ABSTRACT
In the recent literature on populism, we can observe a growing interest in populist manifestations on the individual level, i.e. populist sentiments or populist attitudes. Sparked by initial works in the Americas, scholars have developed a series of items and item batteries to tap into these (often) latent attitudes. At this point, however, we still lack a coherent cross-country measure and doubts about cross-national reliability and validity of different scales continue to persist. To overcome some of these concerns, this chapter provides a systematic comparison of individual level populist measurements. For this purpose, we draw on data sets from Europe (LIVEWHAT, SNES, WoPo) and the Americas (LAPOP, CCES, UCEP and UDP) and use item response theory (IRT) models. Two observations from our empirical analyses stand out. First, most of the populism scales we test here remain limited in their ability to measure populist attitudes at the extremes, both at the lower and upper ends of the scales. Second, we find that some items while capturing important attributes of populism in theory, remain limited in their level of information. In light of these findings, we draw several conclusions for analysts and researchers wishing to formulate their own populism scale.
