How populist attitudes scales fail to capture support for populists in power

Abstract

Populist attitudes are generally measured in surveys through three necessary and non-compensatory elements of populism, namely anti-elitism, people-centrism, and Manicheanism. Using Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Module 5 (2016–2020) data for 30 countries, we evaluate whether this approach explains voting for populist parties across countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas. We show that the existing scales of populist attitudes effectively explain voting for populists in countries where populist leaders and parties are in opposition but fail to explain voting for populist parties in countries where they are in power. We argue that current approaches assume “the elite” to mean “politicians”, thus failing to capture attitudes towards “non-political elites” often targeted by populists in office—in particular, journalists, academics/experts, bureaucrats, and corporate business leaders. The results reveal limits to the usefulness of existing survey batteries in cross-national studies of populism and emphasize the need to develop approaches that are more generalizable across political and national contexts.

Globalization and social distance: Multilevel analysis of attitudes toward immigrants in the European Union

“…Secondly, we encourage researchers to pool cross-sectional data over time in order to observe changing attitudes toward immigration and examine the association of globalization with such attitudes from a within-country perspective. Thirdly, if populism measured as a political ideology of an individual is available [ 65 , 66 ], it can replace the common measure of individual political ideology on the scale of right to left used in this study. Finally, comparable datasets outside the EU can be used to examine whether social distance is tied to contacts and globalization in similar or different manners across regions.…”

When Correlation Is Not Enough: Validating Populism Scores from Supervised Machine-Learning Models

“…Other studies show that many concepts, such as political trust or external political efficacy, are correlated with populism, and that it is hard to disentangle these concepts empirically despite being different theoretical concepts (Dolezal and Fölsch 2021;Geurkink et al 2020). Finally, other recent studies demonstrate that even carefully designed survey scales measuring populist attitudes might lack validity and rather capture opposition to the government (Jungkunz, Fahey, and Hino 2021).…”

Perceived Inequality and Populism

“…Irrespective of the host ideology, research identifies that voters with populist attitudes are more likely to vote for populist parties (Akkerman et al, 2014;Hawkins et al, 2020;Van Hauwaert and Van Kessel, 2018;Loew and Faas, 2019;Marcos-Marne et al, 2020). Some studies find these effects to be minor, for populists in power (Jungkunz et al, 2021;, or compared to host ideologies , but generally confirm that populist attitudes influence voting. Only one recent conjoint experiment finds no evidence of populist appeals (Neuner and Wratil, 2020).…”