Vox populi, or vox populist? Measuring and contextualizing populist attitudes in Slovakia

Measuring populist attitudes became an expanding field focusing both on the demand and supply sides and trying to capture support for populist parties. In the literature there are different conceptualizations of what is the content and dimensionality of populist attitudes. According to the widely applied ideational approach to populism (Mudde 2004; Stanley 2008) core elements of populism are a) praise of the people /peoples’ value; b) anti-establishment /anti-elite feelings; c) Manichaean outlook on politics (Hawkins et al., 2012; Castanho Silva et al., 2019, Van Hauwaert et al. 2019). To challenge the operationalization of populist attitudes this study makes use of the CSES Module 5, post-election survey dataset for Slovakia 2020. Module 5 contains batteries of questions to measure populist attitudes defined as a “triangle” of following components: a) political elites and electoral process (anti-elitism); b) out-groups perception (foreigners, minorities etc.) and c) we the people (nationalism) dimensions (Hobolt et al., 2016). To our opinion this concept is heavily based on the academic notion of the populist radical right, which is defined as a combination of nativism, authoritarianism and populism in the ideological core of the party appeals (Mudde 2007). The survey, however does not properly cover populism as thin-centered ideology, or, more exactly, equates it with the general anti-elitism. Yet, the Module 5 still provides a wealth of data regarding “populism” as it is often treated in the broad sense – as a radical challenge – or, better, a set of radical challenge(r)s to liberal democracy. It also enables to analyze the radical political attitudes of respondents on the individual level. So, the study will identify if and how are nativism, authoritarianism, and populism distributed among Slovak electorate and its various relevant subgroups. These will include – but will not be limited – the constituencies of the major political parties. Except for the occurrence and distribution of the radical and challenger political persuasions, analysis will include the extent to which these attitudes are consistent with the vote choice. The secondary objective of the study will be to assess the potential of CSES survey to measure populism among the Slovak electorate. The conclusions will be applied on relevant aspects of the ISSP pretest (Slovakia´s part) and could offer methodological feedback on operationalisation of populist attitudes before the application of the ISSP survey in 2023.