Psychological Correlates of Populist Attitudes

Studies of demand- side populism with a focus on attitudinal and behavioral factors are becoming morepopular, but only a few have explored the phenomenon’s psychological determinants. We tackle the lack ofconversation between populism scholars and political psychologists and test the impact of conspiracy beliefs,moral disengagement, need for cognition, and belief in simple solutions on populist attitudes. We use the mostwidespread ideational definition in an attempt to bring clarity to demand-side populism, as the literature oftenconflates the concept of populism with adjacent ideological and psychological factors. We analyze representativesamples from two very different countries (Italy and Turkey) to test our hypotheses. We use two of the most often-used measures of populist attitudes and also explore populism’s individual building blocks: people-centrism,antielitism, and a Manichean worldview. We consistently find conspiracy beliefs (and our control variableof institutional trust) as primary sources of populist attitudes, whereas the impact of the other psychologicalfactors is more dependent on context and operationalization. Our article calls for more conceptual clarity,careful theorization, and more work on the refinement of available survey measures. We also highlight theimportance of national contexts and the dangers of generalization based on individual country studies.