Measuring Left-Right and Libertarian-Authoritarian Values in the British Electorate

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. This content downloaded from 137.Butler and Stokes' authoritative analysis of the British electorate concluded that in general voters' political attitudes were poorly formed and, in consequence, unstable and inconsistent. This paper re-examines this question by developing and evaluating multiple-item scales of two core dimensions of mass political beliefs: left-right and libertarian-authoritarian values. The scales are shown to have respectable levels of internal consistency, high levels of stability over a one-year period, and to be useful predictors of support for political parties. In these respects they compare favourably with other commonly used indicators of political attitudes, values and ideology (left-right self-placement, postmaterialism and attitudes to nationalization). This superiority applies across different levels of political involvement. Contrary to the conclusions of earlier research into mass political ideology in Britain, therefore, it is contended that in general the electorate has meaningful political beliefs. Moreover, as the scales developed in this research form part of the British and Northern Irish Social Attitudes Series and recent British Election Studies, they provide an important resource for further studies of political culture in the UK. IN'I'RODUC'I'IONTraditional approaches to attitude measurement in public opinion surveys and election studies have typically involved a single forced-choice question or a short battery on each topic. The latter are often constructed from a more or less ad hoc combination of items included in the surveys. Even where questions have been designed to provide multiple indicator measures of political attitudes, they have focused on contemporary political issues rather than underlying dimensions of ideology and values. Consequently, the selection of attitude items has not usually been directed towards the construction of reliable and valid scales of central political beliefs, but rather towards topicality (for an exception see Feldman 1988).An alternative approach has focused upon respondents' judgments of the meaning of abstract terms such as 'left-right' or 'liberal-conservative', often with the use of visual self-placement scales. Again, however, these approaches are flawed in that they assume high levels of sophistication Psrit.Jtzl. OJSoc. Volutneno.47 1.s5ue rlo. I Marcll /996 1K4iNN()()()7-1315 (C)I.on(lonzichool oJl:cotzomic.s 1996 This content downloaded from 137.

Education and liberalism: pursuing the link

“…However, Lipset's (1959) article highlighted the need to distinguish between two different dimensions of 'liberalism'; the economic and the social and since the 1990's there has been a widespread consensus that this uni-dimensional approach does not adequately capture the subtleties of social values (Flanagan 1987;Fleishman 1988). In the UK, the work of Evans et al (1996) crystallised these two dimensions as a ' 'left-right' dimension (economic liberalism) and an libertarian-authoritarian dimension (social liberalism). The economic dimension is concerned with issues of distribution, public ownership and the balance of power between employees and employers, while the social dimension is concerned with issues of personal freedom and authority.…”

“…During that time it has become almost routine to measure the positions of the populace along two dimensions which broadly follow the definitions of 'economic' and 'noneconomic' or social liberalism (Evans et al 1996;Fleishman 1988;Houtman et al 2008) put forward as essential in helping to 'clarify the relationship between class position and political behaviour' (Lipset (1959) 485). Moreover, that education leads to social liberalism has become one of the most replicated findings in social science (Weakliem, 2002).…”

“… People who break the law should be given stiffer sentences  Young people today don't have enough respect for tradition British values  For some crimes the death penalty is the most appropriate sentence  Censorship of films and magazines is necessary to uphold moral standards  Schools should teach children to obey authority Economic liberalism is also measured using a scale devised by Evans et al (1996) and comprises five items  Big business benefits owners at the expense of the workers  Ordinary working people do not get their fair share of the nation's wealth  Government should redistribute income from the better off to those who are less well off  Management will always try to get the better of employees if it gets the chance  There is one law for the rich and one for the poor For each of the items in the above scales there were five response categories: strongly agree, agree, neither agree nor disagree, disagree, strongly disagree. The responses were coded such that low values represented the liberal position in each case, items were then summed together and divided by the number of items on the scale.…”

“…Firstly, we use what has become the 'standard' measure of (social) liberalism in the UK (Evans et al 1996); this scale is made up of the following five items:…”

Immigration into the mainstream: Conflicting ideological streams, strategic reasoning and party competition

“…On the one hand, there is a Left-Right axis referring to the appropriate level of state involvement in the economy. As such, parties are classified along a spectrum ranging from 'socialist' to 'neo-liberal' (Evans at al, 1996;Kriesi et al, 2006). This 'old' politics dimension concerned, among other issues, labour market regulation, public/private ownership and level of taxation, and characterised a majority of the West European democracies from the mid-20 th century to the early 1970s.…”