A Scale to Measure Populist Attitudes

Summary

A historical study of American Populism led to the development of a 20-item Likert scale with a high degree of internal consistency. One hundred original respondents took a preliminary set of 100 items, and the 20 items with the highest item-total score correlations were selected for the final scale. The final scale was administered to 222 new adult respondents, ages 18 to 69, 140 male and 82 female, from a wide occupational range. The resulting scale represents an attitudinal syndrome centering on the conviction that wealth and power are unfairly distributed in the United States; support for tax revision, governmental regulation of business, and compensatory social welfare programs; and personal pessimism and disillusion with the political process. This attitudinal syndrome corresponds with the positions of both historical American Populism and contemporary “New Populism.”