Left-right Scale Research Articles

Left-right voting in 10thSaeima and Riigikogu elections in 2011

Distribution of parties along ideological continuum historically has been the issue of governmental accountability, has served as a competition platform and communication code between political candidates and potential voters. Debate on the framework of the left-right continuum and its impact on voting behaviour are still ongoing in the Western countries, generally recognising the split as such, and rather debating its changing nature. The aim of the paper is to highlight the left-right continuum as a meaningful notion in the research of electoral behaviour both in Latvia and Estonia according to the thesis that voters in general tend to choose a party in elections which corresponds (or lies closest) to their self-placement in the left-right continuum (Downs, 1957); and the Laponce’s thesis concerning the left-right continuum as the “political Esperanto” – a language allowing parties and voters to understand each other (Laponce, 1981). Results of this research show that although the opinion of the parties themselves and experts concerning placement of the parties along the left-right scale coincides, the left-right continuum does not serve as the “political Esperanto” between the parties and voters. Still the idea of voting for the party, which is closest to one’s own opinion, is particularly well pronounced in Latvia.

Elite Preferences in a Consolidating Democracy: The Brazilian Legislative Surveys, 1990-2009

This article examines key ideological, economic, and institutional preferences of the Brazilian political elite in the first 25 years of the country’s present democratic regime. In introducing the unified dataset of the Brazilian Legislative Surveys, we examine several crucial dimensions of politicians’ attitudes, including elite placement on a traditional left-right scale, preferences concerning the fundamental economic model, direct comparisons of the recent Cardoso and Lula governments, and orientations toward Brazil’s global and regional projection. On many of the central issues there has been attitudinal stability, but on the dimensions on which there has been notable change, nearly all of the change has been in the direction of decreasing polarization. In contrast to the experience of some neighboring countries, the Brazilian case demonstrates that the sustained practice of democracy can lead to attitudinal convergence and macropolitical stability, even when the initial political and socioeconomic conditions appear daunting.

C’est en forgeant qu'on devient forgeron? Assessing legislative productivity in Fifth Republic France

This exploratory research note theorises about and tests the factors that have affected legislative productivity in France from 1960 to 2007. The empirical model accounts for intra-parliamentary dynamics such as the parties’ ideological placement on a left-right scale, the government's seat strength, coalition governments and intensity of opposition to the majority in the National Assembly. The model also considers features unique to the Fifth Republic, such as judicial review of bills by the Constitutional Council and presidents’ ‘sacking’ of prime ministers. External factors include strikes and social movements, as well as prime ministers’ and presidents’ job approval that are posited to impact lawmaking. The results of the analysis suggest how the model developed in this research may be extended to future analyses of parliamentary activity in the Fifth Republic.

Conceptualizing Left and Right in comparative politics

Despite the importance of the Left-Right dimension in comparative politics, establishing an index that captures this dimension in both a theoretically and empirically sound manner remains an ongoing challenge for political scientists. Having reviewed existing attempts to construct measures for the Left-Right dimension, and having concluded that they are merely inductive and problematic from a methodological perspective, this article proposes a deductive approach based on Norberto Bobbio’s theory of Left and Right and suggests a combination with statistically robust measures drawn from the data provided by the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP). The fundamental features of the proposed index are: first, Left and Right are theoretical concepts which should be accounted for in the empirical analysis. Second, the Left-Right dimension is time- and country-specific. Third, different statements have different meanings on a Left-Right scale. Fourth, the importance of the Left-Right dimension itself varies over time and across countries. Finally, the data have to be analysed adequately.

The Importance of Actor Cleavages in Negotiating the European Constitution

This paper aims to explore government preferences and cleavages in the bargaining process on the European Constitution, across the range of 25 EU member states. The study focuses on preferences concerning socioeconomic policymaking and explores whether divisions can be discerned between preferences held by actors according to locations on the left-right policy scale, actors in older as compared to newer EU states, net EU budget positions, domestic rates of support for European integration, and smaller as compared to larger states. The analysis also controls for possible external effects, such as recent domestic macroeconomic developments. Negotiations on the European Constitution are found to be determined less by general transnational left-right divisions, but cleavages according to the length of EU membership and the size of EU member states.

