The months around the US 2020 presidential election were characterized by polarization, populism, conspiracy theories, and violent acts, far exceeding usual out-party animosity in western democracies. Using an original two-wave panel survey fielded before the election in November 2020 (n = 3111) and after the inauguration in January 2021 (n = 3384), supported with data from the American National Election Study (ANES, n = 3080), we investigate the dynamics of political violence justification and its connection with populist attitudes and conspiracy beliefs. While we find that conspiracy beliefs are associated with higher justification of violence, the relationship with populist attitudes is mixed, and mostly depends on whether people believe in conspiracy theories or not—with populist attitudes being associated with greater political violence justification among those who believe conspiracy theories, while having no or even a negative correlation among those who do not. Finally, results from fixed-effects models provide some evidence for a temporal interpretation of the relationships, indicating that an increase in conspiracy beliefs is strongly and consistently associated with an increased willingness to justify violence.

Populist attitudes are generally measured in surveys through three necessary and non-compensatory elements of populism, namely anti-elitism, people-centrism, and Manicheanism. Using Comparative Study of Electoral Systems Module 5 (2016–2020) data for 30 countries, we evaluate whether this approach explains voting for populist parties across countries in Asia, Europe and the Americas. We show that the existing scales of populist attitudes effectively explain voting for populists in countries where populist leaders and parties are in opposition but fail to explain voting for populist parties in countries where they are in power. We argue that current approaches assume “the elite” to mean “politicians”, thus failing to capture attitudes towards “non-political elites” often targeted by populists in office—in particular, journalists, academics/experts, bureaucrats, and corporate business leaders. The results reveal limits to the usefulness of existing survey batteries in cross-national studies of populism and emphasize the need to develop approaches that are more generalizable across political and national contexts.

Abstract

While populism has become a major force in many nations in recent decades, the extent to which the phenomenon is found in Japan’s politics is a contested topic on which scholars have asserted positions ranging from claims that it simply does not exist in Japan, to opposing claims that Japan’s most powerful and influential recent prime ministers have in fact been populists, with various positions in between those extremes also being represented. Some of this contestation arises from different definitions of “populism” that were developed in parallel in Japanese and Western literature, both of which also further differ from the vernacular usage of the term in Japanese political and media discourses. Consequently, scholars following different definitions have drawn quite different conclusions regarding the populist nature of Japanese political actors. This chapter outlines the correspondences and contrasts between the different definitions and uses them to examine claims that prominent contemporary political figures, including former prime ministers Junichiro Koizumi and Shinzō Abe, as well as regional governors Toru Hashimoto, Yuriko Koike, and Takashi Kawamura, have been populists or have utilized populist rhetoric in their campaigns. We find that while overt populism in Japan—at least according to the definitions used internationally—is generally confined to regional politics, national leaders have also displayed proclivity to borrow limited aspects of populist rhetoric and strategy in support of their political campaigns and policy objectives.