Measuring Populist Ideology: Anti-Elite Orientation and Government Evaluation

In most contemporary conceptions of populist ideology, anti-elite orientation is considered to be one of its central components. Consequently, instruments designed to measure the populist orientation include scales intended to tap this element of populist orientation. One potential problem that such operationalizations may encounter is the interaction with the political status of relevant actors – parties and leaders. Namely, a negative and critical attitude towards party(ies) in government could reflect both a populist anti-elite orientation but also simply a negative attitude towards the party (which in turn may be affected by pre-existing party identification or negative government performance evaluation). Hence, such an indicator of populist ideology would be contaminated with unintended content. This paper will explore this issue, which has substantive and methodological ramifications. The empirical basis is provided by the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES; ww.cses.org) operationalization of populist ideology, included in its Module 5 cross-national program of comparative public opinion surveys. We utilize data from Serbia and Montenegro. In both cases, parties in power during the respective surveys have often been described as populist. As a result, the two countries represent well-fitting cases to examine the outlined problem. The empirical analyses focus in two directions. First, we compare average anti-elite scores of different parties. If the items represent pure indicators of populist ideology, we should observe higher scores among the respondents supporting parties of populist reputation. If the measures are contaminated by government evaluation, we would expect that the major difference is between supporters of the governing parties versus the opposition parties. The second approach to the problem examines the associations between several theoretical components of populist ideology, such as nativism, negative attitude towards outgroups, the exclusive conception of national identity. The hypothesis here is that the governing status of populist parties should affect the intercorrelations between various components of populist ideology. If the measure is contaminated by government evaluation, the anti-elite orientation should appear as a less integrated component of populist ideology. The overall results suggest that the anti-elite scale captures also the attitude towards parties in government.