The Impact of Religion on the Space of Competition: The Dutch Case

AbstractThe political practice of consociational democracies to take religion off the political agenda has led to the idea that religious issues only play a marginal role in the left-right ideological framework. This study demonstrates that religion has more than a marginal effect on the left-right placement of parties and thus on the space of competition. The analysis shows that voters for secular parties and voters for religious parties have different motives and beliefs on which they base the orderings of parties on the left-right scale. In other words, each group of voters defines its own left-right scale. These different left-right scales are individually single-peaked but there is no collective transitivity of orderings of parties. The intransitivity is a clear violation of Downs' condition for placing all parties on a single line in a manner agreed upon by all voters. Instead of having one left-right dimension as some sort of “super issue,” there are at least two left-right scales, one for voters for secular parties and one for voters for religious parties.

Capturing Government Policy on the Left-Right Scale: Evidence from the United Kingdom, 1956-2006

The left-right scheme is the most widely used and parsimonious representation of political competition. Yet, long time series of the left-right position of governments are sparse. Existing methods are of limited use in dynamic settings due to insufficient time points which hinders the proper specification of time-series regressions. This article analyses legislative speeches in order to construct an annual left-right policy variable for Britain from 1956 to 2006. Using a recently developed content analysis tool, known as Wordscores, it is shown that speeches yield valid and reliable estimates for the left-right position of British government policy. Long time series such as the one proposed in this article are vital to building dynamic macro-level models of politics. This measure is cross-validated with four independent sources: (1) it compares well to expert surveys; (2) a rightward trend is found in post-war British government policy; (3) Conservative governments are found to be more right wing in their policy outputs than Labour governments; (4) conventional accounts of British post-war politics support the pattern of government policy movement on the left-right scale.

Empirical Results on the Predictive Power of Basic Personal Values and Core Political Attitudes in Turkish Politics

Using data from a 2009 survey of electoral tendencies, we investigate the predictive power of Turkish people’s basic personal values and core political attitudes in explaining their political choices. Through logit analysis and the comparison of the sub-sample means of the available variables, we examine the characteristics of the voters of the two major parties of the political scene, namely the Justice and Development Party and the Republican People’s Party. Our main finding is that in the presence of the more conventional determinants of party choice such as education and the placement on the left-right scale, values and attitudes contribute little to the prediction of the choice between the two parties in question.

What if Robin Hood is a social conservative? How the political response to increasing inequality depends on party polarization

This paper examines how political competition on a non-economic dimension affects redistribution. More specifically, the paper argues that a high degree of party polarization on a non-economic policy dimension modifies the political response to growing income inequalities. Data from the World Values Survey and the Comparative Manifesto Project are employed to show that party polarization on a traditional moral dimension of politics is associated with a weaker relationship between income and subjective position on the Left-Right scale. Because party polarization is associated with a weaker relationship between income and leftism, the paper claims that the political response to increases in inequality will be weaker in polarized countries. The empirical analysis using redistribution data from the Luxembourg Income Study demonstrates that the positive effect of increases in market inequality on redistribution is lower when party polarization on the non-economic dimension is high.

The Ideological Congruence Controversy

Focusing on the left-right scale as a summary measure of citizens’ and representatives’ preferences, a growing body of literature has used a variety of approaches and data in measuring positions of citizens and representatives. The most recent studies, contrary to previous ones, show no significant difference between ideological congruence in single member district (SMD) and proportional representation (PR) electoral systems. This article examines the major alternative measurement approaches and data sets, finding that recent results are due to differences in time period, not differences in measurement approach. The associations between election rules and ideological congruence are relatively robust to various measurement approaches, as are estimations of the causal processes shaping ideological congruence. The association between election rules and congruence has declined in the past decade, as shown by all three major approaches, due primarily to convergence toward the median of plurality parties in the SMD elections.

