The Nature and Sources of Voters’ Beliefs about the Left-Right Positions of Political Parties

Date Wednesday, 2 October

Time 03:00PM - 04:30PM

Venue Kobe University Faculty & Graduate School of Law (Building II), conference room（神戸大学大学院法学研究科第二学舎大会議室）

Language English

Speaker

Seonghui Lee (University of Essex) with Randy Stevenson and Philip Santoso

Abstract

How do people form their perceptions about the "left-right" positions of parties? Despite the importance of the left-right metaphor in Western Democracies, this question has not been satisfactorily answered. In this paper, we identify a set of cues that voters may use to form their perceptions of parties’ left-right positions and empirically estimate the weight they place on each of these factors when actually placing parties on a standard left-right scale. The factors we examine include: parties' policy positions, parties' patterns of conflict and cooperation with other parties, parties' sizes and the scope of their support, and socio-demographic basis of party supporters. To produce these weights, we use original conjoint survey experiments in Britain, Canada, and Germany, in which respondents are shown profiles of hypothetical parties and assign the party a score on a left-right scale. This lets us, for the first time, directly estimate the relative influence of different party attributes on voters' perceptions, to answer more definitively than any previous work what voters really mean when they think of a party as left or right. Our main conclusion is that patterns of partisan conflict and cooperation play a much larger independent role in shaping voters’ beliefs about the relative left-right positions of parties than has generally been appreciated by scholars who instinctively think of the left-right as a summary of party policy positions.

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