Populist attitudes: An exploration of the Italian and Finnish case
Irene Esteban Pérez1 with Paolo Segatti
Università degli Studi di Milano
Paper presented at the 10th ECPR General Conference; Prague, 7-10 September 2016
1. Introduction.
The study populism has been a concern for a long time in the literature of political science,
sociology and political psychology. Most studies so far approached populism in a rather
broader sense – with a focus on party politics or leadership characteristics. In this
scenario, citizens enter the picture as voters for a party that has been defined to be
populist, and their attitudes are analysed dependent on this vote choice. Less attention,
then, has been devoted to the study of populist attitudes among the citizenry (Akkerman,
Mudde & Zaslove, 2014; Hawkins, Riding & Mudde, 2012; Stanley, 2011). The present
study focuses on public opinion independently of voting behaviour, and it will try to
investigate if there are ‘purely’ populist attitudes.
We refer to citizens, and not voters, in a complete deliberate manner. We believe
that populist attitudes are widely present, prior to the moment of the vote choice and they
might be shared also by voters who at the end might not vote for a party usually labelled
populist. We posit that ‘purely’ populist attitudes might regard not so much attitudes
towards the contents of politics, but rather attitudes on democratic politics works (should
work). We also think that ‘purely’ populist attitudes may not be intrinsically consistent,
other scholars (Akkerman, Mudde & Zaslove, 2014) have already found that signs of
inconsistency of populist attitudes. But we believe that more can be done, conceptually
and empirically. As the aim of this paper is to be exploratory, we do not present concrete
hypotheses. The goal of this paper is to make a description of the measurement of populist
attitudes and the concepts normally interconnected when defining populism at the mass
level in two countries quite diverse, Italy and Finland.
The paper is structured as follows: first, we will discuss aspects of the rather
ambiguous definition of populism. Second, we explore how the study of populist
1
[email protected]
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attitudes has been developed up to now in a critical way that allow us to frame our
approach in an improved style. Next, the discussion of the relationship between the
populist strategy and attitudes towards processes, and conflict aversion is introduced. In
the last part, we perform analyses on the distribution of populist attitudes in Italy and
Finland. Finally, the findings are discussed and further steps are suggested.
2. Theoretical framework
2.1 Debates on populist attitudes: definition and characteristics
The aim of this paper is to disentangle populist attitudes among citizens. It seems
necessary, then, to devote at least some time to the concept populism itself. The definition
of populism has been done mainly at the elite or party level, rather than the attitudes of
people having a populist profile. Different approaches have been proposed to define and
operationalise populism, and it is not the aim of the current study to add to this debate.
Therefore, we use the approach set forth by Cas Mudde (2004, p.544), who defines
populism as follows: “Populism is only a ‘thin-centred ideology’, exhibiting ‘a restricted
core attached to a narrower range of political concepts’”. We prefer this definition since
it captures the concept in the most parsimonious manner.
Mudde defines populism as a ‘thin-centred’ ideology, meaning that populism
lacks a conception of the whole scenario of how a society should be organized. This is
why it is difficult to find a common ideological denominator for all the populist parties
and movements, and normally they are combined with different ideologies and,
consequently, with different policy options.
One of the main characteristics of populism is its appeal to the people. As some
authors point out, “populism worships the people” (Ionescu & Gellner 1969; Laclau,
1977). This idea implies a monism where only interests belonging to the group of the
people are considered to be legitimate, disregarding legitimacy of other groups’ aims and
concerns. The second main characteristic identified by authors defining populism is
related to the portrait of the society that it offers in antagonistic terms. This Manichean
division is normally characterized for its anti-establishment nature. The specificity of
populism in its anti-establishment position is declaring this establishment or elite as a
minority by some social, ethnic or political status.
The aim of this paper is to disentangle how are populist attitudes at the mass level
and what are the indicators allowing us to capture this phenomenon.
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2.2 Measurement of populist attitudes
Habitual to some extent in the European political landscape for the last twenty years,
populist parties seem to have been growing in both electoral outcomes and institutional
power in almost every party system. Populism nowadays receives attention from the
media and the specialized literature. However, when it comes to analysing the existence
of populist attitudes at mass level, the research is scarce. Nevertheless, a few studies have
tried to address this problem, providing an important benchmark (Akkerman, Mudde &
Zaslove, 2013; De Koster, Achterberg & Van der Waal, 2013; Hawkins, Riding &
Mudde, 2012; Spruyt, Keppens & Van Droogenbroeck, 2016; Stanley, 2011).
To begin with, the general trend in the study of populist attitudes is establishing a
relation between a specific kind of populism and corresponding specific attitudes: right
wing-immigation (Oesch, 2008), Euroscepticism and Eurocynism (Krouwel & Abts,
2007), Welfare chauvinism (de Koster, Achterberg & van der Waal, 2012). Normally
these studies have been too focused on the characteristics a concrete kind of populism,
not aiming to disentangle the general political attitudes of populism in a broader sense.
In fact, voters for populist new radical right parties usually may share these attitudes.
Nevertheless, voters for populist left parties might have different attitudes on the same
issues. This tendency to equate populist attitudes to the issue preferences voters for
populist parties (mostly radical right parties) have is present more or less in most of the
previous studies.
We find this tendency in one of the firsts attempts to measure populist attitudes
with survey data in the work of Stanley (2011), The main aim of this article is to explore
the relationship of populist attitudes in voting behaviour in Slovakia 2010. The author
hypothesizes about the relationship of populist attitudes on voting preferences, and
stances between economic and nationalist attitudes.