How Partisan is the Press? Multiple Measures of Media Slant

We employ several different approaches to estimate the political position of Australian media outlets, relative to federal parliamentarians. First, we use parliamentary mentions to code over 100 public intellectuals on a left-right scale. We then estimate slant by using the number of mentions that each public intellectual receives in each media outlet. Second, we have independent raters separately code front-page election stories and headlines. Third, we tabulate the number of electoral endorsements that newspapers give to each side of politics in federal elections. Overall, we find that the Australian media are quite centrist, with very few outlets being statistically distinguishable from the middle of Australian politics. It is possible that this is due to the lack of competition in the Australian media market. To the extent that we can separate content slant from editorial slant, we find some evidence that editors are more partisan than journalists.

Is Left-Right from Circleland? The Issue Basis of Citizens' Ideological Self-Placement

The left-right scale is the concept most often used to describe political actors’ positions. However, there is strong evidence that electoral competition in Western Europe is structured by two dimensions: economic and cultural. How can a single dimension be sufficient to orient oneself in a two-dimensional political space? This paper suggests that the left-right scale corresponds to a curve in a two-dimensional political space rather than to a straight line. Dimensionality is thus ambiguous, which is a situation analogous to Weisberg’s concept of ‘Circleland’. This paper analyses the relations between citizens’ left-right position and issue preferences in five West European countries. The findings strongly support the paper’s hypothesis by showing non-linear relations between voters’ left–right position and issue preferences.

The Patterns of Party Polarization in East Asia

The alignment of parties within a party system shapes the nature of electoral competition, the process of representation, and potentially the legitimacy of the system. This article describes the distribution of parties and the levels of party polarization in the party systems of East Asian democracies. We examine the public's perceptions of party positions on a left-right scale to map the pattern of party competition. The evidence is based on two waves of surveys from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems. We describe considerable variation in the polarization of Asian party systems, which has direct implications for the clarity of party choice and the behavior of voters. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of our findings.

Measuring Left-Right Political Orientation: The Choice of Response Format

Although left-right items are a standard tool of public opinion research, there is little agreement about the optimal response format. Two disputes can be identified in the literature: (1) whether to provide respondents with a small or large number of answer categories, and (2) whether or not to administer the response scale including a midpoint. This study evaluates the performance of the 101, 11, and 10-point left-right scales, which directly speak to the two disputed aspects of measuring the left-right dimension. Drawing on data from a split ballot multitrait multimethod experiment carried out in a methodological pretest to the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), the analysis shows that the choice of a response format makes a difference in terms of data quality: the 11-point left-right scale produces the highest validity of left-right data closely followed by the 10-point scale. Moreover, an application from electoral research illustrates that the choice of response formats affects substantive interpretations about the nature of the left-right dimension. Since all three scales perform about equally well in terms of reliability and the ease of administration, the findings suggest that the 11-point left-right scale should be used in survey research.

Class and Political Preferences in Europe: A Multilevel Analysis of Trends Over Time

This article analyzes trends over time in the relationship between social class and political preferences in EU countries. Multilevel models and logistic regression techniques are employed to examine Eurobarometer data for thirteen nations between 1976 and 2003. In the comparative research addressing the issue of long-term changes in class politics, class voting is the most common indicator. Instead of focussing on electoral behaviour, we analyze data on respondent's self-placement on a left-right scale. We argue that this indicator presents some relevant advantages when large-scale comparisons across time and space are involved. Our results point to a prevailing stability over time of the association between class position and political preferences.

Relevant factors for the voting decision in the 2002 presidential election: an analysis of the ESEB (Brazilian electoral study) data

The article investigates some of the most relevant factors for the voting de- cision in the 2002 presidential election by testing some of the main hypotheses about electoral behaviour in the country by means of logistic regression analyses based on data from the ESEB (Brazilian Electoral Study), a post-electoral survey conducted on a national sample of voters. In the models, taken as a whole, politi- cal opinions did not have much weight in the voting decision. Furthermore, they are unable to “explain” a very large share of voters’ positioning on a left-right scale or on a scale of voters’ “party sentiments”. All these “political” variables taken as a whole, in turn, “explain” only part of the evaluations that voters make of the government’s performance. The analysis shows that Brazilian voters’ voting deci- sion seems rather varied, since some variables were shown to be relevant to “ex- plain” the vote for a candidate, but not for the others. The variables shown to be more frequent (for all four candidates analysed) and with more considerable weight were: voters’ religion, their “party sentiments”, their positioning on a left-right scale, the evaluations made of the then current government (in actual fact impor- tant only for the vote for Serra, the government’s candidate) and the candidates’ attributes (especially “reliability” and “preparedness/competence”).

