Measuring Populism with Surveys

For many years, scholars working on populism have dedicated their resources on studying the supply side of populism and most studies on populism were based on the application of text analysis methods on party manifestos and speeches by party leaders. Only recently, we have seen methods that try to cover both the supply and the demand side of populism by including batteries of items in survey questionnaires suitable for various target groups (voters, candidates and experts). One of these surveys is the Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) which uses the opinion of experts on the positioning of political parties in many countries in Europe. The limitations of CHES are i) the limited scope of the study (covering Europe only), and ii) the CHES questionnaires include only a limited number of questions directly connected to populism and authoritarianism. Finally, we need to explore the possible implications of the fact that the CHES questions have different structure and wording from the questions used in voter and candidate surveys. To deal with the CHES limitations, this paper presents the findings of the application of a modified version of the most recent CHES questionnaire in selected countries in different regions of the world. The findings indicate that extending CHES in other regions of the world is feasible and can be extremely fruitful. In addition, the paper provides guidelines on what scholars should do when they want to compare the position of the voters of a party with the CHES position of the same party.