Hawkins, Riding and Mudde’s (2012) contribution is an important step in
gauging populist attitudes per se, disentangling them from pluralist and elitist attitudes.
The authors try to measure populism, elitism and pluralism with distinctive indicators and
correlating them to policy areas such as education, income and immigration. For populist
attitudes they state that populism is “a way of seeing the world that is linked to different
kinds of language” (Hawkins, Riding & Mudde, 2012, p.7). For its measurement the
authors used indicators incorporating the language of populism as ‘Politics is ultimately
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a struggle between good and evil’, ‘The politicians in Congress need to follow the will of
the people’, ‘The power of a few special interests prevents our country from making
progress’ and ‘The people, not the politicians, should make the most important policy
decisions’. Pluralist attitudes for them are inspired by a vision of democratic politics as a
clash of minorities. Their measurement of it takes into account willingness to compromise
between different viewpoints, valuing other points of view and respondents’ stances on
how important is diversity for freedom. Elitist attitudes for them are those attitudes that
show a preference for technocratic government. They can be gauged by questions related
with Stealth democracy argument –developed by Hibbing and Theiss-Morse (2002), but
the authors argue that Stealth Democracy is measuring both elitism and populism at the
same time. They use indicators as ‘Elected officials should talk less and act more on
important problems’, ‘Compromise is selling one’s principles’, ‘Government would run
better if decisions were taken by successful business people’ and ‘Government would run
better if decisions were taken by independent experts’. The findings of the article are that
populist attitudes are widespread in the United States, being stronger in lower educated
citizens, related to lower income, ideological radicalism and anti-immigrant stances.
A third exercise of analysing populist attitudes is found in the paper by Akkerman,
Mudde and Zaslove (2013). In this paper, the authors try to measure populist attitudes
and see if these attitudes are related with voting behaviour in the Netherlands. They do
so by contrasting populist attitudes with pluralist and elitist attitudes and they investigate
the relationship of these sets of attitudes with the vote choice. Their conception of populist
attitudes is based on the one by Hawkins et al., incorporating four more questions, two
new ones ‘The political differences between the elite and the people are larger than the
differences among the people’ ‘I would rather be represented by a citizen than by a
specialized politician’ and two suggested by Hawkins et al. in the Stealth democracy
battery, and now incorporated by Akkerman et al. in the populism dimension: ‘Elected
officials talk too much and take too little action’ ‘What people call “compromise” in
politics is really just selling out on one’s principles’. For elitist attitudes they are based
on the Stealth democracy battery by Hawkins et al. and they add a new indicator
‘Politicians should lead rather than follow the people’. Their findings show a significant
and positive relationship correlation between populist attitudes and the intention to vote
for populist parties in the Netherlands. But their results also a positive correlation between
populism and elitism that appear to be quite unexpected.
The last main advancement in the measurement of populist attitudes is the article
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by Spruyt, Keppens and Van Droogenbroeck (2016). The aim of this article is to replicate
the measurement made by Akkerman et al. in Flanders, and also try to enlarge the scope
of the analysis, trying to see if populism can be empirically distinguished from lack of
external political efficacy. Their conception of populist attitudes is based on four main
tenets: the existence of two homogeneous groups, “the people” and “the elite”; the
antagonistic relationship between them; the virtuosity of “the people”; and popular
sovereignty considered as the ultimate source of legitimacy. Their measurement of
populist attitudes use as indicators: ‘Politicians should follow only the will of the People’,
‘The people, and not politicians, should make our most important policy decisions’, ‘The
political differences between the elite and the people are much larger than the differences
among the people’, ‘I would rather be represented by a citizen than by a professional
politician’, ‘Elected officials talk too much and take too little action’, ‘What people call
“compromise” in politics is really just selling out on one’s principles’, ‘Established
politicians who claim to defend our interests, only take care of themselves’ and ‘The
established elite and politicians have often betrayed the people’. The authors do not relate
populist attitudes with pluralism and elitism, but they include indicators of lack of
external efficacy, with the following indicators: ‘Voting is the only way in which people
like me can influence policies’, ‘There are so many people who vote at elections, that my
vote will not make any difference’, ‘Parties are only interested in my vote, not in my
opinion’, ‘As soon as they are elected, politicians think they are better than people like
me’ and ‘Voting has no sense, the parties do what they want anyway’.
In their findings, Spruyt et al. show that people’s material position is a relatively
good predictor for populism, being the more economically vulnerable more likely to
develop feelings of anomie and relative deprivation which the authors relate with the
tendency to populism. They also show a strong relationship between education and the
support for populism; with the less educated supporting populism much more strongly
compared to the higher educated.
2.2.1 Possible limits of previous research
Although these studies are important first attempts, we think they have some
theoretical and methodological shortcomings. As general remarks, except for the work of
Hawkins et al., all of these papers analyse voters for specific parties, and not public
opinion. They also do not take into account the distinction between process making and
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policy making –also with the exception of Hawkins et al. Secondly, they also are not
comparative, since they regard voters for a specific party.
