The Exclusionary Populist Attitudes Scale: Testing a New Measure of Populist Attitudes in COVID-19 Post-pandemic Portugal and Italy

Existing populist attitudes scales are used to measure the level of populist appetence in terms of its anti-elitism, people-centrism, and anti-pluralism dimensions. While the study of populism is often focused on exclusionary forms of the phenomenon, this dimension fails to be properly measured by existing populist attitudes scales. To fill this gap, the Exclusionary Populist Attitudes Scale (EPAS), enriched by a measure of cultural anti-pluralism and introducing chauvinism as a fourth dimension, is proposed. A list of initial 23 items composed the preliminary version of the EPAS was applied to 202 Portuguese citizens. Reliability and Exploratory Factor Analysis resulted in a shorter version, composed of 12 items, subsequently applied to 906 Portuguese and 890 Italian citizens. The results supported a four-factorial dimensionality in both countries: Anti-elitism; Chauvinism; Anti-pluralism; and People-centrism. Results also point to the fact that anti-pluralism is slightly more common in Italy than in Portugal. The EPAS showed good psychometric properties in both Portugal and Italy, being a useful measure of populist attitudes with an innovative chauvinistic