https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5613-760X
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ABSTRACT
While populist citizens’ opposition to political elites has been intensively researched, populist criticism of other societal institutions, such as science, has only recently attracted public and scholarly attention. Political and science populism can both be understood as a set of ideas that revolve around an antagonism between a virtuous common people and an evil elite. However, political populism focuses on political power claims and challenges the political elites, whereas science populism addresses truth claims and criticizes the academic elites. Hence, conceptually, both populism variants pit the people against an elite – but they rely on different conceptualizations of the people and the elites, their authority claims, and the alleged (il)legitimacy of these claims. Yet, it remains unclear how distinct these two populism variants are empirically. We address this gap by comparing established scales for measuring individual attitudes towards both variants and provide three take aways: We recommend that scholars should (1) theorize and test the overlaps of the two populism variants, (2) acknowledge their differences and model these accordingly, and (3) consider which variant is better suited for predicting other attitudes or behaviours. Considering these takeaways would allow public opinion research to provide more fine-grained insights into the intricacies of populist attitudes within contemporary societies and challenges.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to the Faculty of Social Science at University of Vienna for the financial support provided to cover the proofreading costs for this article. Finally, we want to thank Dr. Anne Schulz for providing valuable feedback on this work.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Ethical review and approval were not required for the study on human participants in accordance with the local legislation and institutional requirements. The patients/participants provided their written informed consent to participate in this study.
2 Replication code is available via the Harvard dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JRI186.
3 The scale for measuring political populism has been used in over 40 election studies worldwide between 2016 and 2021 and is thus by far the most widely used scale to measure political populism among voters. However, as previously suggested by Castanho Silva et al. (Citation2020), we preemptively removed one item from the original scale to improve the fit of the scale dramatically.
4 Note that the eigenvalue of the third component was smaller than 1 and below the parallel analysis line (in turquoise) – thus, further supporting the presence of exactly two underlying factors.
5 The question wording was: ‘How do you assess the current financial situation of your household?’ with the answer categories ‘get by only with great difficulty’, ‘get by with difficulty’, ‘neither good nor bad’, ‘get by well’, and ‘get by very well’ (in German).