The studies by Hawkins et al., important in the advancement of populist attitudes
research as they are, do not offer a clear and motivated explanation why populist attitudes
are related with elitist attitudes. This is an important finding that in my view should
deserve more discussion and empirical analysis. Unfortunately, the relationship found
between populist and elitist attitudes has a somewhat confusing explanation by the
authors: “Two explanations are possible: (1) the SP and PVV may attract both populists
and elitists, or (2) populist parties attract support from individuals who possess both
populist and elitist attitudes. It appears that both are in fact true.” (p.1340). But these two
affirmations are contradictory, because populism is competing by proposing a political
scenario in terms of people against the elite, so it would not be coherent to attract citizens
with elitist attitudes. We believe that this ambivalence comes from the fact that they are
too concerned with voting behaviour. Therefore, the structural relationship between
populism and elitism which comes before voting choices is dismissed by the authors. A
second argument is that both elitism and populism demand simple solutions to complex
problems. They express a vision of politics completely detached by policy conflict.
The studies by Hawkins et al. do not include classical measurements on
disaffection, so is difficult to test whether the indicators are gathering a more general
feeling of discontent besides populism. They mix indicators of process making and policy
which is an advancement, but the interpretation feels not complete. Finally, in their 2013
article, Akkerman et al. are at then focused on voting behaviour than public opinion, and
consequently, they try to argue that voters of different parties will have different positions
in the scale of populism, pluralism or elitism. Their analyses show that there is no
substantive2 difference on the scale of the aforementioned attitudes between the voters of
different parties.
In the paper of Spruyt et al. the only case analysed is the Flemish case, with a
really particular populist party (Vlaams Belang) known for their rightist and antiimmigrant attitudes. The shortcoming here is again equating populist attitudes per se with
the attitudes voters for a specific party have.
2.3 Attitudes and Stealth argument
2
Not statistically significant
6
The study by Hibbing and Theiss-Morse (2002) developed the so-called “Stealth
Democracy” argument. By trying to figure out which kind of Government would increase
peoples’ satisfaction – as dissatisfaction towards government was widespread in the US
– they found that most citizens do hardly care about any policy. They are, on the contrary,
quite indifferent to them and do not want to be involved in political decision-making,
preferring to turn over that duty to someone else. However, citizens want to know that
the possibility to be involved in the process is available even when they do not want to
make an explicit use of it. So, regarding policies, people are less concerned with obtaining
a concrete policy outcome than preventing others from abusing the process, – they want
to prevent mainly the decision-makers and politicians to take advantage of their position.
This theory, developed by Hibbing and Theiss-Morse, presents a puzzle: if people
don’t care about policy outcomes or participation, and the only concern is procedural:
why is the populist parties’ message – strongly linked to direct democracy and citizen
participation – so widespread among citizens in Western Europe during the last years?
We argue that the solution to this puzzle could be in another observation made
by Hibbing and Theiss-Morse (2002, p. 7): people’s aversion to conflict. “Many people
are simply averse to political conflict and many others believe political conflict is
unnecessary and an indication that something is wrong with governmental procedures”.
We believe that it is here where populist attitudes success remains, the idea of risk
aversion is in accordance with the populist precept of “the people” as a homogeneous
group with the same demands and needs, opposed to an evil elite, which is disconnected
from those “common man” needs. Citizens don’t recognise other people’s preferences in
policy as legitimate as theirs, in this case, the ones coming from the elite. In their study,
Hibbing and Theiss-Morse observe that their respondents believe Americans to have the
same goals. We argue that, because of this reason, people are actually motivated to
involve themselves in politics when they believe that the elites (in this case, the decisionmakers) are trying to get advantage of the positions they hold. As Hibbing and TheissMorse point out in their work, in Europe we can also see that political participation is
often linked to resentment and dissatisfaction rather than to legitimacy, trust and
enlightenment (Hibbing & Theiss-Morse, 2002, p. 10). We also believe that classical
Stealth indicators as ‘decisions should be taken by independent experts’ may be positively
related with anti-party attitudes and attitudes of low political efficacy.
The measurement proposed by Hibbing and Theiss-Morse is different from
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classical measurements of political efficacy and trust because they capture the idea of
leaving political decisions out of the sphere of politics, implying that political conflict is
created at the elite level, and not in the citizenry. This conception of politics is related
with conception of trust and efficacy, but is intrinsically different to affirm have low trust
in the political system and wanting political representation to be merely testimonial.
What this paper offers as a novelty, is the conception of “core” populism and the
concern of people having “core” populist attitudes about process combined with aversion
to conflict, different from feelings of distrust. We challenge the measurement of populist
attitudes made up to the moment, by performing a cross-country analysis, examining
populist attitudes. We also address a concept of populism openly referred to process
making, and therefore populism is for us related to public opinion, and not just voters.
2.4 Our measurement
For our analysis, we will use indicators of Stealth democracy. For now, we will
define “Stealth Democrat” based on the Hibbing and Theiss-Morse (2002) argument on
citizens who are dissatisfied with the way democracy works, but who do not want to be
active participants, those are citizens who want problems to be solved by experts, and be
bothered the lesser the better. “Stealth populism” relates this Stealth argument with the
negation of conflict done by the populist discourse, which implies a monism in the aims
of the population. “Stealth Populists” are dissatisfied with democratic processes, and
think that the general political conflict is made up by the elites, but these citizens also
prefer expert management instead of active citizen involvement.
