Once Upon a Time We Have a Concept. . . Measuring Nostalgia

In times of a populist rise, the literature on populism grows continuously. Recently, scholars have demonstrated that populist actors use nostalgic rhetoric that invoke representations of a glorious national past in order to sharpen group boundaries between the ‘authentic us’ and the ‘alien them’. This study contends that there is considerable overlap between populism and nostalgia – i.e. both share the idea that it used to be better. In addition, often populists appeal to situations where, e.g. due to lower levels of immigration, the people were more homogeneous; throwing nationalism in the mix. To determine whether nostalgic rhetoric and/or feelings of nostalgia is really a new “kid on the block”, explaining populist attitudes and/or populist support, we first rely on a pilot-study in the Dutch context, conducted in May 2022, as well as a nationally representative panel survey; to be conducted January to March 2023. Utilizing an EFA with the pilot data, we explore how many latent dimensions those concepts – i.e. populist attitudes, nostalgia, and nativism – share. The results show two underlying concepts, while using a PCA, we find a single latent concept with seven components. This indicates that there is not only considerable theoretical overlap between the concepts, but also empirically, these concepts pick up on the same meaning. To overcome conceptual overlap, we deconstruct the dimensions of nostalgia using experimental and observational data. This allows us to theorize and empirically investigate how nostalgic rhetoric devices impact political behavior. Understanding the nostalgic component in rhetoric allows us to contribute to the literature on drivers of party support. This thus helps scholars to theorize and test when and how this type of rhetoric is applied by various parties or by media pundits.