Populists Vote for Populists, Right? How Populist Attitude Scales Fail to Capture Support for Populists in Power
Surveys of the attitudes of voters for populist parties generally measure three non-compensatory factors of populism: anti-elitism, people-centrism, and Manicheanism. Using Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Module 5 data for 23 countries, we evaluate whether this approach explains voting for populist parties across countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas. We show that the existing scale of populist attitudes effectively explains voting for populists in countries where populist leaders and parties are in opposition but fails to ex- plain voting for populist parties in countries where they are in power. We argue that current approaches assume ‘the elite’ to mean ‘politicians’, thus failing to capture attitudes towards ‘non-political elites’ often targeted by populists in office – journalists, academics, bureaucrats, etc. The results reveal limits to the usefulness of existing survey batteries in cross-national studies of populism and emphasize the need to develop approaches that are more generalizable across political and national contexts.