Left–Right Political Scales: Some ‘Expert’ Judgments

Much recent cross-national research is highly dependent on the classification of the ideological stance of political parties in a variety of nations, usually measured in terms of some more or less explicit Left-Right ideological scale. The need for such classification is quite apparent in the plethora of studies attempting to evaluate the relationship of political parties to public policy outcomes. In virtually all such research, Left parties are distinguished from all other parties (see, for example, Hewitt, 1977; Tufte, 1979), while in a few, the focus is tighter, with Castles (1978; 1982) discussing the role of Right and Centre parties and Cameron (1982), in addition, examining the impact of Christian Democratic parties. Once the problem of classification is more complex than distinguishing the Left from the rest, it becomes necessary to locate the political positions of parties on some sort of unidimensional or multidimensional scale, where the dimensions are related to the explanations being offered for public policy variation.