Methodologically speaking, there are also some aspects of previous research open
to discussion: in order to capture elitism, in the article by Akkerman et al. includes
statements related to forms of leadership, that is, leadership by experts and by business
managers. But those indicators only tell us about the forms of management and
representation that citizens prefer, and not their degree of elitism per se. Elitism is not
measured in this paper in terms of how citizens believe themselves to be more equal
among them than compared to the elites, which would be the regular approach. These
indicators only reflect a preference on expert management, and we believe that is why
elitism is here related to populism, based on the “Stealth Democrats” argument. For
“Stealth Democrats” the preference is being managed by experts, but it does not imply a
degree of “ideological” elitism.
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Another aspect of the methodological design that could be argued of the papers of
Akkerman et al. is the use of mean scores for the analysis of the attitudes. The authors
perform a factor analysis and they explain the items loading in every of them, but when
they have to construct a scale for attitudes (pluralist, populist and elitist) they do not use
the results of these factor analyses –factor scores– but a mean score by summing up the
different items and dividing for the number of items. The usefulness of the factor analysis
is precisely to know which indicators have a better weight in the latent concept and the
procedure allows to create a factor score which takes this nuances into account, allowing
a refined measurement. That is why the use of mean scores seems a bit limited to perform
this analyses.
In this paper, the intention is to highlight the link between populist attitudes and
attitudes regarding the process of decision-making in democracy. Populism becomes
relevant in the political arena because citizens might perceive that outcomes do not
matter; the issue being a matter of concern is the process. Previous studies, focusing on
the content of populism, have failed to find what defines populist core attitudes. We, then,
argue that this is due to a misguiding focus of these studies.
We also believe that by performing a cross-country comparison, we will be able
to argue that the findings on populist attitudes are not context related. In this sense, we
think our paper could contribute to the existing literature, improving it.
3. Data and methods
First, what this paper wants to approach is the problem of the measurement of attitudes
related with populism as framed before, how are these so-called populist attitudes
distributed among the citizens in general. We investigate this using data from Italy and
Finland, two different countries with institutional and party system differences and a
different political culture, but also with a presence of populist parties. This characteristic
is one of the most interesting because in the case of Finland, we count with the example
of True Finns, a party derived from the Finnish Rural Party coming from a tradition of
agricultural populism and with a ethno-nationalist base. In Italy, on the other hand, we
find two strictly populist parties: Lega Nord and Movimento Cinque Stelle (M5S) the
first one right wing oriented and the second one a bit more ambiguous in its position on
the left-right axis. In the Italian case, most of their leaders have implemented to some
extent the populist discourse. It is because of it that we could expect populist attitudes to
be widespread in the Italian electorate.
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For testing our hypotheses in Italy and Finland, we make use of two datasets. In
Italy we make use of the data of the Italian National Election Survey 2013 (ITANES,
2013). This study consists of a survey face-to-face interviews conducted after the general
elections of 24 February 24 2013. The selected sample was 13,083 in which 1,508 were
able to complete the interview. The response rate was, thus 24 percent.
The data for the Finnish case come from the Finnish National Election Study
2011. This study interviewed face-to-face of the Finnish-speaking respondents between
18 April and 28 May 2011, and Swedish-speaking respondents between 5 and 24 April
2011. The data contain 1298 cases. Altogether, 1,298 persons were interviewed. 1,141
respondents consented to fill in the drop-off questionnaire, in total, 806 adequately filled
in questionnaires were returned (71 percent).
3.1 Variables
3.1.1 Compared questions
We start our description of the data by exploring different questions related with populist
and elitist attitudes. We also have questions related with external efficacy, views of
politics, politicians and Government. We think these questions are relevant to understand
how electors conceive the democratic processes and their representatives.
In both surveys, we have some questions that are similar and can be compared:
1. In politics settling for a compromise actually means selling out one's principles.
2. Our political system would work better if decisions were made by expert technocrats
instead of politicians.
3. People like me don’t have any say in what the Government does.
4. Sometimes politics and government seem so complicated that a person like me can’t
really understand what’s going on.
5. Those elected to parliament soon lose touch with the problems of ordinary people.
6. Parties are only interested in people's votes, but not in their opinions.
Prior to the analyses, it is important to consider the distribution of these variables, because
the factor analysis takes into account the correlation variation, estimating the correlation
matrix. For this we need in the first place enough variance in our variables. We will
explain some remarks about concrete indicators which need to be discussed.
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In Italy, the variable ‘Those elected to parliament soon lose touch with the
problems of ordinary people’ is remarkably skewed, gathering more than 95 percent of
the respondents agreeing with this statement. This is one of the biggest problems we face
when analysing attitudes. This is one of the questions we could use to test people’s
positions about politicians (in this case, elected ones) but the sentiment that elected
politicians are disconnected with regular citizens is so widespread that it doesn’t allow us
to compare, because there are not enough respondents in the rest of the categories to test
if this attitude is triggering some behaviour. In Finland, we find the same methodological
challenge, with more than the 80 percent of the sample agreeing with this negative vision
of elected politicians, in this case is a bit less strong than in the Italian case, but still it
doesn’t have enough variability.
As well in the case of Italy, in the variable ‘Parties are only interested in people's
votes, but not in their opinions’ there is a high percentage of the sample (91 percent)
agreeing with the statement that parties are only interested in votes and not in voters’
opinions. In the Finnish sample we find a totally different scenario, with only up to an 18
percent of the sample strongly agreeing with this statement, and the majority of the
sample being divided between agreement/disagreement (up to a 73 percent). So, Finnish
citizens (in the sample) think in a higher percentage than respondents from Italy that
politicians are interested in their opinions.
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Table 1. Descriptives of attitudinal variables
Variable
N
Mean
Std. Dev.
