The predictive power of the left-right self-placement scale for the policy positions of voters and parties

The left-right self-placement scale is often used in political science as a proxy for the policy positions of voters and parties. Yet studies have suggested that, for voters, this relation is dependent on education level. These studies were, however, hampered by data limitations and restricted statistical analyses. In addition, the extent to which the relation between the left-right self-placement scale and policy positions differs for parties and voters has not been explored. This article looks at the differential relation between left-right self-placement and policy positions for voters with different education levels on an integrated dataset containing over 50 voter and party policy positions. It is found that the left-right self-placement scale is a much better predictor for the policy positions of parties than it is for the policy preferences of voters. Robustness checks show that neither the saliency of the policy positions nor their complexity moderates these findings.     

Value orientations, political conflicts and left-right identification: A comparative study

Abstract. Have the meanings of 'left' and 'right' changed during the last twenty years? In this article the ten-point left-right self-placement scale is correlated with three central value orientations (religious/secular, economic left-right and materialist/post-materialist values) to examine whether associations between these value orientations and the self-placement scale have changed from the early 1970s to 1990. Four theories about the changing meaning of the left-right language are presented. These theories about the irrelevance, persistence, transformation and pluralisation of the meaning of left and right are tested by using Eurobarometer data from eight West European countries and the second wave of the European Value Study from 1990. The data provide strong support for pluralisation theory. Left-right semantics have an impressive absorptive power, describing an over-arching spatial dimension capable of incorporating many types of conflict. Left-right semantics are significantly correlated with religious/secular values, remain highly correlated with the dominant industrial value orientations (economic left-right values), and are increasingly associated with materialist/post-materialist value orientations. The new meanings of left and right are added to the old meanings.     

Is the Left-Right Scale a Valid Measure of Ideology?

In order to measure ideology, political scientists heavily rely on the so-called left-right scale. Left and right are, however, abstract political concepts and may trigger different associations among respondents. If these associations vary systematically with other variables this may induce bias in the empirical study of ideology. We illustrate this problem using a unique survey that asked respondents open-ended questions regarding the meanings they attribute to the concepts “left” and “right”. We assess and categorize this textual data using topic modeling techniques. Our analysis shows that variation in respondents’ associations is systematically related to their self-placement on the left-right scale and also to variables such as education and respondents’ cultural background (East vs. West Germany). Our findings indicate that the interpersonal comparability of the left-right scale across individuals is impaired. More generally, our study suggests that we need more research on how respondents interpret various abstract concepts that we regularly use in survey questions.     

Change and continuity in the ideological gender gap a longitudinal analysis of left-right self-placement in OECD countries

When asked to place themselves on a left-right scale, men and women tend to take different positions. Over time, however ideological gender differences have taken a different form. While women were traditionally more right-leaning than men, from around the mid-1990s onwards they have been found to take positions to the left of men. Using an originally constructed dataset that includes information on the left-right self-placement of more than 2.5 million respondents in 36 OECD countries between 1973 and 2018, I empirically verify how the ideological gender gap has evolved since. The results show, first, that while women have shifted to the left since the late 1970s, the pace of this change has strongly diminished since the late 1990s. Second, there is important between-country variation in the size of the reversal in the ideological gender gap. Third, with the exception of the Silent generation and the Baby-boomers, newer generations of women have not taken more left-leaning positions than generations before them.     

Left-right perceptions,partisan preferences,electoral participation,and partisan choice in France

An analysis based on survey data shows that electoral participation at the second ballot in France can be accounted for by partisan preferences but not by left-right perceptions of party locations. This finding runs counter to the work of Rosenthal and Sen (1973), who validated a spatial model of participation at the second ballot employing left-right perceptions and partisan preferences interchangeably. Because they use aggregate data, Rosenthal and Sen (1973) are restricted in two ways that, operating interactively, lead them to an unwarranted conclusion concerning the power of left-right perceptions. Later work by Rosenthal and Sen (1977) indicating that left-right perceptions can account for shifts in partisan choice between the two ballots by voters who have decided to participate is confirmed, but partisan preferences account even better for second-ballot choices. Left-right perceptions and partisan sympathies are related, but discrete partisan attitudes are a more powerful factor than left-right perceptions in French second-ballot electoral behavior.     

