Populist Attitudes: Bringing Together Ideational and Communicative Approaches

Abstract

The study of populist attitudes has thus far drawn heavily on ideational definitions of populism, focussing almost exclusively on attitudes related to dimensions such as people-centredness and anti-elitism. However, these accounts have largely ignored other approaches to populism, especially the discursive-performative school which see populism as something that is communicated and done by political actors. We argue that when studying populist attitudes, these approaches are not mutually exclusive. In this article, we develop a novel measure of attitudes towards populist communication and consider how these interact with populist ideational attitudes. Testing our measures on the Australian case, we demonstrate that attitudes towards populist communication exist independently of populist ideational attitudes, and that they have a significant effect on voting behaviour and on attitudes related to the ideational approach. Therefore, we argue that studies of populist attitudes need to take attitudes towards populist communication into account in future work.

Recalibrating populism measurement tools: Methodological inconsistencies and challenges to our understanding of the relationship between the supply- and demand-side of populism

“…as reference Schulz et al (2018) scale, Hameleers et al (2021 prove via an experiment conducted in 15 European countries, that different messages and frames can activate different attitudinal dimensions of populism-such as anti-elitism, belief in a homogenous people or support for popular sovereigntyindependently from each other, but that the effects of populist messages largely depend on the characteristics of countries and level of exposure to the messages. Finally, Kefford et al (2021) show that in the Australian case, attitudes toward populist communication-emerging from the discursive-performative tradition-display a strong effect on populist right voting, independent from that of the ideational items that have thus far monopolized most scales.…”

“…Following Wuttke et al's (2020) suggestion, Castanho Silva and Wratil (2021) and Silva et al (2022) successfully apply non-compensatory approaches to the treatment of populist attitudinal that were part of extant scales, such as those by Akkerman et al (2014) and Van Hauwaert and van Kessel (2018). Moreover, Kefford et al (2021) show that some dimensions of populism, such as attitudes toward populist discursive and performative styles, traditionally absent from demand-side studies, can also be incorporated in attitudinal surveys. Similarly, recent studies demonstrate that including in the analysis different but related constructs such as narcissism (Arias-Maldonado et al, forthcoming;Mayer et al, 2020) or belief in conspiracy theories (Castanho Silva et al, 2017;Salvati et al, 2022).…”

Who supports science-related populism? A nationally representative survey on the prevalence and explanatory factors of populist attitudes toward science in Switzerland

“…However, the four theoretical components of science-related populism themselves do not represent non-compensatory concepts. This means that they must be operationalized-most usefully-with the Bollen approach, which is common practice in current populism research [79][80][81]. Accordingly, we used respondents' average agreement with the four subscales of the SciPop Scale to quantify conceptions of the ordinary people, conceptions of the academic elite, demands for decision-making sovereignty, and demands for truth-speaking sovereignty (possible range of each subscale score: 1.00 to 5.00).…”

The Growth of Populism: In Search of a Local Answer to a Global Challenge

“…Moreover, the performance of crisis, breakdown or threat is a key component of the populist style.An important contribution to the study of populism is its definition as something that is communicated and done by political actors. G. Kefford, B. Moffit, A. Werner emphasize that such a research approach to populism can be combined with other approaches on a complementary basis [Kefford, Moffit, Werner, 2021].The experience of Ukraine during the years of independence, according to MM Rogozha, proves that "the lack of a stable democratic tradition in favorable conditions is a good ground for the flourishing of populism" [Рогожа, 2020, p. 53]. At the same time, modern research on populism in Europe shows that even an established democratic tradition does not prevent the actualization of either right-wing or left-wing populism.…”

“…An important contribution to the study of populism is its definition as something that is communicated and done by political actors. G. Kefford, B. Moffit, A. Werner emphasize that such a research approach to populism can be combined with other approaches on a complementary basis [Kefford, Moffit, Werner, 2021].…”