The Ideational Approach to Populism
Edited By Kirk A. Hawkins, Ryan E. Carlin, Levente Littvay, Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser
Populism is on the rise in Europe and the Americas. Scholars increasingly understand populist forces in terms of their ideas or discourse, one that envisions a cosmic struggle between the will of the common people and a conspiring elite. In this volume, we advance populism scholarship by proposing a causal theory and methodological guidelines – a research program – based on this ideational approach. This program argues that populism exists as a set of widespread attitudes among ordinary citizens, and that these attitudes lie dormant until activated by weak democratic governance and policy failure. It offers methodological guidelines for scholars seeking to measure populist ideas and test their effects. And, to ground the program empirically, it tests this theory at multiple levels of analysis using original data on populist discourse across European and US party systems; case studies of populist forces in Europe, Latin America, and the US; survey data from Europe and Latin America; and experiments in Chile, the US, and the UK. The result is a truly systematic, comparative approach that helps answer questions about the causes and effects of populism.
Contemporary US Populism in Comparative Perspective
Kirk Hawkins, Brigham Young University, Utah, Levente Littvay, Central European University, Budapest
With the victory of Donald Trump in the 2016 United States presidential election, populists have come to power in the U.S. for the first time in many years. However, U.S. political scientists have been flat-footed in their response, failing to anticipate or measure populism's impact on the campaign or to offer useful policy responses. In contrast, populism has long been an important topic of study for political scientists studying other regions, especially Latin America and Europe. The conceptual and theoretical insights of comparativist scholars can benefit Americanists, and applying their techniques can help U.S. scholars and policymakers place events in perspective.
Multilevel Structural Equation Modeling
Bruno Castanho Silva - University of Cologne, Germany
Constantin Manuel Bosancianu - Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin fuer Sozialforschung, Germany
Levente Littvay - Central European University, Hungary
Multilevel Structural Equation Modeling serves as a minimally technical overview of multilevel structural equation modeling (MSEM) for applied researchers and advanced graduate students in the social sciences. As the first book of its kind, this title is an accessible, hands-on introduction for beginners of the topic. The authors predict a growth in this area, fueled by both data availability and also the availability of new and improved software to run these models. The applied approach, combined with a graphical presentation style and minimal reliance on complex matrix algebra guarantee that this volume will be useful to social science graduate students wanting to utilize such models.