The SciPop Scale for measuring science-related populist attitudes in surveys: Development, test, and validation
Abstract
Populism typically pits political elites against “the virtuous people.” A distinct variant of populism (“science-related populism”) extends beyond politics, targeting academic elites and suggesting they ignore people’s common sense and will. Individual endorsement of such a worldview (“science-related populist attitudes”) has been conceptualized but not yet measured. Hence, we developed the SciPop Scale, a survey instrument to measure science-related populist attitudes. We tested 17 survey items in a first representative survey and developed an 8-item scale. We then tested German, French, and Italian versions of this scale in a second representative survey, employing confirmatory factor analysis, Item Response Theory, and external validity tests. Findings show that the SciPop Scale is a robust and reliable measure of populist demands toward science.
Items of the final SciPop Scale.
Items measured with 5-point Likert scales ranging from 1 (“fully disagree”) to 5 (“fully agree”).
Niels G. Mede
Science Communication Researcher
I am a Senior Research and Teaching Associate at the Department of Communication and Media Research (IKMZ) of the University of Zurich, where I also completed a PhD in communication studies. My work focuses on science communication, digital media, public perceptions of science, threats and attacks against scholars, climate change communication, and survey methodology. Over the last years, I was a visiting researcher at the Department of Life Sciences Communication of the University of Wisconsin—Madison (2022), the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford (2023), and the Digital Media Research Centre at the Queensland University of Technology (2024).