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A Functional-Contextualist Account of Political (Verbal) Behavior. Demagogy and Transformation of Psychological Functions. This paper analyses political behavior from a functional-contextualist viewpoint. In particular, the different tactics or mechanisms involved in the political language of demagogy are split up, with the aim of understanding the auspicious effects that demagogue politicians obtain in the State where they act, and how such political strategy is able to raise, maintain, and perpetuate at the height of power to the politician behaving in that way, even despite the damaging consequences derived at medium and long term for that State. Both traditional behavior-analytic concepts like say-do relations, and recent functional-contextualist theoretical advances like derived relational responding (or relational frames) and transformation of functions are employed, but also close concepts of other disciplines such as the emic/etic distinction of M. Harris’ Materialist Anthropology, as well as the theoretical analysis of linguistic conduct made by G. Bueno’s Philosophical Materialism, which divide such conduct from a philosophical perspective into three axes: semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic. As result, six mechanisms are found to take part in the relational structure of demagogy:
Manicheism, Redemptionism, Machiavellism, Sophistic, Ridiculing, and Hypocrisy. Finally, the transformation of psychological functions entailed by such mechanisms are detailed.
Key words: demagogy, democratic authoritarianism, functional-contextualist analysis, hypocrisy, machiavellism, manicheism, redemptionism, ridiculing, sophistic