What Are the Sources of Political Parties’ Issue Ownership? Testing Four Explanations at the Individual Level

Political parties’ issue ownership—their perceived competence in handling issues and problems—is a major ingredient explaining voting behavior. Yet, our understanding of the sources of issue ownership is limited. This study is the first to bring together and evaluate four different explanations of voters’ perceptions of parties’ issue ownership: partisanship, attitudes, perceived real-world developments, and constituency-based ownership. Using novel measures implemented in a national survey, we show that all four sources exert independent, if varying, influences on voters’ issue ownership perceptions. Even though voters’ partisanship tends to dominate issue ownership perceptions, attitudes and performance evaluations also matter. Moreover, the hitherto mostly neglected constituency based component of ownership has a substantial, independent influence on ownership perceptions. These findings indicate that issue ownership is more than merely an expression of partisanship and attitudes.     

Measuring issue-salience in voters' preferences

We provide a new approach to the measurement of issue salience that explains how the salience of an issue among voters and the position of the parties on a given issue interact to each other and determine vote choices and aggregate election results. Analyzing the spatial model of voting, we show how voting probabilities can be estimated by a multinomial logit regression where the ideal policy locations of voters on each issue dimensions are independent variables, and where no individual specific perception about the location of the political parties is used in the regression. The pieces of survey information that are used to calculate issue-salience are: i) specific position of respondents on each issue dimension, ii) vote choice, and iii) the policy position of parties on each issue dimension, which is measured by the mean perceived position. Rather, only an aggregate estimate of party positions on issues is needed. To demonstrate the mechanics and value of the approach, we analyze regional elections in the Basque province of Spain. In that region, we find that the left-right dimension is about two times more salient than nationalism. The nationalism issue is, however, more divisive than the left-right issue. This shows that the issue that voters care more about, may not coincide with the issue on which the parties offer more distinctive policies.     

Belief systems concerning the environment: The general public,attentive publics,and state legislators

This paper examines multiple characteristics of belief systems among people at different levels in the policy process using the same measures in the same time period. More specifically, it analyzes belief systems concerning the environment among the general public, several attentive publics, and state legislators in Idaho. The following belief system characteristics are probed: horizontal constraint among specific issue beliefs, and between general environmental orientations and party and ideology; vertical constraint between the general environmental orientation and specific issue beliefs; and the role of general orientations in screening incoming information. Legislators are more likely to connect their environmental beliefs to partisan and ideological orientations. However, attentive and general public respondents do exhibit substantial constraintwithin the environmental issue domain; individual self-placement on a preservationist-developmentalist dimension appears to provide a cohering force in orientations to the environment. While legislators exhibit greater belief connections with general political orientations, the results also suggest an order in the public's beliefs about the environment and in the nature of conflict over the environment.     

Losing Touch? The Political Representativeness of Swedish Parties, 1985–1994

Political parties are often said to be in decline. In Sweden, the major parties have lost significant amounts of members and activists in recent years. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether the decline in participatory linkage via parties has been accompanied by a representative decline. Using data from the Swedish Election Studies and Parliamentary Studies, average self-placement on the left-right schema is compared between Members of Parliament, party activists, party members and voters. There is no evidence of a decline in the political representativeness of the parliamentarians. There is, however, some evidence that members and activists have become radicalized compared to the voters. This is particularly true of the Social Democrats, and also to some extent in the Moderate Party. Thus, while there is no general decline in the representative linkage provided by the Swedish parties, there is some justification to speak of a representational decline for the Swedish parties as membership organizations.     

