Breaking Bad: Testing Populism in Terms of Scale and Subcomponents

Traditionally, populism studies have been pre-occupied with the supply-side of populism but recent developments in the field have shifted towards the demand-side, which in turn has lead to the emergence of new developments in populism scales, conceptualizing them as second-order concepts which typically consist of three components: people-centredness, anti-elitism, and a Manichean outlook. This reflects the ideational conception of populism, which became commonplace in broader populism studies; however, even though they are starting from the same theoretical foundations, this is not reflected in their operationalization. This has subsequently led to the development of literature which recognises this as a limitation, and which attempts to mitigate the issue by comparing scales. Various comparisons have shown that the most-used scale by Castanho Silva et al. is also one of the most well-rounded, as it consists of the all three components of populism (people-centredness, anti-elitism, Manichean outlook), thus properly reflecting the non-compensatory nature of the ideational approach to populism. Yet, this is where the problem deepens. The empirical research which has been undertaken thus far has its own limitations in terms of operationalization, showing that the Manichean outlook is not (or is perhaps even negatively) correlated with the other dimensions of the scale. Thus, we will test both how the scale as such and its sub-components separately associate with general ideological positions, as well as socio-cultural and economic predictors of populism; such as political trust, authoritarianism, climate change, and conspiracy-theories. This will provide a more precise overlook of populism and its determinants, and will also include insights on the external validity of an internationally-used scale. To do so, we use survey data from Croatia taken in 2018 and 2020 on a nationally probabilistic representative sample (n=2000) which was conducted by the Faculty of Political Science from the University of Zagreb. Our research has the added value testing at a representative level in a new context, as well as testing on a larger sample than is typically used for case studies.