Populist attitudes toward politics and science among university students from the UNC'S professional school of sociology

Abstract

This study analyzed populist attitudes toward politics and science among university sociology students, using the ideational approach that conceptualizes populism as an ideology that divides society between virtuous people and corrupt elites. The scales developed by Akkerman for political populism and Mede for scientific populism were administered to 141 students at the National University of Cajamarca via a self-administered questionnaire on Google Forms. Descriptive analyses revealed moderate levels of political populism (M = 48.4, SD = 5.11) and moderate-low levels of scientific populism (M = 23.9, SD = 3.48). Normality tests indicated non-normal distributions, justifying the use of non-parametric statistics. Spearman's correlation showed a moderate positive association between both constructs (ρ = .253, p = .003), confirming common but dimensionally differentiated ideational relationships. Gender analyses revealed no significant differences in any dimension of populism, suggesting similar attitudinal patterns among male and female students, with higher scores among male students. Kruskal-Wallis tests did not identify differences by academic year, suggesting attitudinal stability during university education. The instruments demonstrated satisfactory reliability (α = .877 political populism; α = .822 scientific populism). The findings confirm the applicability of the dual ideational model in Latin American university contexts, showing that training in social research methodology reduces susceptibility to scientific populist narratives without substantially modifying pre- existing political orientations. The absence of changes per academic year challenges expectations about the democratizing impact of higher education, indicating that populist attitudes are formed during primary political socialization and remain considerably stable during academic training.