Populists Vote for Populists, Right? How Populist Attitude Scales Fail to Capture Support for Populists in Power

Abstract

Surveys of the attitudes of voters for populist parties generally measure three non-compensatory factors of populism: anti-elitism, people-centrism, and Manicheanism. Using Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Module 5 data for 23 countries, we evaluate whether this approach explains voting for populist parties across countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas. We show that the existing scale of populist attitudes effectively explains voting for populists in countries where populist leaders and parties are in opposition but fails to ex- plain 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 – journalists, academics, bureaucrats, etc. 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.

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

“…We run a confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) model and find only two factors with eigenvalues over one (2.56 and 1.18) and that, in line with our previous GRM analysis, pop2 displays the lowest unique variance (Table A2). Our analysis corroborates those by Castanho Silva et al (2020) and Jungkunz et al (2021) that also reveal important limitations regarding the choice of items by the CSES and other demand-side populism scales. The issues detected regarding goodness of fit, and unexpected loadings, indicate that at the failures predicting support for populist parties in some countries may be associated with the design of the scale.…”

“…Differences in the conceptualization-or emphasis on specific populist attributes-can also explain why some approaches work in some regional contexts but not so much in others (De la Torre and Mazzoleni, 2019, p. 81-85, 90-91). For instance, the emphasis on the anti-elite dimension can hinder the ability of some measurements to properly assess populism in countries where populist parties are in government (Jungkunz et al, 2021). Similarly, the conflation of populism with exclusionary right-wing nationalism in the literature (De Cleen and Stavrakakis, 2017) contributes to create some problems when it comes to measure attitudes and parties.…”

“…voters of populist parties (Akkerman et al, 2017;Van Hauwaert and van Kessel, 2018, p. 72;Marcos-Marne, 2021;Mazzoleni and Ivaldi, 2022), other recent analyses find that this relationship only holds true in some countries (Jungkunz et al, 2021), reveal limitations to the explanatory power of some populist attitudes on vote choice (Neuner and Wratil, 2022), a significant impact of positive and negative partisanships on populist voters' behavior (Koch et al, 2021) and even that some populist parties attract people with elitist attitudes (Akkerman et al, 2014). Moreover, recent studies prove the variety of psychosocial traits displayed by individuals who support populist parties, in terms of ideological orientation (Vasilopoulos and Jost, 2020), attitudes toward outgroups and personality (Fatke, 2019) among other.…”

Populist Democrats? Unpacking the Relationship between Populist and Democratic Attitudes at the Citizen Level

“…Previous democracy research has indeed found that support for dimensions of democracy depends on the political context (Easton 1975;Spierings 2014). In a similar vein, Jungkunz, Fahey, and Hino (2021) find that the level of populist attitudes among voters for populist parties is lower when the populist party in question is in power. In contexts in which populist leaders are in power, the perceived importance of key institutions of liberal democracy, such as the separation of powers, is likely to be lower.…”

De los tipos ideales a las realidades históricas. El fascismo italiano a la luz de la teoría ideacional del populismo

“…Estos análisis han tendido a ver las actitudes populistas como un constructo de orden superior de carácter no compensatorio, lo que implica que todos los componentes de las mismas deben estar mínimamente presentes para que podamos emplear este término (Wuttke et al, 2020). Estos desarrollos metodológicos han posibilitado la realización de análisis cuantitativos sobre la presencia (Akkerman, Mudde, and Zaslove, 2014), las causas (Spruyt et al, 2016;Akkerman, Zaslove y Spruyt, 2017;Rico et al, 2017;Marcos-Marne, 2021;Boscán et al, 2020;Stanojevic et al, 2020;Marcos-Marne et al, 2021) y los efectos de las actitudes populistas (Akkermann et al, 2014;Andreadis et al, 2013;Marcos-Marne et al, 2020;García Sanz et al, 2018;Jungkunz et al, 2021).…”