Measuring Populists Attitudes: New Wine in an Old Bottle? Or Just Better Wine?

What explains why voters support populist parties? Two competing explanations dominate the literature. The more standard explanation focuses on conventional indicators such as political trust, efficacy, and political satisfaction. The argument goes as follows: voters with lower levels of trust, efficacy, or satisfaction with government are more likely to support populist parties. The second approach focuses on populist attitudes, arguing that citizens with higher levels of populist attitudes (defined as a people-centered notion of political representation) are more likely to support populist parties. The populist approach does not deny that indicators such as trust and efficacy may partially explain support for populist parties, but it goes a step further. It argues that those who support populist parties do not only support populist parties because of their political disaffection. Those who support populist parties may also possess a specific concept of political representation, i.e. a people-centered notion of political representation. In essence, the first approach equates populism with an anti-establishment vote, while the second approach argues that populism is not only a vote against the political establishment but it is a vote for an alternative. We need to examine whether the diverse indicators measure something different. We know that lower levels of trust and lower levels of political satisfaction predict voting for populist parties fairly well. While we also know that scoring higher on a people-centered measure of populism does well in predicting voting for a populist party. The first part of the paper identifies whether the different indicators, perhaps, measure the same thing? The purpose of this first part of the paper is to assess the extent to which the populist measure taps into something different than the more standard trust and efficacy measures The second part of the paper, subsequently tests the extent to which the different indicators are able to explain support for populist parties. Using data from the Netherlands (NKO) from the 2017 elections we first perform a confirmatory factor analysis using the standard six populism questions, political trust, external efficacy, and internal efficacy items. We show that that political trust, external efficacy, internal efficacy and populist attitudes are different constructs. Second, using structural equation modelling we build a vote choice model with populist attitudes, trust and efficacy as our main independent variables. In this part we show that populist attitudes, rather than trust or efficacy, is the most important indicator to explain voting for a populist party. The results have important implications for further research on populism. The findings demonstrate that populism is not just is not just a protest vote, but also a choice for an alternative, i.e. for the idea that solving the most pressing political problems is possibly if politicians follow the will of the people. These findings are important for future research. By better understanding the differences (and/ or the links) between populism and other measures of political preferences we are better able to understand why voters support populist parties and we can also perhaps better explain why populist parties remain successful.