How Populist Are the People? Measuring Populist Attitudes in Voters

• Author: Agnes Akkerman,Cas Mudde,Andrej Zaslove
• DOI: 10.1177/0010414013512600
• Published date: 01 August 2014
• Date: 01 August 2014
• Subject Matter: Articles

Comparative Political Studies

2014, Vol. 47(9) 1324 –1353

© The Author(s) 2013

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414013512600

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Article

How Populist Are the

People? Measuring

Populist Attitudes in

Voters

Agnes Akkerman1, Cas Mudde2, and Andrej

Zaslove3

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.

1Department of Sociology, VU University Amsterdam, the Netherlands

2Department of International Affairs, University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA

3Department of Political Science, Institute for Management Research, Radboud University, the

Netherlands

Corresponding Author:

Andrej Zaslove, Department of Political Science, Institute for Management Research, Radboud

University, P.O. Box 9108 6500HK, Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Email: a.zaslove@fm.ru.nl

512600CPSXXX10.1177/0010414013512600Comparative Political StudiesAkkerman et al.

research-article2013

Akkerman et al. 1325

Keywords

populism, measuring populism, voter attitudes, left populism, radical right

populism

Introduction

The sudden and unexpected rise of populist parties since the 1990s has shown

no immediate sign of abating. The populist radical right is the most success-

ful new party family in postwar Western Europe (e.g., Mudde, 2007), the Tea

Party has become an influential political force in the United States (e.g.,

Skocpol & Williamson, 2012), and populist leaders have proven to be lasting

figures in Latin American politics (e.g., Remmer, 2012). In addition to this

geographical diversity, populist parties span the left–right political spectrum:

from the populist radical right such as the National Front in France or One

Nation in Australia, to neoliberal populists like Berlusconi in Italy and

Fujimori in Peru, to left-wing populists such as Chávez in Venezuela, and The

Left in Germany.

The continued success of populism is reflected in the academic literature

(Bale, 2012; Mudde, 2007). The lion’s share of this research has focused on

defining populism (e.g., Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2008a; Hawkins, 2009;

Mudde, 2004; Weyland, 2001; Zaslove, 2008), on explaining the rise and

continued success of populist parties (e.g., Albertazzi & McDonnell, 2008b;

Mény & Surel, 2002b; Mudde, 2007), and more recently on assessing their

influence on the political system (e.g., Akkerman, 2012; Albertazzi &

McDonnell, 2005, 2010; Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser, 2012b). Much less

research has been conducted on measuring populist attitudes at the mass level

(few exceptions include: Elchardus & Spruyt, 2012; Hawkins, Riding, &

Mudde, 2012; Stanley, 2011). To be sure, numerous studies have focused on

(supposedly) related attitudes, such as trust and satisfaction with democracy

and/or immigration (e.g., Doyle, 2011; Fieschi & Heywood, 2004; Ivarsflaten,

2008; Norris, 2005; Oesch, 2008), assuming that low levels of trust or satis-

faction with democracy and opposition to immigration are related to popu-

lism or that they serve as a breeding ground for (right-wing) populism.

As illuminating as these studies are, they do not directly measure populist

attitudes. First, we should not assume that populism is automatically linked

with opposition to immigration (March, 2011; Mudde & Rovira Kaltwasser,

2013). And, second, even though low levels of trust and satisfaction with

democracy may constitute a breeding ground for populism, they are not direct

measures of populist attitudes among the voting public per se (Mudde, 2007;

Norris, 2005).

In this article, we seek to measure populist attitudes directly and to inves-

tigate whether these attitudes can be linked with party preferences. The