Publications of Levente Littvay
An Empirical Comparison of Seven Populist Attitudes Scales. Political Research Quarterly. 2019:1-16.
An Empirical Comparison of Seven Populist Attitudes Scales
With the recent upsurge of populism in developed and transition democracies, researchers have started measuring it as an attitude. Several scales have been proposed for this purpose. However, there is little direct comparison between the available alternatives. Scholars who wish to measure populist attitudes have little information available to help select the best scale for their purposes. In this article, we directly compare seven populist attitudes scales from multiple perspectives: conceptual development, questionnaire design, dimensionality, information, cross-national validity, and external validity. We use original survey data collected online from nine countries in Europe and the Americas, with around 250 participants per country, in which all seven batteries of questions were present. Results show that most scales have important methodological and validity limitations in at least one of the dimensions tested, and should not be used for cross-national comparative research. We recommend populist attitudes items that work better at capturing populism, and more generally provide guidelines for researchers who want to compare different scales that supposedly measure the same construct.
A Genetic Basis of Economic Egalitarianism. Social Justice Research. 2017;30:408-37.
A Genetic Basis of Economic Egalitarianism
Studies of political attitudes and ideologies have sought to explain their origin. They have been assumed to be a result of political values ingrained during the process of socialization until early adulthood, as well as personal political experience, party affiliation, social strata, etc. As a consequence of these environment-dominated explanations, most biology-based accounts of political preference have never been considered. However, in the light of evidence accumulated in recent years, the view that political attitudes are detached from any physical properties became unsustainable. In this paper, we investigate the origins of social justice attitudes, with special focus on economic egalitarianism and its potential genetic basis. We use Minnesota Twin Study data from 2008, collected from samples of monozygotic and dizygotic twin pairs (n = 573) in order to estimate the additive genetic, shared environmental, and unique environmental components of social justice attitudes. Our results show that the large portion of the variance in a four-item economic egalitarianism scale can be attributed to genetic factor. At the same time, shared environment, as a socializing factor, has no significant effect. The effect of environment seems to be fully reserved for unique personal experience. Our findings further problematize a long-standing view that social justice attitudes are dominantly determined by socialization.
The Elite Is Up to Something: Exploring the Relation Between Populism and Belief in Conspiracy Theories. Swiss Political Science Review. 2017;23(4):423-43.
The Elite Is Up to Something: Exploring the Relation Between Populism and Belief in Conspiracy Theories
We explore the relationship between populist attitudes and conspiratorial beliefs on the individual level with two studies using American samples. First, we test whether and what kinds of conspiratorial beliefs predict populist attitudes. Our results show that belief in conspiracies with greedy, but not necessarily purely evil, elites are associated with populism. Second, we test whether having a conspiratorial mentality is associated with all separate sub‐dimensions of populist attitudes – people‐centrism, anti‐elitism, and a good‐versus‐evil view of politics. Results show a relation only with the first two, confirming the common tendency of both discourses to see the masses as victims on elites’ hands. These findings contribute to research on the correlates of populism at the individual level, which is essential to understanding why this phenomenon is so strong in contemporary democracies.
The Elite Is Up to Something: Exploring the Relation Between Populism and Belief in Conspiracy Theories. Swiss Political Science Review. 2017;23(4):423-43.
The Elite Is Up to Something: Exploring the Relation Between Populism and Belief in Conspiracy Theories
We explore the relationship between populist attitudes and conspiratorial beliefs on the individual level with two studies using American samples. First, we test whether and what kinds of conspiratorial beliefs predict populist attitudes. Our results show that belief in conspiracies with greedy, but not necessarily purely evil, elites are associated with populism. Second, we test whether having a conspiratorial mentality is associated with all separate sub-dimensions of populist attitudes – people-centrism, anti-elitism, and a good-versus-evil view of politics. Results show a relation only with the first two, confirming the common tendency of both discourses to see the masses as victims on elites’ hands. These findings contribute to research on the correlates of populism at the individual level, which is essential to understanding why this phenomenon is so strong in contemporary democracies.
Does explicit instruction to answer quickly speed up respondents in web surveys?
We tested if explicit instruction to answer quickly speed up respondents in web surveys. In sum, it does not appear so. We used a Wilson–Patterson style battery of ideology that was originally designed for quick responses to brief issue positions. Fielded in the US and India through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and in Hungary during a lab experiment, there is no significant difference in response time when having extra instructions asking people to respond quickly.