An Empirical Comparison of Seven Populist Attitudes Scales

Abstract

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.

The role of populist attitudes in explaining climate change skepticism and support for environmental protection

“…Disentangling the correlation between populism and climate and environmental attitudes from political ideology and other control variables such as political trust is of utmost importance. Several empirical studies confirm the high quality of this measure in different settings and contexts (Castanho Silva et al 2019, Van Hauwaert et al 2019. The quality of the online survey in the British Election Study is particularly high; approximately 4,100 respondents answered questions on populism, climate skepticism, and environmental protection between 14 April and 4 May 2016.…”

Populist Attitudes and Selective Exposure to Online News: A Cross-Country Analysis Combining Web Tracking and Surveys

“…Recently, populism studies have moved beyond supply side explanations that focus on political parties and politicians' discourse to also investigate populism as an individual-level predisposition. While there are methodological debates on the measurement of populist attitudes (Castanho Silva, Jungkunz, Helbling and Littvay, 2019;Wuttke et al 2020), such batteries can be used as an independent variable in crosscountry research (Wettstein, Schulz, Steenbergen, Schemer, Müller, Wirz and Wirth, 2020). Most prominently, populist attitudes transcend existing political cleavages and predict voting for populist radical left and right parties in many Western democracies (Van Hauwaert and Van Kessel 2018;Wettstein et al 2019).…”

Disentangling How Populism and Radical Host Ideologies Shape Citizens’ Conceptions of Democratic Decision-Making

“…On the part of voters, populism exists as a set of widespread attitudes among ordinary citizens that lie dormant until activated by weak democratic governance and policy failure. These attitudes are centered on the three constituent ideational elements of anti-elitism, people-centrism, and a Manichean worldview (Akkerman, Mudde, & Zaslove, 2014;Castanho Silva, Jungkunz, Helbling, & Littvay, 2019;Rooduijn, 2014).…”

“…We measure populist attitudes with an additive index by using a battery of six Likert items, which focus on anti-elitism and popular sovereignty as core concepts of populism (Hobolt, Anduiza, Carkoglu, Lutz, & Sauger, 2016). Castanho Silva et al (2019) conclude in their empirical comparison of populist attitudes scales that this scale fails "to capture more than mere anti-elitism" (Castanho Silva et al, 2019, p. 10) and thus does not fully cover the dimensions of the ideational approach to populism (Hawkins et al, 2018;Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2017). While we acknowledge this criticism and the resulting limitations in the interpretation of our results, we argue that this scale also captures support for popular sovereignty (Wuttke, Schimpf, & Schoen, 2020), and we thus believe that, given the limited data available, this scale is at least a defensible approximation to the target concept.…”