A Common Left-Right Scale for Voters and Parties in Europe

Abstract

This article presents a scaling approach to jointly estimate the locations of voters, parties, and European political groups on a common left-right scale. Although most comparative research assumes that cross-national comparisons of voters and parties are possible, few correct for systematic biases commonly known to exist in surveys or examine whether survey data are comparable across countries. Our scaling method addresses scale perception in surveys and links cross-national surveys through new bridging observations. We apply our approach to the 2009 European Election Survey and demonstrate that the improvement in party estimates that one gains from fixing various survey bias issues is significant. Our scaling strategy provides left-right positions of voters and of 162 political parties, and we demonstrate that variables based on rescaled voter and party positions on the left-right dimension significantly improve the fit of a cross-national vote choice model.

Partisanship, Ideology, and Representation in Latin America

“…In this respect, this paper is closely related to Jessee (2010), Shor and Rogowski (2010), Tausanovitch and Warshaw (2013), and Battista, Peress and Richman (2013), who use common items and scaling techniques to examine policy representation in the United States. In addition, my study nicely aligns with recent analyses of Europe's common ideological space by Bakker et al (2011), König, Marbach and Osnabrügge (2013), and Lo, Proksch and Gschwend (2014), as well as Saiegh (2009) who uses scaling techniques to estimate the location of political actors in Latin America.…”

“…Relying on European political groups to identify the location of parties in different European countries is another case in point (König, Marbach and Osnabrügge, 2013;Lo, Proksch and Gschwend, 2014). An alternative approach is to treat questions that are asked in the same form to respondents in different countries as bridges to create a common spatial map.…”

The AfD: Finally a Successful Right-Wing Populist Eurosceptic Party for Germany?

“…In most West European polities, parties position themselves within a two-dimensional (Kitschelt, 1995;Benoit and Laver, 2006) or perhaps even three-dimensional (Bakker, Jolly, and Polk, 2012) space. The 4 everyday language of politics, however, still relies on the traditional left-right-dichotomy, and most West Europeans are quite happy to place themselves on a unidimensional left-right-scale (Lo, Proksch, and Gschwend, 2014). While the precise meaning of "left" and "right" may vary across time and space (Huber and Inglehart, 1995), left-right-placement usually reflects the perceived distance between voters and parties as well as value-based preferences (Knutsen, 1997).…”

Birds of the Same Feather Tweet Together: Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation Using Twitter Data

“…When the analysis also includes voters, it is done at the expense of strong "bridging" assumptions (Jessee 2009), or only for self-selected population groups (Bonica 2014). There is also little work on cross-national ideological estimation (Lo, Proksch, and Gschwend 2013). Most importantly, given the sparse nature of the data (roll call votes or contributions) and its costly collection (survey data), current measurement methods generate ideal points that are essentially static in the short run.…”