Understanding Party Ideology: Multiple Perspectives, Different Views?

• In Event: Shifts in Party Ideology

Abstract

Since 1999, a team of researchers based out of Chapel Hill has administered an expert survey to political scientists across dozens of countries to acquire information about political ideology and political parties in those countries. The Chapel Hill Expert Survey (CHES) dataset is a rich source of information that has led to many important comparative insights and publications. However, the CHES is limited in one way – it only considers the opinions of political scientists. Are we the most appropriate experts to estimate party positions and ideology accurately? A better set of experts might be political journalists, whose jobs are to cover and report on the positions of the parties on a daily basis. And how well do experts, academic or otherwise, understand how voters see parties? Our paper tests whether the Chapel Hill expert survey approach could benefit from taking into account a wider range of experts, and contributes to the growing comparative literature on expert surveys as the key tool for measuring political party ideology. Using data from Canada, which has a range of parties with a complex history of ideological clarity, we examine and compare the responses of academic experts, political journalists and a random sample of Canadians to a range of questions about party placements and stances. Evaluating common survey items across these three sets of groups will allow us to develop a better measure of political party ideology across contexts, which should be useful to the larger community of scholars that study political parties and elections in Canada and other democratic societies.

Authors

• Christopher Alcantara, The University of Western Ontario

• David A. Armstrong, University of Western Ontario

• Laura Stephenson, University of Western Ontario