Political orientation in youth beyond the left-right divide: testing a three-factor model of political orientation and its relatedness to personal values

Abstract

ABSTRACT The utility of the left-right dimension of political orientation, including among youth, has been questioned recently. Moreover, a sizeable share of young voters in Slovenia has a hard time describing their political orientation. In present research we thus explored whether a multi-dimensional model of social, economic and international dimension, could be better suited for describing young people's political orientations. In addition, as values precede political stances, we explored the relatedness of personal values with proposed dimensions of political orientation and whether the predictive power of regression models containing control background variables could be improved by their inclusion. We used FES Youth Study Southeast Europe 2018/19 data of 1,015 14-29-year-old Slovenians. The three dimensions exhibited good fit to the data and were relatively independent of the left-right placements, offering valuable additional insight into political thinking of youth. Moreover, the values were predictive of scores on all three dimensions over and beyond the included control variables, and shares of explained variances were higher than those with the left-right dimension. While the study has some limitations, findings suggest that a multi-dimensional approach to political orientation could be beneficial in research dealing with the aspects of the ever-changing political and social landscape.