The Left and Right as Social Categories

• In Event: The Political Implications of Party Polarization

Abstract

Are Western Publics developing affective attachments to the Left or Right as social categories? Several lines of research in political science have suggested the answer is yes and that the consequences of this development are profound. However, evidence for this conclusion comes from only a limited set of relatively narrow studies and so has not yet captured the attention of the researchers in charge of either large national election studies or several large-scale cross-national survey projects like the CSES or ESS. In this paper, we suggest (and implement) a solution to this dilemma. Specifically, we propose a method to leverage existing survey work -- in which respondents are asked to place parties on the left-right dimension -- to provide a great deal of indirect evidence on the extent to which citizens in western democracies are developing affective attachments to the Left and Right as social groups. Further, since our method can be applied to historical survey data from many different countries, we can both characterize how widespread the phenomenon is and how it has changed over time.

Authors

• Lie Philip Santoso, Duke Kunshan University

• Nick Lin, Academia Sinica

• Randolph T. Stevenson, Rice University