Min
Max
1,435
2.23
0.95
1
4
747
2.67
0.83
1
4
1,375
2.39
0.95
1
4
719
3.02
0.87
1
4
1,488
1.68
0.83
1
4
1,280
2.10
0.95
1
4
1,484
1.65
0.79
1
4
1,288
2.09
0.96
1
4
1,488
1.42
0.62
1
4
1,277
1.79
0.77
1
4
1,489
1.52
0.70
1
4
1,287
2.33
0.86
1
4
Compromise means selling one’s principles
Italy
Finland
Better if decisions made by experts
Italy
Finland
People don’t have a say in Government
Italy
Finland
Politics is too complicated
Italy
Finland
Politicians lose touch with people
Italy
Finland
Parties are not interested in peoples’ opinion
Italy
Finland
Source: ITANES 2013; Finnish National Election Study 2011
As we can see, the number of valid responses is quite high, except for the case of Finland
of the first two questions. The standard deviations are also normal in our variables of
interest. The range of response goes from 1 ‘Complete true’ to 4 ‘Not at all true’ in Italy
or 1’Fully agree’ to 4 ‘Not agree at all’ and 1 ‘Strongly agree’ to 4 ‘Strongly disagree’ in
Finland.
On average, people are more inclined to agree (2) with the idea that compromising
is selling one’s principles in Italy and in Finland are more inclined to disagree (3) with it.
With respect to decisions being made by experts, Italians in the sample tend to be more
inclined to agree (2) with this idea than Finnish, more inclined to disagree (3) with the
idea of technocratic decisions.
About people and their say in Government, Italians in the sample on average think
that this idea is true (1-2) while in Finland they also agree (2) but it is more close to the
disagreement than in Italy (between 2-3).
3.1.2 Italian case
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In addition, in Italy we considered the following variables:
I1. Laws should always be respected, even if one thinks they’re unfair.
I2 People generally lack the knowledge/interest to decide on important political matters.
I3. If Italians could decide directly about important political matters, instead of relying
on politicians, the country would be much better off.
I4. Political parties are necessary to defend the interests of different social classes and
groups.
I5. People can participate in politics in Italy thanks to political parties.
I6. Without political parties there can be no democracy.
In the following table, we present a summary of the descriptives of the variables for the
Italian case:
Table 2. Descriptives of attitudinal variables.
Variable
Law should always be respected
People lack knowledge on political matters
Italians should decide pol matters
Pol parties are necessary
People can participate because of parties
Without parties there is no democracy
N
Mean
Std. Dev.
Min
Max
1,469
1,447
1,406
1,451
1,460
1,412
1.94
2.05
2.34
2.50
2.69
2.32
0.87
0.83
0.93
0.89
0.89
0.91
1
1
1
1
1
1
4
4
4
4
4
4
Source: ITANES 2013
In this case, our variables have reasonable number of valid cases, none of them shows an
important number of missing cases, and also the standard deviations are normal. The
ranges of response go from 1 ‘Fully agree’ to 4 ‘Don’t agree at all’ or 1 ‘Completely true’
to 4 ‘Not true at all’.
As we see from the descriptives, on average, Italians in the sample tend to agree
with the necessity to respect the laws, they agree that people lack knowledge in political
matters and they are between agree and disagree about Italians deciding on political
matters. They are also divided on agreement or disagreement about the necessity of
political parties and they are more inclined to disagree about political parties being the
way to participation for people. On the other hand, they are placed between agree and
disagree on average on the idea that without political parties, democracy is not possible.
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3.2 Finland
In Finland, the following extra questions considered to analyse populist attitudes:
F1. Voting is the only way in which ordinary people can have a say about how things are run
F2. Politicians are not interested in the opinions of ordinary people
F3. I have no say in what the government and parliament decide
F4. Through political parties, citizens’ opinions will be taken into consideration in decisionmaking
F5. By voting people can have a say in how things are run
F6. It doesn’t really matter which parties form the government, policy decisions will be the
same
F7. Members of parliament would help our country more if they stopped talking and
concentrated on solving real problems
F8. Things would be better in Finland if successful corporate managers made the decisions
F9. The Finnish government would function better if it were managed like an enterprise
3.2 Further analyses
After seeing the variance of the items, we think is useful to explore beforehand the
correlations between the variables we are using, in order to understand the relationship
between these items (Table 2). However, correlation matrices are not the most suitable
method to understand relationships between variables with Likert scale responses, so we
performed also polychoric correlations3 more suitable for ordinal variables (Van der Eijk
& Rose, 2015) (Table 3).
From what we can see in the correlation matrix of the Italian case, our variables
are not correlated, except for d22_6 ‘Political parties are necessary to defend the interests
of different social classes and groups’ with d22_7 ‘People can participate in politics in
Italy thanks to political parties’ and d22_8 ‘Without political parties there can be no
democracy’. This makes sense, because all of them are related to a concrete view of
political parties. Also ‘People like me don’t have any say in what the government does’,
3
Van der Eijk and Rose, 2015, p.4: “Polychoric correlations are often recommended as the appropriate correlation
measure to use for factor analysis of ordinal items (…). These have been shown to approach the true underlying
correlation between the items better than product-moment correlations. However, they assume underlying normal
distributions, which may in some circumstances be rather bold. Moreover, they are also vulnerable to producing
inaccurate results in small samples or when items are strongly skewed”. Taking into account our sample size (more
than a thousand respondents for almost all our variables, and most of them not being strongly skewed –with some
exceptions- we still think polychoric correlations will be more precise for our analyses.
