Unpacking the interplay between populism and euroscepticism: towards a new operationalisation

The connection between populism and Euroscepticism has been the focus of previous studies. For instance, Pirro & Taggart (2018) refer to “the unexceptional overlap between populist and Eurosceptic politics” but of course they recognize that “not every Eurosceptic party is necessarily populist … and not every populist party is necessarily Eurosceptic” concluding that “there is no necessary convergence between populism and Euroscepticism”. Harmsen (2010) refers to other differences between the two concepts, e.g. that populism can be traced back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries while Euroscepticism constitutes a more recent phenomenon that dates from the early 1990s and is of course, confined to Europe alone. However, as Harmsen (2010) argues, although euroscepticism is not a subset of populism, there may be a strong connection between them: “opposition to European integration has unquestionably been shaped by wider anti-elite discourses, and in turn has served to reshape these discourses – as well as the parties which deploy them”. In addition, focusing on Hungary and Poland Csehi and Zgut (2021) show that in Orbán’s and Kaczyński’s discourses “the EU is equated with ‘the corrupt elite’ that stands in conflict with ‘the pure people’, the Hungarians and Poles, and … the EU is claimed to act against the notion of popular sovereignty”. At the focus of the DATAPOPEU Research Project funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research & Innovation is the interplay between populism and euroscepticism. In this paper, we discuss the survey items that have been used in DATAPOPEU surveys focusing on the items that have worked well in measuring populism and euroscepticism. Then we create two indices, one for populism and one for euroscepticism. We study how populist attitudes are correlated with eurosceptic attitudes. Our findings are compared with previous studies aiming to provide an in-depth approach of the operationalization of this interplay.