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...

We explore the relationship between populist attitudes and conspiratorial beliefs on the individual level with two studies using American samples. First, we test whether and what kinds of conspiratorial beliefs predict populist attitudes. Our results show that belief in conspiracies with greedy, but not necessarily purely evil, elites are associated with populism. Second, we test whether having a conspiratorial mentality is associated with all separate sub-dimensions of populist attitudespeople-centrism, anti-elitism, and a good-versus-evil view of politics. Results show a relation only with the first two, confirming the common tendency of both discourses to see the masses as victims on elites' hands. These findings contribute to research on the correlates of populism at the individual level, which is essential to understanding why this phenomenon is so strong in contemporary democracies.

With the recent upsurge of populism in developed and transition democracies, researchers have started measuring it as an attitude. Several scales have been proposed for this purpose. However, there is little direct comparison between the available alternatives. Scholars who wish to measure populist attitudes have little information available to help select the best scale for their purposes. In this article, we directly compare seven populist attitudes scales from multiple perspectives: conceptual development, questionnaire design, dimensionality, information, cross-national validity, and external validity. We use original survey data collected online from nine countries in Europe and the Americas, with around 250 participants per country, in which all seven batteries of questions were present. Results show that most scales have important methodological and validity limitations in at least one of the dimensions tested, and should not be used for cross-national comparative research. We recommend populist attitudes items that work better at capturing populism, and more generally provide guidelines for researchers who want to compare different scales that supposedly measure the same construct.

Previous research has consistently found widespread attitudinal impacts of terrorist attacks. Using data from the European Social Survey, which was conducting interviews in 11 countries when the Charlie Hebdo attacks happened in January 2015, I compare respondents from before and after the shootings to test whether the event shifted public opinion on several topics. There is no evidence of average impacts across a range of issues, from xenophobia to ideological self-placement and immigration policy preferences. Data collected when the Paris November 2015 shootings happened also present no evidence of public opinion change on immigration and refugee policy matters in France, but there appears to be an effect in other countries-which varies according to contextual vulnerability. Results suggest that views on immigration and immigrants have, to a certain extent, stabilized in Europe and are less susceptible to shifts from dramatic events.

No abstract