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Values and partisanship in left‐right orientations: measuring ideology
Author(s) -
HUBER JOHN D.
Publication year - 1989
Publication title -
european journal of political research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.267
H-Index - 95
eISSN - 1475-6765
pISSN - 0304-4130
DOI - 10.1111/j.1475-6765.1989.tb00209.x
Subject(s) - ideology , left and right , component (thermodynamics) , political science , social psychology , psychology , politics , law , thermodynamics , physics , structural engineering , engineering
. This paper analyzes whether left‐right scales provide an interval measure of citizen issue attitudes that is comparable across eight Western European countries. Two commonly held views of left‐right self‐placement are juxtaposed: (1) the theory that issue attitudes are the primary component of left‐right self‐placement, and (2) the theory that partisanship is the primary component of left‐right self‐placement, which entails that left‐right scales will take on different substantive meanings in countries with different types of party systems. Distance measures and least squares regression show that left‐right scales are generally an appropriate instrument for cross‐national tests of theories that have as an explanatory variable the ideological orientations of voters.