A Common Left-Right Scale for Voters and Parties in Europe
Open accessAbstract
This article presents a scaling approach to jointly estimate the locations of voters, parties, and European political groups on a common left-right scale. Although most comparative research assumes that cross-national comparisons of voters and parties are possible, few correct for systematic biases commonly known to exist in surveys or examine whether survey data are comparable across countries. Our scaling method addresses scale perception in surveys and links cross-national surveys through new bridging observations. We apply our approach to the 2009 European Election Survey and demonstrate that the improvement in party estimates that one gains from fixing various survey bias issues is significant. Our scaling strategy provides left-right positions of voters and of 162 political parties, and we demonstrate that variables based on rescaled voter and party positions on the left-right dimension significantly improve the fit of a cross-national vote choice model.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cites
Beyond the Median: Voter Preferences, District Heterogeneity, and Political Representation
Gerber, E. R., & Lewis, J. B. (2004) · Journal of Political Economy · doi:10.1086/424737 · Cited by 324 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Research works printed but not linked: 51
- Adams, J., S. Merrill, and B. Grofman. 2005. A unified theory of party competition: A cross-national analysis integrating spatial and behavioral factors. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Aldrich, J., and R. McKelvey. 1977. A method of scaling with applications to the 1968 and 1972 presidential elections. American Political Science Review 71(1):111-30.
- Alvarez, R., and J. Nagler. 2004. Party system compactness: Measurement and consequences. Political Analysis 12(1):46-62.
- Bafumi, J., and M. Herron. 2010. Leapfrog representation and extremism: A study of American voters and their members in Congress. American Political Science Review 104(3):519-42.
- Bailey, M. 2007. Comparable preference estimates across time and institutions for the court, Congress, and presidency. American Journal of Political Science 51(3):433-48.
- Bawn, K., and Z. Somer-Topcu. 2012. Government versus opposition at the polls: How governing status affects the impact of policy positions. American Journal of Political Science 56(2):433-46.
- Benoit, K., and M. Laver. 2005. Mapping the Irish policy space: Voter and party spaces in preferential elections. Economic and Social Review 36(2):83.
- ---. 2006. Party policy in modern democracies. London: Routledge.
- Benoit, K., and G. McElroy. 2007. Party groups and policy positions in the European Parliament. Party Politics 13(1):5-28.
- Bergara, M., B. Richman, and P. Spiller. 2003. Modeling Supreme Court strategic decision making: The Congressional constraint. Legislative Studies Quarterly 28(2):247-80.
- Blais, A., R. Nadeau, E. Gidengil, and N. Nevitte. 2001. The formation of party preferences: Testing the proximity and directional models. European Journal of Political Research 40(1):81-91.
- Brady, H. E. 1985. The perils of survey research: Inter-personally incomparable responses. Political Methodology 11(3-4):269-91.
- Calvo, E., and T. Hellwig. 2011. Centripetal and centrifugal incentives under different electoral systems. American Journal of Political Science 55(1):27-41.
- Campbell, D., and D. Fiske. 1959. Convergent and discriminant validation by the multitrait-multimethod matrix. Psychological Bulletin 56(2):81-105.
- Carroll, R., J. B. Lewis, J. Lo, K. T. Poole, and H. Rosenthal. 2009. Measuring bias and uncertainty in DW-NOMINATE ideal point estimates via the parametric bootstrap. Political Analysis 17(3):261-75.
- Dalton, R., D. Farrell, and I. McAllister. 2011. Political parties and democratic linkage: How parties organize democracy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- De Vries, C. 2007. Sleeping giant: Fact or fairytale? European Union Politics 8(3):363-85.
- Duch, R., J. May, and D. Armstrong II. 2010. Coalition-directed voting in multi-party democracies. American Political Science Review 104:698-719.
- Duch, R., and R. Stevenson. 2008. The economic vote: How political and economic institutions condition election results. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Enelow, J. M., and M. Hinich. 1984. The spatial theory of voting. New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Erikson, R. S., and D. W. Romero. 1990. Candidate equilibrium and the behavioral model of the vote. American Political Science Review 84(4):1103-26.
- Ezrow, L. 2010. Linking citizens and parties: How electoral systems matter for political representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Golder, M., and J. Stramski. 2010. Ideological congruence and electoral institutions. American Journal of Political Science 54(1):90-106.
- Groseclose, T., S. Levitt, and J. Snyder. 1999. Comparing interest group scores across time and chambers: Adjusted ADA scores for the US Congress. American Political Science Review 93(1):33-50.
- Hinich, M., and M. C. Munger. 1994. Ideology and the theory of political choice. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
- Hix, S., A. Noury, and G. Roland. 2007. Democratic politics in the European Parliament. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Hobolt, S. B., J.-J. Spoon, and J. Tilley. 2009. A vote against Europe? Explaining defection at the 1999 and 2004 European Parliament elections. British Journal of Political Science 39(1):93-115.
