I am pleased to invite you to the next meeting of the ISS Political Science Workshop, hosted by the Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo, on Feb 28, 2020.

The presenter will be Airo Hino, Professor in the School of Political Science and Economics at Waseda University.
*Please note that the presentation for this workshop will be in English.*

TITLE: "Populists Vote for Populists, Right? Promises and Pitfalls of Measuring Populist Attitudes Across Countries"
DATE: Feb 28, 2020 (Fri) 16:00-17:30
LOCATION: Rm. 108, Institute of Social Science (UTokyo / Hongo)
(https://www.iss.u-tokyo.ac.jp/guide/index.html)

*The abstract for this talk is appended below.*

Please feel free to forward this information to anybody who may be interested. While advanced registration is not necessary, we would appreciate your RSVP for administrative purposes.
SIGNUP FORM: https://forms.gle/pUqsvFWjDRuSk4Lp7

Best regards,

Kenneth Mori McElwain (Institute of Social Science, UTokyo)
Hiroto Katsumata (Yokohama City University / Macromill Data Science Joint Lab


*** ABSTRACT
With the rise of populist leaders and parties in the contemporary politics, increasing efforts have been made to study these phenomena from voters' perspectives with the following question in mind: What are the core attitudes that lead some people to vote for populists? Most attitudinal batteries proposed so far are designed to tap on the following three key dimensions of populism: (i) anti-elitism, (ii) people-centrism, and (iii) Manicheanism. We evaluate how the existing batteries perform in explaining voting for populists in each country by using a recent module of cross-national surveys (i.e. Comparative Study of Electoral Systems) that specifically addresses these attitudinal questions. Our results show that the existing scale of populist attitudes effectively explains voting for populists in countries where populist leaders and parties are in opposition, but unequivocally fails to explain voting for populists in power. We argue that the current batteries fail to tap on the global feeling of anti-elitism as they are only concerned of politicians as 'elites'. Typically, populist leaders start blaming other 'non-political elites' for problems as soon as they seize power, which range from traditional 'liberal' media and journalists, academic intellectuals, bureaucrats, and to corporate business leaders. To measure more general anti-elitist attitudes also encompassing these 'non-political elites', we tested a new set of batteries in a survey conducted after the Japanese Upper House election held in July 2019. The results show that voters for the incumbent LDP, which arguably embraces some populist characteristics, appear to distrust the 'non-political elite' professions such as journalists and academic researchers. We also asked some question items deriving from conspiracy theories in Japan to see its relevance to the populist nature of recent opinion formations. Some preliminary analyses are presented.