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.