- Hooghe, L., R. Bakker, A. Brigevich, C. de Vries, E. Edwards, G. Marks, J. Rovny, and M. Steenbergen. 2010. Reliability and validity of measuring party positions: The Chapel Hill expert surveys of 2002 and 2006. European Journal of Political Research 49:687-703.
- Jessee, S. A. 2009. Spatial voting in the 2004 presidential election. American Political Science Review 103(1):59-81.
- Kedar, O. 2005. When moderate voters prefer extreme parties: Policy balancing parliamentary elections. American Political Science Review 99(2):185-99.
- King, G., C. Murray, J. Salomon, and A. Tandon. 2004. Enhancing the validity and cross-cultural comparability of survey research. American Political Science Review 98(1):191-207.
- Lewis, J. B., and K. T. Poole. 2004. Measuring bias and uncertainty in ideal point estimates via the parametric bootstrap. Political Analysis 12(2):105-27.
- Macdonald, S. E., O. Listhaug, and G. Rabinowitz. 1991. Issues and party support in multyparty systems. American Political Science Review 85(4):1107-31.
- Mair, P., and C. Mudde. 1998. The party family and its study. Annual Review of Political Science 1(1):211-29.
- Markus, G. B., and P. E. Converse. 1979. A dynamic simultaneous equation model of electoral choice. 73(4):1055-70.
- McElroy, G., and K. Benoit. 2010. Party policy and group affiliation in the European Parliament. British Journal of Political Science 40(2):377-98.
- ---. 2012. Policy positioning in the European Parliament. European Union Politics 13(1):150-67.
- McFadden, D. 1973. Conditional logit analysis of qualitatative choice behavior. In Frontiers of Economics, ed. P. Zarembka. New York: Academic Press.
- Palfrey, T., and K. Poole. 1987. The relationship between information, ideology, and voting behavior. American Journal of Political Science 31(2): 511-30.
- Peterson, D. A. M. 2009. Campaign learning and vote determinants. American Journal of Political Science 53(2):445-60.
- Poole, K. 2005. Spatial models of parliamentary voting. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
- Poole, K. T., and H. Rosenthal. 1997. Congress: A political-economic history of roll call voting. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Powell, G. 2000. Elections as instruments of democracy: Majoritarian and proportional visions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
- Rabinowitz, G., and S. E. Macdonald. 1989. A directional theory of issue voting. American Political Science Review 83(1):93-121.
- Rehm, P., and T. Reilly. 2010. United we stand: Constituency homogeneity and comparative party polarization. Electoral Studies 29(1):40-53.
- Reif, K., and H. Schmitt. 1980. Nine second-order national elections. A conceptual framework for the analysis of european election results. European Journal of Political Research 8(1):3-44.
- Saiegh, S. 2009. Recovering a basic space from elite surveys: Evidence from Latin America. Legislative Studies Quarterly 34(1):117-45.
- Shor, B., C. Berry, and N. McCarty. 2010. A bridge to somewhere: Mapping state and congressional ideology on a cross- institutional common space. Legislative Studies Quarterly 35(3):417-48.
- Shor, B., and N. McCarty. 2011. The ideological mapping of American legislatures. American Political Science Review 105(3):530-51.
- Treier, S. 2010. Where does the president stand? Measuring presidential ideology. Political Analysis 18(1):124.
- Westholm, A. 1997. Distance versus direction: The illusory defeat of the proximity theory of electoral choice. American Political Science Review 91(4):865-83.
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Birds of the Same Feather Tweet Together: Bayesian Ideal Point Estimation Using Twitter Data
Barberá, P. (2015) · Political Analysis · doi:10.1093/pan/mpu011 · Cited by 982 · see citing works
- Authors
- Lo, J., Proksch, S.-O., & Gschwend, T.
- Affiliations
- University of Mannheim (DE)
- McGill University (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Proksch, Sven-Oliver
- Venue
- Political Analysis
- Publisher
- Cambridge University Press (CUP)
- Published
- 2014
- Volume
- 22
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 205-223
- ISSN
- 1047-1987 (ISSN-L)
- 1476-4989
- OpenAlex
- W2323450102
- Cited by
- 78
- References
- 1
- Citations by year
- 2026: 2 · 2025: 4 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 7 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 4 · 2020: 6 · 2019: 11 · 2018: 6 · 2017: 8 · 2016: 8 · 2015: 5 · 2014: 6 · 2013: 1 · 2012: 1
- FWCI
- 39.44
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- Political Analysis (publishedVersion)
- RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
- MADOC (University of Mannheim) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- University of Cambridge
- Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (project C4, SFB-884)
- Universität Mannheim (SFB 884)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Political Science and International Relations › Electoral Systems and Political Participation
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Management Science and Operations Research › Psychometric Methodologies and Testing
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Survey Methodology and Nonresponse
- Keywords
- left-right scale, political ideology, party positions, survey bias, international comparability, scaling, European Parliament elections
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
