ABSTRACT
Populism had already taken root in Taiwan long before its recent global rise. This chapter applies the Item Response Theory (IRT) method to construct the latent populism scale from a comprehensive 8-item battery of populism proposed by Van Hauwaert, Shimpf, and Azevedo (2020) and further validates it with a sample of over 2,500 respondents in Taiwan. This chapter argues that such a measure is not only internally coherent but also externally valid in the contemporary mass politics of Taiwan and predictively valid in explaining variations in attitudes among citizens in Taiwan across four different globalization-related policy issues. Based on this validated survey instrument, this chapter finds that a significant proportion of Taiwanese voters have moderate- or lower-level candidate-centred rather than party-centred populist orientations. With continued efforts to refine and evaluate the survey instrument with probability samples in countries around the world, a promising avenue for future comparative public opinion research on populism in Asia would be to study it as political culture and explore its electoral causes and political consequences in such third-wave democracies as Taiwan.