14
‘Sometimes politics and government seem so complicated’, ‘People we elect to the
Parliament quickly lose touch with the people’ and ‘Parties are only interested in people's
votes, but not in their opinions’ are correlated, which is theoretically coherent.
In the Finnish case we see (Table 4), that in general, our variables are not highly
correlated, except for P13_1 ‘Members of parliament would help our country more if they
stopped talking and concentrated on solving real problems’ and P13_2 ‘What making
compromises in politics really means is selling one’s principles’. Also the variable P13_3
‘Things would be better in Finland if successful corporate managers made the decisions’
correlates strongly with P13_4 ‘Things would be better in Finland if independent experts
made the decisions instead of politicians and citizens’ and P13_5 ‘The Finnish
government would function better if it were managed like an enterprise’. And between
them P13_4 correlates with P13_5.
15
Table 3. Polychoric correlations of the variables (Italy)
D22_1
D22_2
D22_3
D22_4
D22_1
D22_2
D22_3
D22_4
D22_5
D22_6
D22_7
D22_8
D38_1C
D38_2C
D38_3C
D38_4C
1.00
0.21
0.06
0.23
0.27
-0.09
-0.14
-0.12
0.16
0.11
0.15
0.24
1.00
-0.01
0.11
0.22
-0.07
-0.11
-0.12
0.12
0.17
0.07
0.17
1.00
0.14
-0.09
0.21
0.16
0.25
0.03
0.04
0.09
0.02
1.00
0.01
0.07
0.02
0.03
0.14
0.13
0.19
0.13
D22_5
D22_6
D22_7
D22_8
D38_1C
D38_2C
D38_3C
D38_4C
1.00
-0.23
-0.21
-0.24
0.18
0.19
0.11
0.21
1.00
0.49
0.52
-0.15
-0.06
-0.20
-0.21
1.00
0.45
-0.23
-0.09
-0.29
-0.29
1.00
-0.15
-0.04
-0.22
-0.17
1.00
0.47
0.57
0.53
1.00
0.45
0.44
1.00
0.68
1.00
Source: ITANES 2013
D22_1. In politics settling for a compromise actually means selling out one's principles.
D22_2. Our political system would work better if decisions were made by expert technocrats instead of politicians.
D22_3. Laws should always be respected, even if one thinks they’re unfair.
D22_4. People generally lack the knowledge/interest to decide on important political matters.
D22_5. If Italians could decide directly about important political matters, instead of relying on politicians, the country would be much better off.
D22_6. Political parties are necessary to defend the interests of different social classes and groups.
D22_7. People can participate in politics in Italy thanks to political parties.
D22_8. Without political parties there can be no democracy.
D38_1C. People like me don’t have any say in what the government does.
D38_2C. Sometimes politics and government seem so complicated that a person like me can’t really understand what’s going on.
D38_3C. Usually, people we elect to the Parliament quickly lose touch with the people.
16
D38_4C. Parties are only interested in people's votes, but not in their opinions.
17
Table 4. Polychoric correlation matrix in Finland
K15_1
K15_2
K15_3
K15_4
K15_5
K15_6
K15_7
K15_8
K15_9
P13_1
P13_2
P13_3
P13_4
P13_5
K15_1
1.00
0.16
0.21
0.27
0.09
0.17
0.17
0.12
0.15
0.32
0.23
0.18
0.09
0.23
K15_2
K15_3
K15_4
K15_5
K15_6
K15_7
K15_8
K15_9
P13_1
P13_2
P13_3
P13_4
P13_5
1.00
0.70
0.53
-0.33
0.61
0.37
-0.34
0.31
0.41
0.36
0.06
0.11
0.15
1.00
0.60
-0.39
0.67
0.37
-0.40
0.40
0.42
0.39
0.10
0.11
0.17
1.00
-0.27
0.57
0.36
-0.44
0.40
0.37
0.39
0.17
0.13
0.23
1.00
-0.49
-0.24
0.50
-0.37
-0.25
-0.17
-0.08
-0.15
-0.14
1.00
0.38
-0.45
0.47
0.40
0.36
0.13
0.20
0.23
1.00
-0.26
0.36
0.21
0.26
0.15
0.10
0.15
1.00
-0.33
-0.22
-0.20
-0.06
-0.10
-0.16
1.00
0.31
0.29
0.22
0.26
0.27
1.00
0.56
0.28
0.27
0.39
1.00
0.39
0.27
0.42
1.00
0.56
0.64
1.00
0.57
1.00
Source: Finnish National Election Study 2011
K15_1 Voting is the only way in which ordinary people can have a say about how things are run
K15_2 Those elected to parliament soon lose touch with the problems of ordinary people
K15_3 Politicians are not interested in the opinions of ordinary people
K15_4 I have no say in what the government and parliament decide
K15_5 Through political parties, citizens’ opinions will be taken into consideration in decision-making
K15_6 Political parties are only interested in people’s votes, not in their opinions
18
K15_7 Sometimes politics seems so complicated that I can’t really understand what is going on
K15_8 By voting people can have a say in how things are run
K15_9 It doesn’t really matter which parties form the government, policy decisions will be the same
P13_1 Members of parliament would help our country more if they stopped talking and concentrated on solving
real problems
P13_2 What making compromises in politics really means is selling one’s principles
P13_3 Things would be better in Finland if successful corporate managers made the decisions
P13_4 Things would be better in Finland if independent experts made the decisions instead of politicians and
citizens
P13_5 The Finnish government would function better if it were managed like an enterprise
19
3.3 Factor analysis
3.3.1 Italian case
The third step we perform is the factor analysis. We are aware that we are not strictly
looking for a latent factor in this case, because the dimension and the technique used
doesn’t allow us to distinguish between error measurement and error in the variables. And
as we explained before, the absence of variance in some of the variables limits our search
for a factor. Nevertheless, we will perform factor analysis with polychoric correlations,
more suitable for ordinal variables.
