Left–right ideology as a dimension of identification and of competition^*

Abstract

There is some controversy about the dimensionality of the left–right (LR) distinction. Some authors argue for unidimensionality (LR structured by socio-economic issues). Other authors concede that socio-economic issues are of fundamental importance in shaping the LR divide, but nevertheless argue for multidimensionality. Considering these controversies, we define our two major goals: to test the dimensionality of LR voting alignments among the mass public in 21 countries at the individual level, and to test the differentiation of the dimensionality of the LR divide as a ‘dimension of identification’ and as a ‘dimension of competition’. Our main findings are as follows. First, as ‘dimension of identification’, LR voting has a multidimensional character: it is anchored in multiple sets of values orientations, both economic and non-economic. Second, the same cannot be said when we discuss it as a ‘dimension of political competition’: LR party-system polarization only has a significant and positive impact on left–right value voting for socio-economic values.

Notes

^*The author would like to thank Inês Lima for her assistance in data analysis; and both Carlos Cunha and Stewart Lloyd-Jones for revising the English.

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^7. N. Bobbio, Left and Right: The Significance of a Political Distinction (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1997), pp. 72–79.

^8. Nöel and Thérien, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 44.

^9. R. Inglehart, ‘The changing structure of political cleavages in Western society’, in R. J. Dalton, S. C. Flanagan and J. E. Alt (Eds) Electoral Change in Advanced Industrial Democracies: Realignment or Dealignment? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 25–69; O. Knutsen, ‘The partisan and the value-based components of left-right self-placement: A comparative study’, International Political Science Review,18 (1997), pp. 191–225; Dalton, op. cit., Ref. 2; A. Freire, ‘Party polarization and citizens’ left-right orientations’, Party Politics,14(2) (2008), pp. 189–209; Freire and Kivistik, op. cit., Ref. 2.

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^11. H. Kitschelt, Z. Mansfeldova, R. Markowski and G. Toka, Post-Communist Party Systems: Continuity and Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 289.

^12. The concepts of ‘dimension of identification’ and ‘dimension of competition’, which will be developed below, are taken from G. Sani and G. Sartori, ‘Polarization, fragmentation and competition in Western democracies’, in H. Daalder and P. Mair (Eds) Western European Party Systems: Continuity and Change (London: Routledge, 1983), pp. 307–340. See also Kitschelt, Mansfeldova, Markowski and Toka, op. cit., Ref. 11, pp. 258–259 and 289.

^13. S. M. Lipset and S. Rokkan, ‘Cleavage structures, party systems, and voter alignments: An introduction’, in S. M. Lipset and S. Rokkan (Eds) Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives (New York, NY: Free Press), pp. 1–64; S. Flanagan, ‘Value change in industrial societies’, American Political Science Review, 81(4) (1987), pp. 1303–1319; O. Knutsen and E. Scarbrough, ‘Cleavage politics’, in J. W. van Deth and E. Scarbrough (Eds) The Impact of Values (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 492–524; S. C. Flanagan and A.-R. Lee, ‘The new politics, culture wars, and the authoritarian-libertarian value change in advanced industrial democracies’, Comparative Political Studies, 36(3) (2003), pp. 235–271.

^14. O. Knutsen and S. Kumlin, ‘Value orientations and party choice’, in J. Thomassen (Ed.) The European Voter: A Comparative Study of Modern Democracies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 157ff.

^15. C. van der Eijk, H. Schmitt and T. Binder, ‘Left-right orientations and party choice’, in Thomassen (Ed) ibid., pp. 167–191; R. Lachat, ‘The impact of party polarization on ideological voting’, Electoral Studies, 27(4) (2008), pp. 687–698; B. Wessels and H. Schmitt, ‘Meaningful choices, political supply, and institutional effectiveness’, Electoral Studies, 28(5) (2008), pp. 19–30; W. van der Brug, M. Franklin and G. Toka, ‘One electorate or many? Differences in party preference formation between new and established European democracies’, Electoral Studies 27(4) (2008), pp. 589–600.

^16. Knutsen, op. cit., Ref. 9; Freire, op. cit., Ref. 9.