Spatial voting in non-partisan cities: A case study

In spatial voting theory, voters choose the candidate whose policy preferences are most like their own. This requires that (a) voters and candidates have policy preferences that can be meaningfully summarized in terms of low-dimensional “ideal points” on a left-right scale; (b) voters are able to discern, either directly or through relevant cues, the ideal points of the candidates who are running for office; and (c) voters incorporate this information into the choices they make at the ballot box. Perhaps more than in any other elections, it is not clear that any of these requirements are met in non-partisan municipal elections: policy preferences may not be ideologically structured, information may be inadequate, and voters may choose candidates for reasons other than ideology. This makes non-partisan municipal elections an especially hard test for spatial voting theory. Using novel data from both municipal candidates and eligible voters in a major non-partisan municipal election in Canada, we show that municipal policy attitudes are ideologically structured and that these municipal policy ideal points are strongly related to mayoral and council vote choice. Thus, despite the institutional and informational obstacles, spatial voting can play an important role in non-partisan municipal elections.     

Building policy scales from manifesto data: A referential content validity approach

Researchers using scales based on MRG/CMP/MARPOR's manifesto dataset face a bewildering array of different scales. The validation of these scales has tended to focus on external, convergent validity. The actual content of these scales has received less attention and the choice of the manifesto components which make up these scales has often been conducted by either opaque or questionable methods. This article develops a critique of existing methods of component selection and proposes a new method of component selection based on the covariance of components with ‘naïve’ provisional scales, which are refined in an iterative process. It uses this method to construct a set of comparable one (general left–right) and two (economic and social) dimensional scales – filling a gap in the existing body of scales that will allow researchers to compare dimensionality across models without inadvertently comparing different assumptions that underlie the construction of the scales.     

The Correlates of Discord: Identity,Issue Alignment,and Political Hostility in Polarized America

The American public remains largely moderate on many issues, but incivility and hostility are rife in American politics. In this paper, I argue that the alignment of multiple issue attitudes along the traditional ideological spectrum helps explain the asymmetrical rise in negative political affect. I introduce belief congruence theory as a supplemental theoretical framework to social identity theory. Cross-sectional data reveal a significant association between issue alignment and negative out-party affect that is neither mediated nor moderated by partisan identity. A first-difference approach using two panel studies then addresses potential heterogeneity bias by testing a change-on-change model within individuals. Both panels, which are from different time periods, covering different issues, reveal significant associations between issue alignment and outgroup dislike. In contrast, partisan identity was only significantly associated with ingroup affect. This work suggests that cross-cutting issue preferences could help attenuate political hostility and reiterate the need to reconsider the role of issue-based reasoning in polarized America.     

Left-right political scales

Abstract Although left-right scales are an inherent feature of much cross-national research, they have necessarily been created on a somewhat ad hoc basis, since the empirical foundation for valid cross-national scales rarely exists. This paper seeks to provide such a foundation by using judgements of party ideological position which are both explicit and non-idiosyncratic across a wide range of countries. These judgements derive from a so-called 'expert' survey of leading political scientists in Western Europe, the USA, and elsewhere. It is our hope that the scales which we derive in this way may prove useful in a wide variety of contexts of comparative research.     

Issue Attitudes and Survey Continuity across Interview Mode in the 2000 NES

Nathan J. Kelly Department of Political Science, University at Buffalo, The State University of New York, Buffalo, NY 14260-4120 e-mail: nkelly{at}buffalo.edu H. Whitt Kilburn Department of Political Science, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3265 e-mail: wkilburn{at}email.unc.edu Can researchers draw consistent inferences about the U.S. public'sissue attitudes when studying survey results from both the in-personand telephone interview modes of the 2000 National ElectionStudies (NES) survey? We address this question through an analysiscontrasting the distribution of issue attitudes across modesin the dual sample design of the 2000 NES. We find clear differencesacross mode even when applying a method devised by the NES toimprove comparability by recoding issue attitude scales fromthe in-person mode. We present an alternative method of recodingthese scales, which substantially improves comparability betweenmodes. Through an analysis of the covariance structure of theissues and simple models of vote choice, we discuss the implicationsof the results for the study of issue attitudes in the 2000NES.     