Table 5. Factor analysis of the Italian case
Factor
Eigenvalue
Difference
Proportion
Factor 1
2.66
1.65
0.81
Factor 2
1.02
0.61
0.31
Factor 3
0.40
0.35
0.12
LR test: independent vs. saturated: chi2(45) = 3000.07 p<0.001
Cumulative
0.81
1.12
1.25
Source: ITANES 2013
As we see from the analysis, there are at least three factors to take into account. We are
aware that the convention is not to take factor with an Eigenvalue lower than one, but in
this case we believe that the third factor has some interesting explanatory value.
From our factor analysis the variables d22_3 ‘Laws should always be respected,
even if one thinks they’re unfair’ and d22_4 ‘People generally lack the knowledge/interest
to decide on important political matters’ were dropped because of insufficient loading on
the retained factors (<0.30).
We allow oblimin rotation with the method of principal factors, because we
assume our variables in general to be correlated. The number of observations is 1,167 and
there are three significant retained factors.
20
Table 7. Rotated factor loadings (pattern matrix) and unique variances
Variable
Compromise is selling one’s principles
Decisions should be made by experts
Italians should decide directly pol matt
Political parties are necessary
People participate thanks to pol parties
Without parties there can’t be democracy
I don’t have a say in Gov. actions
I can’t understand politics
MPs lose quickly touch with people
Parties’ interests are votes, not opinions
Factor 1
0.20
0.16
0.19
-0.16
-0.26
-0.14
0.69
0.59
0.79
0.76
Factor 2
-0.12
-0.10
-0.27
0.67
0.60
0.65
-0.07
0.05
-0.13
-0.13
Factor 3
0.38
0.36
0.40
0.00
-0.01
-0.06
0.04
0.12
-0.10
0.08
Uniqueness
0.79
0.83
0.73
0.53
0.57
0.55
0.51
0.61
0.35
0.39
Source: ITANES 2013
The first factor is related with perception on parties and politics, with questions loading
high on this factor as ‘I don’t have a say in Government’s actions’, ‘For people like me,
politics seems too complicated’, ‘Elected Politicians often lose touch quickly with the
people’ and ‘parties are interested in votes, not in people’s opinions’. We will call this
factor “Efficacy”.
In the second factor we have questions with a high load like ‘Political parties are
necessary’, ‘People can participate in politics thank to political parties’, and ‘without
parties there can be no democracy’. This second factor will be called “Party sympathy”.
The relationship of the Party Sympathy factor with populism (factor 3) is negative.
We can observe that also efficacy and party sympathy are negatively related,
meaning that people scoring high on one score low on the other. This could be influenced
by the conception of politics in Italy, where citizens feel politically ineffective and their
perception of politicians as not responsive (Segatti, 2006). As Segatti’s work showed, “in
Italy (…) the internal dimension of (in)efficacy is correlated with the external one, in
contrast to what happens in other countries” (Segatti, 2006 p. 246). These attitudes are
related to disaffection, which is influenced by individual and system-level factors, as the
behaviour of parties and politicians (p. 267) and in general it is conceived as a systemic
factor (p. 270).
“[D]isaffection seems to have a dual character. On the one hand, because it is
shaped by inherited cultural bias (subcultural legacies and ideological political
identities), it can be conceived as a predisposition which is exogenous to the
current political context. On the other, it should also be understood as an
endogenously primed-reaction to current political events and to the actual
behaviour of political elites and parties”. (Segatti, 2006 p.267).
In a more general remark, the work of Montero and Torcal (2006, p.342) emphasize that:
“in many new democracies in Southern Europe and the American Southern Cone,
21
disaffection leads to widespread estrangement from politics and public affairs, and that
this consequence deepens the breach between citizens and politicians still further”.
It is also interesting to show two different cases as Italy and Finland because in
their study Montero and Torcal show that in democracies with the highest levels of
disaffection, low levels of political accountability are found. As they underline, this is a
open opportunity in the electoral market for populist discourse to appear:
“[P]olitical disaffection may affect the nature of the relationship between elites
and citizens in a very negative way, as it creates ‘space and opportunities that
might be exploited by anti-liberal and/or anti-democratic political entrepreneurs
and their populist projects’. While disaffected democrats might not challenge the
democratic order, their uninformation, un-involvement, and estrangement from
the public sphere do have a lasting impact on the mechanisms of democratic
accountability”.
This is one of the reasons why we are interested in the comparison of two notable different
countries, in which even though in their citizenry the vision of politics and politicians is
quite dissimilar, widespread populist attitudes can be found.
The third factor has questions loading as ‘Compromising is selling one’s
principles’, ‘Decisions should be done by experts’ and ‘Italians should decide about
political matters’. This factor combines really different visions of politics (expert decision
versus popular decision) which approaches us to show the ambivalence of this third
factor, which is the one we consider as “Stealth Populism”. It is also interesting to see
how the set of variables which load high on Stealth Populism, also load up in the efficacy
factor, to 0.2 approximately.
