Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey 2023 (POPPA)

In 2018, the first wave of the Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey (POPPA) introduced a new approach for measuring populism among political parties. Wave 1 captured positions and attitudes of 250 parties on their key attributes related to populism, political style, party ideology, and party organization in 28 European countries. Wave 1 has been downloaded more than 6700 times (from the Harvard Dataverse in October 2024) and the accompanying Comparative Political Studies article has been cited more then 250 times (according to Google Scholar). Given the importance of POPPA as a core sources for populism scholars, we have expanded the original dataset. The 2023 wave of POPPA contains similar core feature and builds on the 2018 wave.

The principal motivation for the expert survey is to provide a better understanding of key party characteristics related to populism and political representation. POPPA 2023 follows the methodological approach of the first wave, building on the multidimensional, continuous, and comprehensive approach for capturing populism. The multidimensional approach refers to the use of five sub-dimensions of populism to produce an aggregate measure of populism. These sub-dimensions operationalize the ideational approach of populism. The continuous approach refers to the use of a continuous scale which measures degrees of populism. Measuring populism along a continuous scale implies that political parties are more or less populist and that they cannot be classified as simply populist or not populist. The comprehensive approach of POPPA provides a measure for every relevant party in parliament across European democracies, not only those that are widely considered to be populist. The comprehensive nature of the data allows researchers to derive populism scores for all relevant parties in these European countries in 2018 and 2023. Whereas wave 1 covers of 249 parties in 28 countries, wave 2 provides a measure of populism for 312 parties in 31 countries. Wave 2 was fielded between January 25, 2023 and May 25, 2023.