Data

We have collected two waves of the Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey. We offer two datasets for public use. The 2018 POPPA data is the first POPPA wave. The 2023 POPPA data includes the second POPPA wave as well as the first POPPA wave, with some minor adjustments (see Codebook).

2023 Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey

The 2023 data (Wave 1 and Wave 2) is now publicly available on Harvard Dataverse: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RMQREQ

The 2023 wave of POPPA contains builds on the 2018 wave. The principal motivation for the expert survey is to provide a better understanding of key party characteristics related to populism and political representation. POPPA 2023 follows the methodological approach of the first wave, building on the multidimensional, continuous, and comprehensive approach for capturing populism. The multidimensional approach refers to the use of five sub-dimensions of populism to produce an aggregate measure of populism. These sub-dimensions operationalize the ideational approach of populism. The continuous approach refers to the use of a continuous scale which measures degrees of populism. Measuring populism along a continuous scale implies that political parties are more or less populist and that they cannot be classified as simply populist or not populist. The comprehensive approach of POPPA provides a measure for every relevant party in parliament across European democracies, not only those that are widely considered to be populist. The comprehensive nature of the data allows researchers to derive populism scores for all relevant parties in these European countries in 2018 and 2023. Whereas wave 1 covers of 249 parties in 28 countries, wave 2 provides a measure of populism for 312 parties in 31 countries. Wave 2 was fielded between January 25, 2023 and May 25, 2023.

We provide the following data files and folders in the Harvard Dataverse repository:

Files in Main Folder:

  1. README.txt
  2. codebook.html
  3. POPPA_Replication.Rproj
  4. README_replication.Rmd
  5. README_replication.html

Folder: final_data

  1. 1, poppa1.rds
  2. 2, poppa2.RDS
  3. poppa_integrated-stata.tab [Original file is a .dta file]
  4. poppa_integrated.rds
  5. poppa_integrated-csv.tab [Original file is a .csv file]

Note: The abbreviation for National Alliance (Latvia, POPPA ID: 3104) is “NA.” Consider this when loading the data.

Folder: rcode

  1. cleaning_rawdata.R
  2. combine_waves.R
  3. expert_dataset.R
  4. master_replication.R
  5. party_dataset.R

Folder: original_data

DUE TO THE EMBARGO ON A NUMBER OF VARIABLES, THESE DATASETS ARE NOT AVAILABLE AT THE MOMENT.

  1. df_list.rds
  2. party_family_labels.csv
  3. POPPA_List_of_parties_2018.xlsx
  4. POPPA_List_of_parties_2022.xlsx
  5. surveys_poppa2023.rds

Folder: stata_dofiles

  1. POPPA – Variable Names and Labels.do

Instructions for Using the Data:

There are two ways to use the data:

  1. Download the data in the file format of choice.
  2. You can also run the README_replication.Rmd file in R Markdown. This file contains the replication code and can be used to regenerate the data.

Note: DUE TO THE EMBARGO, THE RMARKDOWN FILE CANNOT BE RUN AT THE MOMENT.

To run the R Markdown file, do the following:

  1. Download the README_replication.Rmd file
  2. Download the necessary data from the “original_data”” folder
  3. Download the rcode
  4. Execute the README_replication.Rmd file

Citation

When using the POPPA 2023 dataset, please cite both the dataset on Harvard Dataverse and the working paper:

  • Zaslove, Andrej; Meijers, Maurits; Huber, Robert, 2024, “Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey 2023 (POPPA)”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/RMQREQ, Harvard Dataverse, V1
  • Zaslove, A., Meijers, M. J., & Huber, R. A. (2024, November 19). The State of Populism: Introducing the 2023 Wave of the Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey. SocArXiv https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/9wmjb

2018 Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey

The 2018 Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey (POPPA) dataset measures positions and attitudes of 250 parties on key attributes related to populism, political style, party ideology, and party organization in 28 European countries. The expert survey was fielded between April 2018 and July 2018 to 294 country-experts. 

We provide the following data files:

  • party_means:
    This file contains the mean expert judgments per political party.
  • party_medians:
    This file contains the median expert judgments per political party.
  • expert-level:
    This file contains the expert judgments per political party on expert level.

Citation

When using the dataset, please cite both the dataset on Harvard Dataverse and the article in Comparative Political Studies:

  • Meijers, Maurits; Zaslove, Andrej, 2020, “Populism and Political Parties Expert Survey 2018 (POPPA)”, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/8NEL7B, Harvard Dataverse.
  • Meijers, M. J., & Zaslove, A. (2021). Measuring Populism in Political Parties: Appraisal of a New Approach. Comparative Political Studies, 54(2), 372–407. https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414020938081

Acknowledgment:
The POPPA expert survey was conducted by dr. Maurits Meijers and dr. Andrej Zaslove. We are grateful for the amazing research assistance by Margot Daris, Loran de Hollander and Lars Stevenson. We could not have done this project without them. In addition, we would like to thank Victor Ellenbroek and Benthe van Wanrooij for their research assistance. The POPPA team gratefully acknowledges funding from Radboud University and from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) [Grant: M. Meijers, VI.Veni.191R.018].