Right-wing Voters Research Articles

Right as Opposed to Wrong as Opposed to Left: The Spatial Location of "Right Parties" on the Israeli Political Map

Right as Opposed to Wrong as Opposed to LeftThe Spatial Location of “Right Parties” on the Israeli Political Map Gideon Doron (bio) Introduction Politics is a dynamic process: constantly changing directions and emphases; adjusting and readjusting to altering circumstances. People directly involved in this process relentlessly engage in a never-ending process of defining and redefining objectives and interests, of justifying and rationalizing changing modes of behavior and decision processes as opportunities arise. William Riker labeled the outcomes of this fluctuating process as the "disequilibrium of preferences."1 Seen from this perspective, the definition of a "Right" political orientation (or party, bloc, ideology) as opposed to a "Left" political orientation (or party, bloc, ideology) may merely constitute a tentative, not to say random, positioning of individuals and parties within an ever-changing, contracting or expanding, multi-dimensional, and time-dependent ideological space. Israeli politics notwithstanding: the political blocs consisting of loose groupings of ideologically similar Right-wing or Left-wing parties follow this definitional rule (or rather one should say—non-rule). Subsequently, an attempt to clarify the question of which parties belong to which political bloc often adds analytical confusion regarding actual or perceived ideological differences between the competing political parties. The research enterprise, as well, by grouping together distinct political groups along an ideological spectrum, often fails to grasp the full garment of the political messages carried out by these groups. Moreover, concepts and labels used to describe the different orientations of competing parties in Western democratic polities, such as "nationalist," "socialist," "market oriented," "security-minded," "doves," "hawks," "liberal," and "conservative," carry substantively different meanings in Israel. Over time, Israeli political [End Page 29] parties have changed their spatial positions, assumed different interpretations of their identities, added new dimensions to their platforms that are not always consistent with their previous positions, and for purposes of self-preservation and/or the desire to increase their power, have appeared with new packages of 'self-defining' elements. The purpose of this article is to introduce some order, albeit temporary and time-dependent, into the evaluation of the spatial locations of the Israeli political parties on a hypothetical right-to-left distribution that has, over the years, defined the positions of so-called right-wing voters and right-wing parties in Israel. Within this context the Herut Party (later Gahal and the Likud) the largest and leading right-wing party, is given particular attention The first part of this article explains the reasons for the analytical confusion that often prevails when political agents are defined as holding "rightist" or "leftist" positions on the political map. The key to understanding this confusion, it is argued, lies in the multidimensionality of Israeli politics. Two examples illustrate this problem. The first involves the failure to conduct a one dimension Minimum Connecting Coalition (MCC) type of analysis.2 The second relates to voters' dilemmas during the 1988 and 1992 elections.3 The second part of this article is historical in essence. It explains why Herut is placed on the right side of the political map and why this party's principal rival—Mapai (later Ma'arach and Labor)—has been placed to the left of it. Starting the review at the pre-state period, a comparison of the spatial positions of the Labor and the Likud, the only parties that separately and jointly have dominated Israeli modern politics, is presented. The article concludes with a proposal for an empirically more relevant classification of these two competing parties. The classification offered relies on three elements. The first element stresses the institutional differences between governing and opposition parties. Whereas governing parties are perceived as preservers of the prevailing political status quo, opposition parties by definition seek to promote changes in it. The second element focuses on voters' behavior as an outcome of their preference distributions across a diversity of issues, and the third on the ideological rationalization of the above differences. [End Page 30] A. The Multidimensional Space of the Israeli Polity A political space usually consists of several dimensions. Each dimension, in turn, contains substantively related elements.4 For example, the security of communities and individuals constitutes a dimension which depicts people's preferences concerning the...

A Strange Affair: The 2002 Presidential and Parliamentary Elections in France

The 2002 Elections In France Were A Gripping Drama Unfolding in four acts. Each act has to be understood as part of a whole, as each election was ultimately dependent upon the results of the first round of the presidential election on 21 April. However untypical in the context of Fifth Republican history, the first round of the presidential election strongly inf luenced the peculiar course of the subsequent contests. The outcome of the first election on the 21 April – at which the far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen won through to the second ballot against Jacques Chirac, narrowly distancing the outgoing premier Lionel Jospin – created an electric shock which reverberated around the streets of Paris and other French cities and sparked a civic mobilization without parallel since May '68. The end-result of this exceptional republican mobilization was to secure the easy (initially rather unexpected) re-election of Chirac as president at the second round two weeks later. The election of 5 May was unlike a typical second-round election. Rather than a bipolar contest pitting left and right over a choice of future governmental orientations, it was a plebiscite in favour of democracy (hence Chirac) against the far-right (Le Pen). Chirac was re-elected overwhelmingly as president, supported by at least as many leftwing as right-wing voters. This enforced plebiscite against the extreme right allowed a resurgent Jacques Chirac to claim a renewed presidential authority. At the parliamentary election of 9 and 16 June, the Fifth Republic reverted to a more traditional mode of operation, as a new ‘presidential party’, informally launched just weeks before the elections, obtained a large overall majority of seats to ‘support the President’ in time-honoured Fifth Republican tradition.

Lay theories of heroin addiction

This study examined the structure and determinants of lay people's implicit theories of heroin addiction. A questionnaire was derived from interviews with lay people about their beliefs and theories of heroin addiction and academic literature on the subject. One hundred and forty-four subjects completed the questionnaire, in which they rated 105 statements about the causes, correlates and cures of heroin addiction. The three parts of the questionnaire were individually factor analyzed and a clear, interpretable factor structure emerged for each. The factors seemed similar to explicit academic theories, but the exception was beliefs about cure, which did not show overall support for the most clinically used models. When the three factor analyses were combined into a single ‘higher-order’ factor analysis four factors emerged, labelled moralistic, psychosocial, sociocultural and drug treatment, which reflect more or less coherent views on the nature of heroin addiction. Subjects' political beliefs was the greatest (demographic and attitudinal) determinant of lay beliefs in these factors, with experience of addiction, addicts, drugs and age also highly correlated. Vote was the main determinant and best predictor of the four ‘higher-order’ structured lay theories: right-wing voters emphasizing moralistic and individualistic theory and left-wing voters supporting the psychological and societal ideas. Implications for policy and interventions to addicts of these lay theories are considered.