Does Political Information Matter? An Experimental Test Relating to Party Positions on Europe

This article focuses on whether the provision of 'objectively' correct information to voters about where parties stand on an issue affects their placement of the parties, and ultimately their own position, on that issue. Classic theories of how mass publics make voting decisions assume that voters are able relatively accurately to place themselves and the parties on various issue dimensions. While these assumptions have been challenged, it is generally assumed that the provision of new information makes voters' placements more informed. We explicitly test this idea using a survey experiment focusing on one political issue – European integration. In the experiment, all respondents were twice asked to place the three main British parties and themselves on a bipolar scale of European integration. This was done towards the beginning, and then at the end of the survey. Most respondents were also given information on the 'informed' positions of the parties, derived from expert survey placement. Our analyses indicate that individuals' placements did change, and the tendency was related to both political sophistication and the inherent difficulty of placing the party. Only less sophisticated voters updated their placements, and these changes are concentrated on the placement of the Labour party, where the elite stance on Europe has been more conflicted. For all respondents we do not detect any corresponding changes in self-placement that would be congruent with 'cueing' effects.     

Measuring and explaining the complexity of left-right perceptions of political parties

This paper examines the dimensional complexity in voter perceptions of party left-right locations. Most of the theoretical and empirical research on electoral politics treats left-right party locations as based on a one-dimensional ideological spectrum. We measure variation in the complexity of voters’ perceptions of left-right party locations and demonstrate that the dimensionality varies widely. First, we generate a measurement of the complexity of perceived left-right party placements and apply this to data from the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). This measure, based on the dimensional fits of scaled party placements, allows us to compare left-right complexity cross-nationally. We then examine several possible correlates of this cross-national variation, finding relationships with political polarization, party nationalization, and democratic experience. We conclude with a comparison of left-right complexity to the concept of issue dimensionality using data from the European Election Study (EES).     

A directional model of candidate evaluations in the 2016 presidential election

The 2016 U.S. presidential election provides an interesting setting for testing the directional theory of issue voting. But, when modeled using the standard approach, using the seven-point issue scales in the 2016 ANES, it is not clear whether the directional model provides any additional leverage over the more traditional proximity model. In order to get around this impasse, I examine candidate evaluations rather than issue scales. Doing so enables a direct test of directional theory against proximity theory. The empirical results show that the proximity model does not outperform the directional model. Instead, the latter outperforms the former because the directional model produces not only a succinct graphical representation of the electorate's candidate evaluations but also an explanation for the relative spatial positions of the candidates.     

Is gender on the 'new agenda'?

Abstract. This paper examines the politicization of gender inequality through a cross-national analysis of attitudes towards inequality between men and women. The data were obtained from national surveys in the United States, Britain, West Germany, Australia and Italy. In all of these countries, attitudes towards gender inequality were found to be associated with the 'left-right' cleavage over economic inequality and redistribution, but they were unrelated to 'new politics' issues. It was also found that attitudes towards gender inequality were more closely integrated into the left-right cleavage in those countries where there was greater awareness of gender issues, and that they had very little net impact on partisanship. Thus high levels of awareness of gender inequality are not associated with the emergence of a new cross-cutting political cleavage. It is concluded that inequality of opportunity between men and women does not constitute part of a new politics agenda, nor does it cross-cut other sources of political interests. It is more plausibly seen as a new element of the well-established left-right cleavage. Consequently, it leaves the structure of political divisions relatively intact.     

Race,Sophistication, and White Opinion on Government Spending

The conventional wisdom in public opinion research suggests that the white public views government spending as a single race-coded issue. This article develops an alternative theory that rests on two propositions. First, the white public sees government spending not as a single issue, but rather, as two distinct issues: spending on the deserving poor and spending on the undeserving poor. Second, political sophistication strengthens the impact racial stereotypes have on attitudes toward spending on the undeserving poor, and it does not affect the relationship between stereotypes and attitudes toward spending on the deserving poor. These hypotheses are tested using data from the 1996 and 1992 NES surveys. The empirical results provide strong support for both propositions.