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.

Social media data is increasingly used to gain insights into trends in mental health, but prior studies aimed at confirming a link between online expression of suicidal ideation on social media and actual suicide deaths have been inconclusive. Using comprehensive six-year data sets of Twitter posts and suicide deaths in Japan, we examine the diurnal relationship between the proportional incidence of a suicide-related keyword, "kietai" ("I want to disappear"), and suicide deaths with an OLS regression model. We also use co-occurrence analysis to reveal changes in the linguistic context of the suicide-related keyword at different hours of the day. We find a clear diurnal pattern in the use of this suicide-related keyword, peaking between 1am and 5am. This diurnal trend is positively correlated with suicide deaths among younger cohorts (ages 15 to 44), but the correlation is negative among older adults (45 and over). The correlation among young adults strengthens when a delay between tweet incidence and suicide deaths is included. Compared to daytime tweets, nighttime tweets exhibited a stronger relationship between words related to self-disgust and words directly indicating suicidal intent. This study confirms the hypothesised link between online suicidal ideation and suicide death. Despite frequent flippant use of the keyword, the consistent correlation and the diurnal changes in the context of the keyword's usage demonstrate the value of social media data to the study of mental health trends in groups at risk of suicide.