Abstract
This chapter introduces the Intergroup model of the populist mentality (IMPM) and offers a cross-national analysis of the internal structure of populist representations. Inspired by social representations theory, we argue that populism is best understood as a multidimensional representation of the intergroup relation between the “people” as the ingroup and the “elite” as an outgroup. This representation is organized around the conflict between a majority group (the people) and a minority group (the elite). The intergroup comparison between the people-majority and the elite-minority is based on power (vertical differentiation in terms of an intergroup competition between a powerless people and a powerful elite) and morality (horizontal differentiation in terms of alleged moral superiority of the people compared to an immoral elite). Through this dialectic antagonism of the people-elite dualism, the elite is simultaneously inferior (horizontal differentiation) and superior (vertical differentiation) to the people. The IMPM identifies four populist subdimensions: two pro-majority dimensions centered on positive views of the people (people-centrism): people sovereignty and people-homogeneity, and two anti-minority dimensions centered on negative views of the elite (anti-elitism): elite distance and elite homogeneity.
We empirically test the IMPM by analyzing validity and consistency of these four dimensions across countries via multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, using data from the Populist Representations Survey that includes nationally representative samples from eight European countries that saw populist movements rise and fall in the last decades: Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, and the U.K. (Ns = 800–1100/country). We first examine the empirical relevance of the four sub-dimensions of populism and offer the most parsimonious measurement model of populist thinking by reducing our analysis to just two dimensions: anti-elitism and people sovereignty.
We further argue that there is a structural homology between populist beliefs focused on the people and generic pro-majority representations, and, conversely, between populist anti-elite beliefs and generic anti-minority representations. We test this idea by examining how populist subdimensions are associated with various correlates of populist thinking such as institutional and social (dis)trust, SDO, and authoritarianism. The results support our conjecture as pro-majority attitudes are positively associated with people sovereignty, whereas anti-minority beliefs mostly relate to anti-elitism, thus further highlighting the necessity of distinguishing the internal components of populism. Finally, we differentiate inclusionary-exclusionary and egalitarian-inegalitarian versions of populism and find that while both anti-elitism and people sovereignty were associated with calls for a higher levels of pro-welfare attitudes, anti-elitism plays a much stronger part in the formation of exclusionary (anti-immigrant) versions of populism.
Overall, our chapter offers a new and more nuanced view of the internal structure of populist representations that allows to establish the similarities and dissimilarities of populist thinking across national contexts, as well as national specificities.
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Notes
- 1.
We first also included Manicheism in our model, but this dimension was largely uncorrelated with the rest of our dimensions, and thereby decreased model fit. We therefore decided to exclude Manicheism from our analysis. This exclusion led to a more focused model, as all dimensions related to the specific conflict between two groups: the corrupt elite and the pure people. Indeed, Manicheism is a more general attitude towards any type of societal conflict with a “good” pole opposed to an “evil” one. Hence, a Manichean outlook could apply to any kind of strongly held beliefs. For example, Bertsou and Caramani (2022) found that items measuring Manichean attitudes loaded positively on both the populist and the elitist scale, while these two concepts are expected to be negatively correlated.
- 2.
Configural invariance is the lowest level and requires that each construct is measured by the same items. It does not guarantee, however, that the measurement properties are the same. Meaningful comparisons require at least metric invariance, tested by constraining the factor loadings between the observed items and the latent variable to be equal across the compared groups. If metric invariance is established, one may assume that respondents in the different samples interpret the items in the same way, although it is still uncertain if the construct is measured in the same way. The third and highest level of measurement invariance is scalar invariance, tested by constraining both the factor loadings and the indicator intercepts to be equal across groups. If scalar invariance is established, one may assume that respondents use the scale in the same way in each group; thereby offering the possibility of comparisons of latent and observed means across samples. In order to test for the different levels of invariance, we progressively imposed new constraints on loadings and intercepts and relied on ∆CFI to evaluate model fit between two successive models, using the ΔCFI ≤ 0.01 criterion as suggested by Cheung and Rensvold (2002). Given the ordinal data of our observed variables, CFA was performed using the diagonally weighted least squares (DWLS) estimator (Kline, 2015).
- 3.
For this last scale, we only have the two first-order factors. Since adding a second order factor would make the CFA model unidentified, we were forced to restrain our analysis and limit the CFA to two dimensions.
- 4.
As a robustness test, we ran exploratory factor analyses using different solutions. An inspection of eigenvalues pointed towards a 2-factor model, where items measuring people homogeneity all loaded on a different factor than those from the other three subdimensions. This offers additional evidence in support of the fact that people homogeneity seems to be a country-specific measure with a tenuous relationship with populist mentality. People-centrism is therefore a potentially problematic measure of the populist mentality, due to its questionable internal validity as a populist subdimension and its limited cross-national comparability.
- 5.
We clustered standard errors at country level as we deal with data coming from multiple surveys, where dependence within the data is commonly observed (due to shared sampling techniques, questionnaire wording, interviewers, or other aspects of survey design). These dependencies may bias estimation of standard errors and lead to invalid statistical inferences. Standardized cluster errors also account for heteroscedasticity.
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This research has been supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Grant 100017_188987/1).
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Staerklé, C., Cavallaro, M., Cortijos-Bernabeu, A. (2024). The Inner Logic: An Intergroup Approach to the Populist Mentality in Europe. In: Sensales, G. (eds) Political Psychology Perspectives on Populism. Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-44073-1_3
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