Psychological Correlates of Populist Attitudes

Abstract

Studies of demand‐side populism with a focus on attitudinal and behavioral factors are becoming more popular, but only a few have explored the phenomenon's psychological determinants. We tackle the lack of conversation between populism scholars and political psychologists and test the impact of conspiracy beliefs, moral disengagement, need for cognition, and belief in simple solutions on populist attitudes. We use the most widespread ideational definition in an attempt to bring clarity to demand‐side populism, as the literature often conflates the concept of populism with adjacent ideological and psychological factors. We analyze representative samples from two very different countries (Italy and Turkey) to test our hypotheses. We use two of the most often‐used measures of populist attitudes and also explore populism's individual building blocks: people‐centrism, antielitism, and a Manichean worldview. We consistently find conspiracy beliefs (and our control variable of institutional trust) as primary sources of populist attitudes, whereas the impact of the other psychological factors is more dependent on context and operationalization. Our article calls for more conceptual clarity, careful theorization, and more work on the refinement of available survey measures. We also highlight the importance of national contexts and the dangers of generalization based on individual country studies.

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

“…Other aggregation approaches-like the "Bollen approach", which averages all scale items or uses factor scores of confirmatory factor analysis, or the "Sartori approach", which classifies respondents as populist vs. non-populist based on their responses-do not account for the concurrency premise [22]. They are thus less useful to capture science-related populism or other populism variants [75], which is why recent research on political populism increasingly favors Goertzian over Bollenian or Sartorian aggregation procedures [76][77][78].…”

Authoritarianism, Political Attitudes, and Vote Choice: A Longitudinal Analysis of the British Electorate

“…Populism has been measured by the scale originally developed by Akkerman et al (2014) that has since been used in a variety of studies in different settings to investigate populist attitudes in mass publics (e.g. Balta et al, 2022;Erisen et al, 2021;Rico et al, 2017;Schäfer, 2021;Spruyt et al, 2016;Vasilopoulos & Jost, 2020). The items ask respondents the extent to which they agree or disagree with statements such as "I would rather be represented by a citizen than a specialized politician", "Politicians in UK Parliament should follow the will of the people", or "People, not politicians, should make most important policy decisions".…”

Make It Great Again: The Relationship Between Populist Attitudes and Nostalgia

“…For instance, there is a bidirectional link between political discontent and populist attitudes, such that political discontent increases populist attitudes, but also, populist rhetoric fuels feelings of political discontent (Rooduijn et al, 2016). Moreover, support for populist movements is associated with conspiracy beliefs (Erisen et al, 2021; Van Prooijen et al, 2022), protest attitudes (Schumacher & Rooduijn, 2013), disagreeableness (Bakker et al, 2021), and ontological insecurity, that is, feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, and fear (Kinvall, 2018). Such emphasis on the negative feelings associated with populist attitudes does not address an important question, however: What makes the bleak rhetoric of populist movements so attractive among citizens?…”