Measuring populist ideology: anti-elite orientation and government status

Abstract

In most contemporary conceptions of populist ideology, anti-elite orientation is considered to be one of its central components. Consequently, instruments designed to measure populism include items intended to capture anti-elitism. Such operationalizations may, however, neglect the interaction with the political status of the relevant actors – that is, parties/leaders. A negative and critical attitude towards the party or parties in government could reflect a populist antielite orientation but might also simply represent a negative attitude towards a specific party (which may be affected by pre-existing party identification or a negative government performance evaluation). Hence, such an indicator of populist ideology would then be contaminated by unintended content. This paper uses the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems dataset (with the addition of Serbia) to analyze the average anti-elite scores of parties in different countries. The overall results suggest that the anti-elite scale also captures the attitude towards parties in government. The paper discusses the methodological ramifications of this finding.