ABSTRACT
This chapter uses expert surveys to measure populism in the context of Latin American presidential systems, contrasting two different approaches of how this research instrument can be deployed. While the first study exploits overlaps of the most prominent definitions of populism as a set of ideas, an informal style, or as political strategy and conceives of populism as a bundle of attributes combined in a single metric, the second study disaggregates these attributes, leaving it to empirical tests to explore how they, and thus the different conceptualizations of populism, relate to each other. As the contrast between both approaches reveals the limitations of the bundled approach, the chapter subsequently uses the disaggregated measures of the second study to examine if and how ten separately measured policy dimensions and the general left–right scale are associated with the degree of populism. The results indicate that across Latin America, populism is related to positioning on economic redistribution, a preference for tough measures to fight crime, and a rejection of a closer relationship with the United States. More importantly, the results show that a simple understanding of populism as anti-elite rhetoric or informal style are only able to capture specific subtypes of populism, while an operationalization in the form of the ideational approach that takes into consideration its components of people-centrism and anti-elitism in its moral version, as well as their combination into an overall index, captures populism best.