Table 8. Factor rotation matrix
Factor1
Factor2
Factor3
Factor 1
0.87
0.49
-0.10
Factor 2
-0.47
0.87
0.16
Factor 3
0.17
-0.09
0.98
Source: ITANES 2013
The Factor rotation matrix, offers us the correlation between factors. We observe, as
expected, that the factor 1 (efficacy) and factor 2 (party sympathy) are negative related,
and also a negative relation is observed with the factor 3 (Stealth Populism).
22
3.3.2 Finnish case
The following step is to perform the factor analysis. It will be done by the same procedure
than in the Italian case. We observe two relevant factors.
Table 9. Factor analysis in Finland
Factor
Eigenvalue
Difference
Factor 1
3.93
2.46
Factor 2
1.47
1.19
Proportion
0,78
0,29
Cumulative
0.78
1.08
LR test: independent vs. saturated: chi2(91) = 2676.17 p<0.001
Source: Finnish National Election Study 2011
We perform the oblimin rotation with the principal factors method, being the number of
observations 593 and the two significant retained factors. In our factor loadings we
dropped the variables ‘Voting is the only way in which ordinary people can have a say
about how things are run’, ‘Through political parties, citizens’ opinions will be taken into
consideration in decision-making’ and ‘By voting people can have a say in how things
are run’, for having an insufficient load (<0.30) in the retained factors.
Table 11. Rotated factor loadings (pattern matrix) and unique variances
Variable
Factor 1 Factor 2 Uniqueness
Politicians soon lose touch with peoples’ problems
0.77
0.00
0.39
Politicians are not interested peoples’ opinions
0.84
0.02
0.30
I have no say in what the Gov. and parliament decide
0.70
0.11
0.49
Political parties are only interested in people’s votes
0.78
0.11
0.37
Politics seems too complicated
0.48
0.10
0.72
It doesn’t matter who is in Gov., policy decisions will be the same
0.50
0.24
0.63
Members of parliament should stop talking and concentrated on
solving real problems
0.49
0.35
0.52
Compromising in politics means selling one’s principles
0.46
0.41
0.49
Corporate managers should make the decisions
0.09
0.76
0.41
Independent experts should make the decisions
0.12
0.68
0.51
Finnish government should be managed like an enterprise
0.20
0.76
0.39
Source: Finnish National Election Study 2011
From the loadings we see that in the first factor, the questions with a high load are ‘Those
elected to parliament soon lose touch with the problems of ordinary people’, ‘Politicians
are not interested in the opinions of ordinary people’, ‘I have no say in what the
government and parliament decide’, ‘Political parties are only interested in people’s
votes, not in their opinions’, ‘Sometimes politics seems so complicated that I can’t really
23
understand what is going on’ and ‘It doesn’t really matter which parties form the
government, policy decisions will be the same’. We will call this factor ‘Efficacy’.
There are also two items ‘Members of parliament would help our country more if
they stopped talking and concentrated on solving real problems’ and ‘What making
compromises in politics really means is selling one’s principles’ which have a load in
both factors: Efficacy and Stealth populism. As we can see, in Finland the two factors
seem to be really close.
For our second factor the variables with a high load are ‘Things would be better
in Finland if successful corporate managers made the decisions’, ‘Things would be better
in Finland if independent experts made the decisions instead of politicians and citizens’
and ‘The Finnish government would function better if it were managed like an enterprise’.
This factor could be reflecting a preference for private management or technocracy, we
will call it the ‘Stealth Populism’ factor.
It is really interesting that indicators considered to be a classical measure of
populism like ‘compromising is selling one’s principles’, are related to populism and
efficacy at the same time, and also that when people think that it does not matter who is
in government, this is measuring to some extent populism.
Table 12. Factor rotation matrix
Factor 1
Factor 1
Factor 2
0.88
-0.47
Factor 2
0.46
0.88
Source: Finnish National Election Study 2011
As we see in the analysis of both cases, populism and efficacy are strongly connected.
4. Conclusions
The most interesting result of this exercise is about core or purely populist
attitudes. We found that in both countries, albeit more in Italy than in Finland, prima facie
populist attitudes are part and parcel of the same factor with elitist attitudes, regardless
they look prima facie completely contradictory. This makes us realise that the core of
populism may be contradictory in its conception, but citizens of the two countries can
share both. Besides the analysis show that populist attitudes may go in hand with attitudes
such as negative conception of politics, party sympathy, and internal and external
24
efficacy. One of the findings of this paper is the close relationship questions related to
efficacy and populism, even in such different contexts as Finland and Italy.
One of the challenges that we tried to deal with in this article is the difficulty of
the measurement of populist attitudes in a comparative way. There is here a equivalence
problem that we need to deal with more detailed strategies (including Confirmatory factor
analysis or latent class modelling).
The next step to perform should be to develop a comparative analysis on how
populist attitudes are related to different policy areas. We think that this relationship is
worthy to be studied. However, because of the widespread distribution of the negative
opinions on politicians and politics in general, it will be difficult to investigate populist
attitudes regarding policies. This does not mean that considerations about the processes
are not important to citizens, but that they are so widespread that their measurement is
methodologically challenging. We believe, however, that further analyses could explore
further this dimension of populism with less emphasis on policy and giving more attention
to process-making.
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