Repository for the research "Populist Attitudes and Vote", part of the project "Has Demand for Populism Met Supply? An Analysis of Brazil’s 2018 General Elections".

We are currently developing a measure for populist attitudes using data available for Brazil.
Following Castanho Silva et al. (2018 and 2019), Schulz et al. (2018) and Wuttke et al. (2020), we propose a noncompensatory multiplicative approach that takes into account the three dimensions required according to the ideational approach.
We are using new data from ESEB (Brazilian Electoral Study, which is part of the CSES - Comparative Study of Electoral Systems) that allow us to measure each dimension separately. Based on recent literature, we believe (and have shown to some extent) that populist attitudes are not independent of issue and ideological positions, but the opposite: they work together shaping electoral choice.

Contemporary populism research in voting behavior tends to classify it as a thincentered ideology, which can be attached to any kind of “thick” or “host” ideology. Studies in Europe and Latin America have found that thin-populist attitudes are predictive of electoral support for populist parties. However, more recent research started challenging this notion, showing that populist attitudes are secondary to ideology and issue positions in determining populist party support. We test the effects of thin populist attitudes on populist vote choice in a most likely case scenario, the 2018 Brazilian presidential elections. Findings suggest that support for the populist candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, is mostly explained by ideological position and anti-minority attitudes, with populist attitudes playing at best a secondary role.

• ESEB 2018 (Brazil's CSES 5th Wave)