Conceptualizing Left and Right in comparative politics

Abstract

Despite the importance of the Left-Right dimension in comparative politics, establishing an index that captures this dimension in both a theoretically and empirically sound manner remains an ongoing challenge for political scientists. Having reviewed existing attempts to construct measures for the Left-Right dimension, and having concluded that they are merely inductive and problematic from a methodological perspective, this article proposes a deductive approach based on Norberto Bobbio’s theory of Left and Right and suggests a combination with statistically robust measures drawn from the data provided by the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP). The fundamental features of the proposed index are: first, Left and Right are theoretical concepts which should be accounted for in the empirical analysis. Second, the Left-Right dimension is time- and country-specific. Third, different statements have different meanings on a Left-Right scale. Fourth, the importance of the Left-Right dimension itself varies over time and across countries. Finally, the data have to be analysed adequately.

Cancer beliefs and prevention policies: comparing Canadian decision-maker and general population views

“…Generally, in comparative politics, and specifically in Canada, ''right/conservative'' versus ''left/progressive'' political orientation is associated with lower support for government intervention into the public sphere [58]. The political sentiments of individual policy-makers are expressions of ideological belief that direct their political orientation on an issue, and the political climate of a region or jurisdiction reflects the relative prevalence of political orientations within it [16,59,60].…”

Contextualizing Cognitive Consonance by a Social Mechanisms Explanation: Moderators of Selective Exposure in Media Usage

“…The invariant traditional class-cleavage based so-called RILE scheme for assessing left-right party positions (Laver/Budge 1992) is still able to explain a great deal of variance of party positions. However, approaches regarding issue change and the absorptive power of the left-right dichotomy are doing a better job (Franzmann /Kaiser 2006;Franzmann 2013;Jahn 2011).…”

Fiscal performance of minority governments: New empirical evidence for OECD countries

“…Australia (2011)(2012)(2013), Canada (2005Canada ( -2010, Denmark (1995Denmark ( -2015, France (1986France ( -1992, Ireland (1995-2001), Italy (1996-2000, the Netherlands (2011-2012), New Zealand (1999)(2000)(2001)(2002)(2003)(2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014), Norway (1995-2005 and 2014-2015), Portugal (1996-2001), Spain (1995-2011), and Sweden (1995. 63 (54) out of the 117 country-year observations of minority governments relate to single-party (coalition) minority governments.…”