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

Sebastian Jungkunz,Robert A Fahey,Airo Hino,Jean-François Daoust

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0261658

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.

Highlights

With the rise of populist parties to power in many countries, it has become increasingly important to investigate the supply side of populism through the analyses of speeches and messages and the demand and popular support for it
As we have argued above, the continued use of populist rhetoric by prominent populists in power such as Donald Trump and Viktor Orban implies that their voters continue to hold populist attitudes, and to be responsive to populist rhetoric, despite the electoral success of their chosen candidates, meaning that the thermostatic view of populist attitudes is not fully applicable—or rather, that populist attitudes may be thermostatic to some extent, but that they are not straightforwardly satisfied just by the election of populist parties and leaders
We conclude that populist attitudes scales, as they are currently operationalized, fail to predict vote choice for populist parties which are in power. This appears mainly be driven by the fact that all scales use items for the anti-elite dimension which over-specify the concept by focusing on negative aspects of parties and politicians

Summary

Introduction

With the rise of populist parties to power in many countries, it has become increasingly important to investigate the supply side of populism through the analyses of speeches and messages and the demand and popular support for it. Many (mostly European) scholars have developed several scales for measuring populist attitudes [1,2,3,4,5,6]. With the exception of a single study that used convenience samples to compare all of these scales against each other [7], there has been little work on measuring populist attitudes crossnationally in Africa, Asia or the Arab world. Module 5 of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES) is the first study to have surveyed populist attitudes in most parts of the world through 2016–2020 using a representative sample of each national population. The data from CSES Module 5 permit us to investigate the promises and pitfalls of using populist attitudes scales cross-nationally and under different political circumstances

Objectives

Conclusion