Abstract
At a time when American “populism” has become a more commonly referenced concern, buzzword, and subject of academic research, conceptual clarity is imperative. This study aims to make some progress by exploring the dimensions and covariates of populism within the mass public. We differentiate economic populists, cultural populists, and ideologically constrained populists, who differ substantially from each other with respect age, gender, education, income, some personality traits, and moral foundations. We also distinguish each of these populist veins from other orientations that are often mis-labeled as populism, such as nativism, nationalism, and authoritarianism—noting points of convergence and divergence. Moreover, with respect to political orientations, we observe that economic populists are usually ideologically “liberal” and Democratic, while cultural populists are usually “conservative” and Republican. Finally, we find that cultural populists exhibit disproportionate levels of political obstinacy, whereas ideologically constrained populists exhibit disproportionate levels of socio-political contempt.
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Notes
We also included a survey item that we intended to measure generic populism: “These days, it seems like everything is rigged against the people, to protect the powerful.” This measure loaded disproportionately on the economic populism factor, but we excluded it because (a) it does not have as much face validity as an economic populism indicator, and (b) we wanted to maintain as much comparability between the economic and cultural populism measures as possible with respect to reliability, which is facilitated using the same number of items in each index.
The Cronbach’s alpha coefficient of these five items (0.56) tells the same story, which is that they are not highly interrelated on a single dimension. Similarly, polychoric correlation coefficients reveal that while the two economic populism items are highly related (\(\rho\) = 0.59; p < 0.001), and the same is true to an even greater degree with respect to the two cultural populism items (\(\rho\) = 0.73; p < 0.001), the relationships between individual economic populism items and cultural populism items are either indistinguishable from zero or negative.
Seemingly unrelated regression enhances the efficiency of regression estimates across multiple models for which the error terms are correlated (which is the case any time the same set of correlates is included in models with different outcome variables). More details are available in Zellner (1962), and here.
Haidt (2012) refers to this as “fairness,” which it is from a disciplinary or punitive perspective. But “fairness” includes egalitarianism as well.
These orientations tend to be significantly, but not overwhelmingly, correlated with one another. The average correlation is 0.41, ranging from 0.12 (Christian Fundamentalism and Anti-Semitism to 0.69 (Nationalism and Ethnocentric Nationalism). Generally, Christian Fundamentalism tends to be much more intercorrelated than the other items are. The weakest correlation, if Christian Fundamentalism is taken out of the mix, is 0.26 (Nationalism and Anti-Semitism).
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Barker, D.C., DeTamble, R. American populism: dimensions, distinctions, and correlates. GPPG 2, 22–46 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-022-00033-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s43508-022-00033-2