^17. Benoit and Laver, op. cit., Ref. 10.

^18. By an encompassing LR divide, we mean a political device, understood either as an instrument of citizens’ political orientation and/or as an instrument of political communication (between politicians, mass media and voters), that is flexible enough to accommodate within it different substantive meanings (the relevant political value conflicts in each country and/or in each epoch) across time and country.

^19. European Social Survey, Round 1, 2002–2003, Dataset, ess.nsd.uib.no/2002; Benoit and Laver, op. cit., Ref. 10.

^20. Bobbio, op. cit., Ref. 7, pp. 60–64.

^21. Nöel and Thérien, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 44.

^22. Inglehart, op. cit., Ref. 9; Knutsen, op. cit., Ref. 9; Dalton, op. cit., Ref. 2; Freire and Kivistik, op. cit., Ref. 2; Benoit and Laver, op. cit., Ref. 10; Klingemann et al, op. cit., Ref. 10.

^23. Sani and Sartori, op. cit., Ref. 12.

^24. J. W. van Deth and E. Scarbrough, ‘The concept of values’, in Van Deth and Scarbrough (Eds) op. cit., Ref. 13, pp. 21–47.

^25. S. Kumlin, ‘Ideology-driven opinion formation in Europe: The case of attitudes towards the third sector in Sweden’, European Journal of Political Research, 39(4), (2001), pp. 487–518.

^26. R. Gunther and H.-C. Kuan, ‘Value cleavages and partisan conflict’, in R. Gunther, J. Ramon Montero, and H.-J. Puhle (Eds) Democracy, Intermediation, and Voting on Four Continents (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 263–266.

^27. See Thomassen, op. cit., Ref. 14, pp. 7–17.

^28. Lipset and Rokkan, op. cit., Ref. 13.

^29. Knutsen and Scarbrough, op. cit., Ref. 13.

^30. Inglehart, op. cit., Ref. 9; Flanagan, op. cit., Ref. 13, p. 1311; H. Kitschelt, The Transformation of European Social Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 28–30; Flanagan and Lee, op. cit., Ref. 13.

^31. Van der Eijk, Schmitt and Binder, op. cit., Ref. 15; Freire, op. cit., Ref. 9; F. Berglund, S. Holmberg, H. Schmitt and J. Thomassen, ‘Party identification and party choice’, in Thomassen (Ed), op. cit., Ref. 14; Wessels and Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 15; Lachat, op. cit., Ref. 15; H. Schmitt, ‘Partisanship in nine democracies: Causes and consequences’, in J. Bartle and P. Belluci (Eds) Political Parties and Partisanship: Social Identity and Political Attitudes (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 75–87; A. Freire, M. C. Lobo and P. Magalhães, ‘The clarity of policy alternatives, left-right and the European parliament vote in 2004’, The Journal of European Integration, 31(5) (2009), pp. 665–683.

^32. Knutsen and Kumlin, op. cit., Ref. 14, pp. 157ff.

^33.Ibid.

^34. P. Mair, ‘Searching for the positions of political actors: A review of approaches and a critical evaluation of expert surveys’, in M. Laver (Ed.) Estimating the Policy Positions of Political Actors (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 10–23.

^35. M. Golder and J. Stramski, ‘Ideological congruence and electoral institutions: conceptualization and measurement’, American Journal of Political Science, 54 (2010), pp. 90–106.

^36. A. Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in 36 Countries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), pp 78–89.

^37. Sani and Sartori, op. cit., Ref. 12, p. 330.

^38.Ibid.

^39. Knutsen, op. cit., Ref. 9; Freire, op. cit., Ref 9.

^40. S. P. Mainwaring and M. Torcal, ‘Party system theory and party system institutionalization after the third wave of democratization’, Kellogg Institute Working Paper 319 (2005), available at kellogg.nd.edu/publications/workingpapers/WPS/319.pdf.

^41. H. Tworzecki, Learning to Choose: Electoral Politics in East-Central Europe (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); R. Rose and N. Munro, Elections and Parties in New European Democracies (Washington, DC: CQ Press, 2003); Mainwaring and Torcal, ibid.; Van der Brug, Franklin and Toka, op. cit., Ref. 15; Freire, Lobo and Magalhães, op. cit., Ref. 31.