Does Proportional Representation Foster Closer Congruence Between Citizens and Policy Makers?

This article assesses the claim that proportional representation (PR) fosters a closer correspondence between the views of citizens and the positions of the government. The study uses the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems data set and compares respondents’ self-placements on a Left-Right scale with placements of cabinet parties’ locations in 31 election studies. The authors argue that PR has two contradictory consequences. On one hand, PR leads to more parties and more choice for voters; but these parties are less centrist, and this increases the overall distance between voters and parties. On the other hand, PR increases the likelihood of coalition governments; this pulls the government toward the center of the policy spectrum and reduces the distance between the government and voters. These two contradictory effects of PR wash out, and the net overall impact of PR on congruence is nil. The data support the authors’ interpretation.

Issues and Party Preferences in Hungary

The article compares proximity and Rabinowitz/Macdonald directional models of issue voting according to their ability to predict preferences for the six Hungarian parliamentary parties. It was assumed that in a relatively new democracy directional models should perform better, since voters would have more difficulty recognizing the exact positions of parties on different issue dimensions. Furthermore, it was assumed that political sophistication would influence the observed relationships. The analysis is based on a Hungarian national random sample, and an additional survey of members of the Hungarian parliament. The data include voters’ and representatives’ expressed preferences concerning eight specific policy issues, as well as their positions on the left-right dimension. Although voters’ issue preferences appear as relatively weak predictors of vote choice, the directional model generally outperformed the proximity model, the difference being greater in the less politically sophisticated group. In addition, the vote is better explained by positions on the left-right scale than on specific issues.

Minimal supersymmetric Pati-Salam theory: Determination of physical scales

We systematically study the minimal supersymmetric Pati-Salam theory, paying special attention to the unification constraints. We find that the SU(4)_c scale M_c and the Left-Right scale M_R lie in the range 10^{10} GeV < M_c < 10^{14} GeV, 10^{3} GeV < M_R <10^{10} GeV (with single-step breaking at 10^{10} GeV), giving a potentially accessible scale of parity breaking. The theory includes the possibility of having doubly-charged supermultiplets at the supersymmetry breaking scale; color octet states with mass of order M_R^2/M_c; magnetic monopoles of intermediate mass that do not conflict with cosmology, and a 'clean' (type I) form for the see-saw mechanism of neutrino mass.

Challenges to established parties: The effects of party system features on the electoral fortunes of anti‐political‐establishment parties

Abstract. The rise of parties that challenge the political establishment has recently sparked the interest of political scientists. Scholars have identified several factors that lie behind the success of such anti‐political‐establishment parties. Most empirical studies, however, have concentrated their attention either on the importance of electoral system features or on the effects of socioeconomic conditions. This article focuses instead on the role that party system factors play in the electoral success of these parties. Using three data sets from studies conducted in three different time periods it tests two seemingly contradictory hypotheses. On the one hand, the claim that where the established parties have converged toward centrist positions and thus fail to present voters with an identity that is noticeably different from their established competitors, the electorate will be more susceptible to the markedly different policies put forward by anti‐political‐establishment parties. On the other hand, there is the argument that these parties profit more from increasing polarization and the subsequent enlargement of the political space than from a convergence toward the median. The results of the analyses show that anti‐political‐establishment parties generally profit from a close positioning of the establishment parties on the left‐right scale. However, there is no consistent support for the notion that party system polarization by itself is associated with an increase in the support for parties that challenge the political establishment.