How Populist Are the People? Measuring Populist Attitudes in Voters

TLDR

Populist parties emerged in the 1990s and have attracted sustained scholarly attention on their definition, causes, and policy influence, yet little work has measured voters’ populist attitudes. This study aims to measure populist attitudes and examine their link to party preferences. The authors distinguish populist, pluralist, and elitist attitudes, develop a measurement instrument, and validate it using principal component analysis on a representative Dutch sample of 600 respondents. Three distinct attitude scales were identified, and voters scoring high on the populist scale showed a significantly stronger preference for Dutch populist parties such as the Party for Freedom and the Socialist Party.

Abstract

The sudden and perhaps unexpected appearance of populist parties in the 1990s shows no sign of immediately vanishing. The lion’s share of the research on populism has focused on defining populism, on the causes for its rise and continued success, and more recently on its influence on government and on public policy. Less research has, however, been conducted on measuring populist attitudes among voters. In this article, we seek to fill this gap by measuring populist attitudes and to investigate whether these attitudes can be linked with party preferences. We distinguish three political attitudes: (1) populist attitudes, (2) pluralist attitudes, and (3) elitist attitudes. We devise a measurement of these attitudes and explore their validity by way of using a principal component analysis on a representative Dutch data set ( N = 600). We indeed find three statistically separate scales of political attitudes. We further validated the scales by testing whether they are linked to party preferences and find that voters who score high on the populist scale have a significantly higher preference for the Dutch populist parties, the Party for Freedom, and the Socialist Party.