a perspectivization strategy by putting themselves in the shoes of Zelensky and

concluding that they would not do better than the President does:

Well, I can't say there's something I don't like about him. Suppose I became a

president just as he did, I would probably behave in the same way. (Int15-F-40-V)

I admire people who are such strong leaders [as Zelensky]. You need a very large

human resource for that, and if I were in his place, it would probably be very difficult

for me. (Int2-M-24-C)

Discussion

The goal of the study was to examine how people make sense of political hyperrealities on

the example of Zelensky's 2019 election campaign and his post-election communication.

Three phases, each with its own features and research questions, were identified within the

study's timeframe and explored in 25 in-depth, semi-structured interviews. This section

discusses the obtained findings with the focus on the study's research questions.

The analysis revealed that the vast majority of the respondents interpreted populist

hyperreality of the Servant of the People as an accurate representation of the Ukrainian

politics (RQ1). Despite many important issues, such as the war in Donbas, were completely

ignored in the series and others, such as, the structure of the Ukrainian political system, were

simplified and distorted, only two respondents noted inconsistencies when comparing the

narrative world of the series with the Ukrainian political reality. In general, the attribution of

truth to the series followed a “partisan rationale” (Hameleers & Minihold, 2020, p. 18), with

many interviewees framing the series' hyperreality as the “people's truth” and opposing it to

the “elite truth”, or in the words of one respondent, “the parallel universe.”

24
 The vast majority of the interviewees said that the series had positively influenced

their decision to vote for Zelensky. While this finding is barely surprising considering what

we know from the narrative persuasion research (Bilandzic, 2012), it vividly illustrates

Fiske's quote about only a “limited and mundane” (1996, p. 62) ability to distinguish between

the fact and fiction in the conditions of hyperreality. It is not that the viewers of the Servant

of the People did not realize that the series was a fiction or that Zelensky was playing a role.

It is rather that this knowledge did not prevent them from being cognitively and emotionally

absorbed by the series and drawing from it to shape their perception of politics. Thus, the

case of the Servant of the People shows that in the new information environments

characterized by the redundancy of truth in its traditional understanding, media audiences are

increasingly communities of belief (Hameleers, 2021, p. 172), so whether to accept a

proposed version of political reality or not is a question of identity rather than epistemology.

Moving to the second research question, most respondents felt quite confident about

their ability to distinguish between the different images of Zelensky during the election

campaign (RQ2a). At the same time, their answers to other interview questions suggest no

strict demarcation lines, especially between the images of Zelensky-comedian and Zelensky-

politician. The interaction between Zelensky's mediated representations caused neither

concern nor confusion among the respondents. On the contrary, even those few who doubted

their ability to spot “the real” Zelensky among his many mediated images enjoyed the overall

communication environment of the campaign. Such finding may signify that maintaining

strict demarcation between different images of Zelensky was never a voters' priority. This

assumption is largely supported by the respondents' accounts of their media consumption

patterns during the election campaign (RQ2b). Particularly, to inform themselves about

Zelensky as a presidential candidate, the respondents mainly turned to the sources free of any

journalistic gatekeeping, such as television comedy shows or campaign materials on social

25
media, without reflecting on the implications of such media repertoires. Even though a few

interviewees did express regret about not having figured out Zelensky's political program,

most were satisfied with the available partisan, entertainment, and fictional content. In this

regard, Zelensky's campaign makes a powerful case for the critique of the overly idealized

conceptions of deliberative democracy and informed citizenship that still guide much

research on political decision-making (Parry-Giles, 2010, pp. 43–44). While it has been

already questioned whether people actually want to deliberate or, perhaps, in today's complex

world being a “good citizen” is too much of a burden (Mattson, 2002), the presented case

allows that in contemporary information environments it may be not just demanding but

sometimes impossible to make informed decisions. As shown, Zelensky's strategy of

circumventing news media left Ukrainians without much choice regarding where to source

information about his candidacy, apart from the options mentioned by the respondents. From

this perspective, the decision of one of the respondents to watch Servant of the People in

order to find out about Zelensky's political views is symptomatic. In fact, Zelensky's recent

international recognition in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine evoked very

similar responses in other countries, with major broadcasters across the globe suddenly

licensing a seven-year-old Servant of the People (Campione, 2022) and mainstream media

outlets incorporating Holoborodko in their discussions of Zelensky's leadership skills (Fetters

Maloy, 2022).

The interviews also examined how Zelensky's voters viewed him as the President of

Ukraine, including in comparison with the fictional president Holoborodko (RQ3). The

study's working assumption was that, regardless of the respondents' assessment of Zelensky,

they would feel he was departing from the image of Holoborodko in the course of his

presidency. This assumption found support in most interviews. Interestingly, while agreeing

on the general trend of gradual divergence between the two images, the respondents

26
interpreted it very differently. Those supporting Zelensky's policies framed the trend

positively – as Zelensky's transformation from an actor playing a president to the actual

President of Ukraine. In turn, Zelensky's opponents perceived his estrangement from the

image of Holoborodko as a rejection of the values and principles for which he was elected.

Thus, two and a half years into Zelensky's presidency, the narrative world of the series still

played a role in how he was perceived by the respondents. Yet, this role was ambiguous: By

interacting with the political attitudes of the respondents, the series simultaneously increased

the value of Zelensky's presidency for his supporters and received negative connotations in

the eyes of those who got disillusioned with him. This points to the unpredictability of

political communication effects in the new information environments. As Glynn puts it: “The

more fully a regime of power seeks to exert control over and through images, the more

vulnerable it becomes to the generation of counterimages, counternarratives, and

counterspectacles” (2009, p. 216).

The present study is not without limitations. Particularly, although the “three phases”

used to guide the interviews and structure the findings have analytical value, the interviews

themselves all took place at the same time. It means that we cannot be sure about the extent

to which the respondents could accurately reflect back on their perceptions and

interpretations at an earlier time. Despite measures were taken to simplify this task for the

respondents (see Methodology), one should not interpret the study's findings as if the data

were collected in “real time.” It could also be helpful to consider individual respondents'

answers in the context of their attitudes to Zelensky at the time of the interview – the

respective data is provided as Supplementary Material. Finally, it should be noted that two

respondents, namely Int8-M27-C and Int24-M26-V, watched Servant of the People during

Phase II, which makes their experiences different from those of the rest of the group.

27
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Figure 1: Different stages in the development of Volodymyr Zelensky's political image

Note. Phase I – Zelensky in the image of the fictional president Holoborodko; Phase II –

Zelensky as a potential and later actual presidential candidate in the 2019 election; Phase III

– Zelensky as the sixth president of Ukraine.

34