In this paper, we engage with the emerging literature that studies the support for populism by means of attitudes among the public at large. More specifically, our paper has two objectives. First, we extend recent research by Akkerman et al. by showing that their measure performs rather well in a context that differs from the one it was originally formulated in. Data from Flanders (the Dutch speaking part of Belgium, N = 1,577) also demonstrate that the support for populism can be empirically distinguished from feelings of lack of external political efficacy. Second, this is one of the first studies that assess who supports populism and why they do so. We show that populism is embedded in deep feelings of discontent, not only with politics but also with societal life in general. Moreover, we demonstrate that populism is strongest supported by stigmatized groups who face difficulties in finding a positive social identity. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of our findings.

Populism is usually studied by looking at the electoral and rhetorical strategies of parties considered to be populist. In contrast, this article attempts to measure the support for the core propositions of populism among voters and explain the social differences in that support. On the basis of a survey of the Dutch-speaking population of Belgium (N: 2,330) we find that this support for populism turns out not to be directly influenced by a weak or uncertain economic position, by dissatisfaction with personal life or feelings of anomie. Support for populism appears foremost as a consequence of a very negative view of the evolution of society -declinism -and of the feeling of belonging to a group of people that is unfairly treated by society.

BackgroundTo investigate how social support relates to mental health problems for Belgian late adolescents and young adults 15–25 years of age. Additionally, we examine changes in mental health problems between 2008 and 2013 and investigate gender differences.MethodsMultivariate analysis of variance was used to investigate (1) psychological distress, (2) anxiety and (3) depression among 713 boys and 720 girls taken from two successive waves (2008 and 2013) of a representative sample of the Belgian population (Belgian Health Interview survey). Psychological distress was measured by the General Health Questionnaire, anxiety and depression by the Symptom Check-List-90-Revised.ResultsGender differences were found for psychological distress, anxiety and depression with girls reporting significantly higher scores than boys. Multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) revealed that adolescents who are dissatisfied with their social contacts and experience poor social support reported more psychological distress, anxiety and depression. In addition, young adult boys (20–25 years of age) were more likely to experience psychological distress when compared to late adolescent boys (15–19 years of age). Finally, the prevalence of anxiety and depression increased substantially between 2008 and 2013 for girls and to a lesser extent for boys.ConclusionsEspecially girls and young people with poor social support experience mental health problems more frequently than boys and those with strong social support. Improving social support among young people may serve as a protective buffer to mental health problems.

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With the ideational turn in populism studies (Mudde and Rovira Kaltwasser 2013), researchers have started to conceptualize and measure populism as a set of attitudes individuals hold about politics and society (e.g. Akkerman et al. 2014; Elchardus and Spruyt 2014;Hawkins et al. 2012;Rooduijn 2014b;Spruyt 2014;Stanley 2011). As proposed in the introduction to this volume, such attitudes are ordinarily dormant, but may be activated given a favorable context for populist discourse and its articulation by political actors. The measurement of these attitudes, however, has been far from uniform, as the review by Van Hauwaert, Schimpf, and Azevedo in 1 Contact author: BCS. BCS wrote the paper with substantial support from BS; BCS, IA, LL ran the analyses; BCS and LL designed the study; IA, EA, NB, YMC, GD, GR, SR, MS collected data, provided valuable comments and edits, and are listed in alphabetical order; LL led the project. The authors would like to thank Andreea Nicutar, Daniel Kovarec, Elisa Totino, Federico Vegetti, Selina Kurer, and Sharon Belli for their help with questionnaire translation and survey implementation, and Sebastian Jungkunz and Nemanja Stankov for assistance with data cleaning and writing the codebooks.the previous chapter shows. The basis of the most commonly scale used today was set in Hawkins, Riding, and Mudde (2012). It was extended into the popularized six-item version by Akkerman, Mudde, and Zaslove (2014), and used by Spruyt et al. 2016, and in the chapters by Andreadis and Ruth; Singer et al.; and Busby et al. in this volume.However, as Van Hauwaert, Schimpf, and Azevedo have shown in their chapter, there is room for improvement in scale development. From a survey methodology perspective, the items fail to identify strong levels of populism and anti-populism and can only discriminate among moderate forms of it. They are not polarizing enough, as there seems to be a general trend of agreement: for all countries and items, the item averages are above the scales' middle point. A further limitation of the existing measures is that in most scales all items are positively wordedmeaning that more agreement indicates more populism. For this reason it is impossible to discriminate between actual agreement with the content and acquiescence bias.Our purpose with this study is to tackle the issue of scale development following practices common in psychology but that have yet to make their way into political science. We start with a large number of items, and use various techniques to select the few ones that work better at capturing populist attitudes. Next we test which items are invariant across countriesi.e., whether they measure the same thing, the same way, in different countries. Recent research has shown that several scales, some of which have been around for decades in social sciences, should not be used for cross-country comparisons because the measure is not invariant across cultures (Alemán and Woods 2016, Ariely and Davidov 2010, Piurko et al. 2011. Our analyses result in a short questio...

Research on the supply side of politics demonstrates that populism acts as a common denominator even though populist parties possess very different ideological positions. However, it is uncertain whether this translates to the demand side: Do voters support left and right-wing populist parties for similar reasons? Using the Netherlands as our case study, we investigate the common demand side characteristics of supporters of populist radical right and populist radical left parties. The paper concludes that populist attitudes (i.e. a people-centered notion of political representation) unify supporters of both populist radical left and populist radical right parties. Supporters of both parties also demonstrate lower levels of political trust (than voters for other parties): this is particularly the case for PVV supporters. Beyond these similarities we find that the PVV and the SP attract very different supporters. PVV supporters demonstrate low immigrant tolerance, while SP voters support more income equality.

Social psychology has studied ethnic, gender, age, national, and other social groups but has neglected education-based groups. This is surprising given the importance of education in predicting people's life outcomes and social attitudes. We study whether and why people evaluate education-based in-groups and out-groups differently. In contrast with popular views of the higher educated as tolerant and morally enlightened, we find that higher educated participants show education-based intergroup bias: They hold more negative attitudes towards less educated people than towards highly educated people. This is true both on direct measures (Studies 1-2) and on more indirect measures (Studies 3-4). The less educated do not show such education-based intergroup bias. In Studies 5-7 we investigate attributions regarding a range of disadvantaged groups. Less educated people are seen as more responsible and blameworthy for their situation, as compared to poor people or working class people. This shows that the psychological consequences of social inequality are worse when they are framed in terms of education rather than income or occupation. Finally, meritocracy beliefs are related to higher ratings of responsibility and blameworthiness, indicating that the processes we study are related to ideological beliefs. The findings are discussed in light of the role that education plays in the legitimization of social inequality.

The relationships between subjective status and perceived legitimacy are important for understanding the extent to which people with low status are complicit in their oppression. We use novel data from 66 samples and 30 countries ( N = 12,788) and find that people with higher status see the social system as more legitimate than those with lower status, but there is variation across people and countries. The association between subjective status and perceived legitimacy was never negative at any levels of eight moderator variables, although the positive association was sometimes reduced. Although not always consistent with hypotheses, group identification, self‐esteem, and beliefs in social mobility were all associated with perceived legitimacy among people who have low subjective status. These findings enrich our understanding of the relationship between social status and legitimacy.