Popular accounts of populist movements often point to negative emotions as a key motivating factor underlying their support. However, little systematic research has been devoted to examining differences in how distinct negative emotions affect levels of populism among voters. This paper attempts to fill this gap by focusing on the influence of the two emotions most frequently connected to populism in political commentary: fear and anger. Informed by appraisal theories of emotions, we hypothesize that populist attitudes are driven by feelings of anger, rather than fear. Using a three-wave online panel survey of Spanish citizens between 2014 and 2016, we find that anger expressed over the economic crisis is consistently associated with variations in support for populism both between individuals and over time, whereas no significant effects emerge for expressions of fear. We discuss the implications of these findings for understanding the nature of populist support.

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...

This paper analyses individuals' adoption of populist attitudes in nine European countries in the wake of the Great Recession. We assess the consequences of three different, interrelated aspects of economic hardship that are expected to foster the development of populist attitudes at the individual level: vulnerability, grievances, and perceptions of the national economic situation. Using comparative survey data, we find effects of all these three individual aspects. Our analysis suggests that the main explanation for populist attitudes is neither the vulnerability nor the economic hardship suffered by the people, but rather the perceptions that citizens have about the economic situation in their country. Using panel data from Spain we address concerns about the presence of endogeneity in the relationship between economy perceptions and populism ECONOMIC CORRELATES OF POPULIST ATTITUDES 2 and conclude that the effect goes mostly from economic perceptions to populist attitudes, and not the other way around.

Given the significance of the left‐right dimension as one of the most frequently employed capping term of ideological thought in most western democracies, the question arises as to how people come to identify themselves along this continuum. Drawing on a set of parent‐child pairs located in Catalonia, we seek to determine whether the processes found elsewhere with respect to the intergenerational transmission of partisanship and issue stances also apply to left‐right ideology, in a novel context characterized by the presence of a distinctive, partially cross‐cutting dimension based on center‐periphery loyalties. Results provide strong support for the principles of the direct transmission model as derived from social learning theory, while also showing the significant role of parents' place identities in conditioning the passing on of left‐right orientations.

Called two years ahead of schedule, the 2012 Catalan election was held in a context of economic recession, controversial austerity measures, growing political disaffection, and increasing popular support for Catalonia's independence. The election was mainly marked by the decision of the incumbent moderate nationalists to advocate for the region's secession from Spain, in the wake of a massive rally in support of the independence of Catalonia. In this article we report on the context, the campaign, and the results of the election, and assess the likely reasons why an unexpectedly high number of voters chose to defect from the incumbent. Additionally, we use survey data to investigate the rapid conversion of a substantial portion of the Catalan public to favour independence, formerly regarded as a rather extreme position, after the 2010 Constitutional Court's controversial decision to curtail the region's reformed Statute of Autonomy.