Populist Thin Ideology: From a Theoretical Conceptualisation to the Development of a New Scale
Résumé
This chapter taps into the concept of populist thin ideology defined by Mudde and Kaltwasser as a set of two fundamental beliefs: (A) the society is divided between the pure people ingroup and corrupt elite outgroup, and (B) right politics intended as a direct expression of the people’s general will without any institutional mediator. Starting from this definition, we conducted an in-depth theoretical analysis of this concept, drawing on social identity theory. Further, we uncovered how extant attitudinal measures of populism present a lack of content and construct validity, implying a mismatch between theory and operationalisation. Accordingly, we designed a new attitudinal scale of the populist thin ideology that aimed to fix identified issues by caring that both (and only) the two subdimensions of populism were measured. We then evaluated the validity of the scale using correlational, factorial analyses, and regression conducted on three independent samples (total n = 1934) of the French adult population. Results showed good psychometric properties in terms of convergent, discriminant, construct, and predictive validity. These findings represent first robust evidence of POP-ThIS possessing satisfying psychometric validity requirements in France. Future research should test this scale in other political contexts and make empirical comparisons with other scales.