Contents, causes and consequences of political discontent

Project in LISS Call 2018
Researchers: Henk van der Kolk (UT), Armen Hakhverdian (UvA), Matthijs Rooduijn (UvA), Andrej Zaslove (RU)

Populist parties and politicians are increasingly successful. As a result, scholars increasingly focus on the topic of populism. A promising new strand in the populism literature focuses on measuring populism as an attitude among individual citizens. These studies suggest that in order to understand recent political developments we must consider the pervasiveness and impact of such individual-level populist attitudes. This attitude can be distinguished from related concepts of political discontent, such as political cynicism, political trust, political dissatisfaction and political efficacy.

In this project the researchers plan to test the dimensionality of a variety of established measures (i.e. political trust, efficacy, and political cynicism) and newer measures (i.e. populist attitudes) of political discontent. They´ll use the data from the LISS panel to create a strong test of the conceptual independence of the various dimensions of political discontent.

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