^42. Tworzecki, ibid.

^43. European Social Survey, op. cit., Ref. 19.

^44. Benoit and Laver, op. cit., Ref. 10.

^45. M. G. Marshall, K. Jaggers and T. R. Gurr, Polity IV Project (2004), dataset available at cidcm.umd.edu/polity.

^46. Scientific Software International, HLM: Hierarchical Linear and Nonlinear Modeling (HLM) (2012), available at ssicentral.com/hlm.

^47. T. Snijders and R. Bosker, ‘Modeled variance in two-level models’, Sociological Methods & Research, 22(3) (1994), pp. 342–363.

^48. C. Achen, ‘Two-step hierarchical estimation: beyond regression analysis’, Political Analysis, 13(4) (2005), pp. 447–456; K. L. Jusko and W. P. Shively, ‘Applying a two-step strategy to the analysis of cross-national public opinion data’, Political Analysis, 13(4) (2005), pp. 327–344.

^49. The absence of data for the LR location of parties in France, Benoit and Laver, op. cit., Ref. 10, pp. 208–209, meant that we had to exclude this case.

^50. P. Norris, Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political Behavior (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 103–104; Freire, Lobo and Magalhães, op. cit., Ref. 31, pp. 11ff.

^51. Which have proven to be good proxies of religious values. See W. Jagodzinski and K. Dobbelaere, ‘Secularization and church religiosity’, in Van Deth and Scarbrough, op. cit., Ref. 12, pp. 76–120 and Knutsen and Scarbrough, op. cit., Ref. 13.

^52. Flanagan, op. cit., Ref. 13; Flanagan and Lee, op. cit., Ref. 13.

^53. Knutsen and Scarbrough, op. cit., Ref. 13, p. 500.

^54. C. Van der Eijk and H. Schmitt, op. cit., Ref. 15. See also H. Schmitt and A, Freire, Ideological polarisation: Different worlds in East and West’, in D. Sanders, G. Tóka and P. Magalhães (Eds) Citizens and the European Polity: Mass Attitudes towards the European and National Polities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 65–87.

^55. Consider Spain in 2004, for example, where the LRM is 10.5 (on a 0–20 scale); now consider the LRpx for the Spanish socialist party (PSOE—Partido Socialista Obrero Español) (8.2). Calculate the difference between LRM and this latter value, which gives 2.3. Then calculate this value and multiply it by the proportion of the vote for each party (|LRm-LRpx|^*EPpx): 2.3^*0.426. Add the result of this calculation to the values calculated for the other parties with parliamentary representation then divide it by IPmax (9.5) to obtain IP: 0.414.

^56. Due to limitations of space, we cannot present the distribution of the macro independent variables in this paper; however, we can provide this information on request.

^57. The Combined Polity Score, The POLITY score, is calculated by subtracting the AUTOC score from the DEMOC score; the resulting unified polity scale ranges from +10 (strongly democratic) to − 10 (strongly autocratic).

^58. Considering also the religious dummies as further control variables (with the two-step hierarchical regression procedure), controlling for the structural dimension of the religious cleavage, does not change this picture. Overall, the Adjusted R² is practically the same (0.084) and, more important, all the value factors have a significant impact and work in the expected direction.

^59. Before proceeding, the reader should bear in mind that in (Graph 1) we present the unstandardized ordinary least squares regression coefficients for each set of values (F1–F5)—which are usually the dependent variables in step two of the hierarchical linear models—across the 21 polities examined.

^60. Bobbio, op. cit., Ref. 7; Nöel and Thérien, op. cit., Ref. 2.

^61. Inglehart, op. cit., Ref. 9; Knutsen, op. cit., Ref. 9; Dalton, op. cit., Ref. 2; Freire, op. cit., Ref. 9; Freire and Kivistik, op. cit., Ref. 2; Benoit and Laver, op. cit., Ref. 10; Klingemann et al, op. cit., Ref. 10.

^62. Benoit and Laver, ibid.

^63. Sani and Sartori, op. cit., Ref. 12.

^64. Freire, op. cit., Ref. 9.