American populism: dimensions, distinctions, and correlates

Abstract

At a time when American "populism" has become a more commonly referenced concern, buzzword, and subject of academic research, conceptual clarity is imperative. This study aims to make some progress by exploring the dimensions and covariates of populism within the mass public. We differentiate economic populists, cultural populists, and ideologically constrained populists, who differ substantially from each other with respect age, gender, education, income, some personality traits, and moral foundations. We also distinguish each of these populist veins from other orientations that are often mis-labeled as populism, such as nativism, nationalism, and authoritarianism-noting points of convergence and divergence. Moreover, with respect to political orientations, we observe that economic populists are usually ideologically "liberal" and Democratic, while cultural populists are usually "conservative" and Republican. Finally, we find that cultural populists exhibit disproportionate levels of political obstinacy, whereas ideologically constrained populists exhibit disproportionate levels of socio-political contempt.

The Relationship between Economic Populist Sovereignism, Globalization and Populist Radical Right Politics: Voter Attitudes in Western Europe and the United States

“…Surprisingly, these attitudes are negatively correlated with voting for Trump, thus only partially supporting the suggestion made by Steger (2019) regarding Trump's distinctive anti-globalist populist reconfiguration at the voter level. By contrast, the observed pattern of attitudes in the United States underscores the relevance of a left-wing manifestation of economic populism, closely tied to concerns about social inequality and economic democracy (Barker and DeTamble 2022;Judis 2016;Warren 2020). In this regard, Dani Rodrik (2021: 167) mentions the attitudes of progressive populism in late 19th-century America, which supported free trade 'because they believed protection helped the country's elites and hurt ordinary people'.…”

“…In this regard, Dani Rodrik (2021: 167) mentions the attitudes of progressive populism in late 19th-century America, which supported free trade 'because they believed protection helped the country's elites and hurt ordinary people'. A recent empirical analysis of economic populist attitudes in the United States further suggests that these dispositions align with 'liberal' or 'progressive' stances, indicating that economic populism may have gained traction within the American left (Barker and DeTamble 2022).…”

Conspiracy thinking and the long historical shadow of Romanticism on authoritarian politics

“…In what follows, we consider several potential candidates: anti-establishment orientations or populism, intuitionism, the authoritarian personality, and, finally, romanticism. Within the literature on conspiracy thinking, there has been a small but growing attempt to circumvent the theoretical and conceptual problems outlined above by merely describing the empirical relationships among these measures as “anti-establishment orientations” or “populism” ( Castanho Silva et al, 2017 ; Bergmann, 2018 ; Wood and Gray, 2019 ; Enders and Uscinski, 2021 ; Uscinski et al, 2021 ; Barker and DeTamble, 2022 ; Enders et al, 2022 ). Largely, these attempts are a-theoretical: they argue that the correlation among these measures (or some combination of these and other items) and authoritarian or extremist politics must be a unique construct because it is orthogonal to a left–right ideological dimension.…”