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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 irene.esteban@unimi.it

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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 anti-

immigrant 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

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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 decision-

makers) are trying to get advantage of the positions they hold. As Hibbing and Theiss-

Morse 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

Compromise means selling one’s principles Italy 1,435 2.23 0.95 1 4 Finland 747 2.67 0.83 1 4 Better if decisions made by experts Italy 1,375 2.39 0.95 1 4 Finland 719 3.02 0.87 1 4 People don’t have a say in Government Italy 1,488 1.68 0.83 1 4 Finland 1,280 2.10 0.95 1 4 Politics is too complicated Italy 1,484 1.65 0.79 1 4 Finland 1,288 2.09 0.96 1 4 Politicians lose touch with people Italy 1,488 1.42 0.62 1 4 Finland 1,277 1.79 0.77 1 4 Parties are not interested in peoples’ opinion Italy 1,489 1.52 0.70 1 4 Finland 1,287 2.33 0.86 1 4 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 N Mean Std. Dev. Min Max

Law should always be respected 1,469 1.94 0.87 1 4 People lack knowledge on political matters 1,447 2.05 0.83 1 4 Italians should decide pol matters 1,406 2.34 0.93 1 4 Pol parties are necessary 1,451 2.50 0.89 1 4 People can participate because of parties 1,460 2.69 0.89 1 4 Without parties there is no democracy 1,412 2.32 0.91 1 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 decision-

making

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.

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‘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.

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Table 3. Polychoric correlations of the variables (Italy) D22_1 D22_2 D22_3 D22_4 D22_5 D22_6 D22_7 D22_8 D38_1C D38_2C D38_3C D38_4C D22_1 1.00 D22_2 0.21 1.00 D22_3 0.06 -0.01 1.00 D22_4 0.23 0.11 0.14 1.00 D22_5 0.27 0.22 -0.09 0.01 1.00 D22_6 -0.09 -0.07 0.21 0.07 -0.23 1.00 D22_7 -0.14 -0.11 0.16 0.02 -0.21 0.49 1.00 D22_8 -0.12 -0.12 0.25 0.03 -0.24 0.52 0.45 1.00 D38_1C 0.16 0.12 0.03 0.14 0.18 -0.15 -0.23 -0.15 1.00 D38_2C 0.11 0.17 0.04 0.13 0.19 -0.06 -0.09 -0.04 0.47 1.00 D38_3C 0.15 0.07 0.09 0.19 0.11 -0.20 -0.29 -0.22 0.57 0.45 1.00 D38_4C 0.24 0.17 0.02 0.13 0.21 -0.21 -0.29 -0.17 0.53 0.44 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.

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D38_4C. Parties are only interested in people's votes, but not in their opinions.

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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 K15_2 0.16 1.00 K15_3 0.21 0.70 1.00 K15_4 0.27 0.53 0.60 1.00 K15_5 0.09 -0.33 -0.39 -0.27 1.00 K15_6 0.17 0.61 0.67 0.57 -0.49 1.00 K15_7 0.17 0.37 0.37 0.36 -0.24 0.38 1.00 K15_8 0.12 -0.34 -0.40 -0.44 0.50 -0.45 -0.26 1.00 K15_9 0.15 0.31 0.40 0.40 -0.37 0.47 0.36 -0.33 1.00 P13_1 0.32 0.41 0.42 0.37 -0.25 0.40 0.21 -0.22 0.31 1.00 P13_2 0.23 0.36 0.39 0.39 -0.17 0.36 0.26 -0.20 0.29 0.56 1.00 P13_3 0.18 0.06 0.10 0.17 -0.08 0.13 0.15 -0.06 0.22 0.28 0.39 1.00 P13_4 0.09 0.11 0.11 0.13 -0.15 0.20 0.10 -0.10 0.26 0.27 0.27 0.56 1.00 P13_5 0.23 0.15 0.17 0.23 -0.14 0.23 0.15 -0.16 0.27 0.39 0.42 0.64 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

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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

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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 Cumulative Factor 1 2.66 1.65 0.81 0.81 Factor 2 1.02 0.61 0.31 1.12 Factor 3 0.40 0.35 0.12 1.25 LR test: independent vs. saturated: chi2(45) = 3000.07 p<0.001 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.

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Table 7. Rotated factor loadings (pattern matrix) and unique variances Variable Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3 Uniqueness Compromise is selling one’s principles 0.20 -0.12 0.38 0.79 Decisions should be made by experts 0.16 -0.10 0.36 0.83 Italians should decide directly pol matt 0.19 -0.27 0.40 0.73 Political parties are necessary -0.16 0.67 0.00 0.53 People participate thanks to pol parties -0.26 0.60 -0.01 0.57 Without parties there can’t be democracy -0.14 0.65 -0.06 0.55 I don’t have a say in Gov. actions 0.69 -0.07 0.04 0.51 I can’t understand politics 0.59 0.05 0.12 0.61 MPs lose quickly touch with people 0.79 -0.13 -0.10 0.35 Parties’ interests are votes, not opinions 0.76 -0.13 0.08 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,

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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

Factor 1 Factor 2 Factor 3 Factor1 0.87 -0.47 0.17 Factor2 0.49 0.87 -0.09 Factor3 -0.10 0.16 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).

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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 Proportion Cumulative Factor 1 3.93 2.46 0,78 0.78 Factor 2 1.47 1.19 0,29 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

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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 2 Factor 1 0.88 0.46 Factor 2 -0.47 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

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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

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