Insights from the Quantification of the Study of Populism

ABSTRACT

Research on populist parties and their voters has produced several books, edited volumes, and peer-reviewed articles that examine these in a comparative context. Country and topic experts defined the “populist” parties of study, and great progress has been made in examining the conditions under which these “populist” parties are successful and the socio-demographic nature of their political support. Recently, quantitative scales have been developed to measure how much populism is present in a party, among their representatives, in the public, and captured in political discourse. By operationalising the definition of populism in such a manner, new insights regarding empirical measurement, quantitative scaling, and ultimately cross-national and diachronic comparisons are now increasingly common. These measures allow for confirmation or refutation of the quantity of populism supplied by the political system or demanded from its voters. This research note captures the current breadth of research using quantitative measures, critically assesses these developments, and concludes with several avenues for future research.

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Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the organizers and participants of the New Directions in the Study of Populism Workshop 15-17 March 2018 in Phoenix, Arizona and Team Populism hosted by BYU for crucial early discussions on the contents of this article. Additionally, this project would not have been possible without the support and encouragement from William Chandler and Peter Gourevitch. Finally, comments from two anonymous reviewers strengthened earlier drafts with suggestions to focus on the insights from the methods reviewed in this article.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on Contributor

Matthew E Bergman is a lecturer at the University of California, San Diego. His teaching and research interests focus on European politics, political economy, and research methods. He is currently serving as the Director of the Krinsk-Houston Law & Politics Initiative. E-mail: [email protected]

ORCID

Matthew E. Bergman http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8879-4615

Notes

1 These factors all had an eigenvalue > 1 explaining over 50% of the total variance.

2 Chronbach’s Alpha measures of 0.82, 0.60, and 0.48 respectively.

3 Populism-Elitism (r = .480, p < .01); Populism-Pluralism (r = .200, p < .01); Pluralism-Elitism (r = .199, p < 01)

4 A subsequent nine-nation analysis using a IRT-methods (item response theory) on populist items substantiates this finding: left-populists have greater populism scores than right-populists while both groups do express significantly greater populism scores than mainstream parties (Van Hauwaert and Van Kessel, 2018).

5 Akkerman et al. (2014) has a CFI of 0.0891, RMSEA of 0.147, and SRMR of 0.066 while the 3-factor model improves each of these measures, respectively: 0.976, 0.048, 0.044

6 Conducting a Multigroup CFA Invariance Test, the Akkerman et al. (2014) scale does not indicate a strongly non-invariant instrument (p-value 0.02)

7 Mainstream opposition New Democracy party candidates responded higher than incumbent populist Syriza, suggesting politicians view this item as an attitude about the current government, as opposed to a populist measure (Andreadis & Ruth, 2018). U.S. Presidential challengers are also shown to use more populist language before toning down their message closer to the general election and potential incumbency (Bonikowski & Gidron, 2016).

8 With item scalability coefficients following Mokken Scale analysis above 0.4.

9 In comparing forms of media content, Rooduijn (2014) identified that tabloid media is no more populist than elite media and that letters to the editor of newspapers appear more populist than other editorials. Correlating this measure with populist party electoral success reveals a positive correlation between the two.