The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior: Peter Mair

The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior
Russell J. Dalton and HansDieter Klingemann

Print publication date: Sep 2009 Print ISBN-13: 9780199270125 Published to Oxford Handbooks Online: Sep-09 Subject: Political Science, Political Behavior, Political Methodology DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199270125.001.0001
LeftRight Orientations
Peter Mair
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199270125.003.0011
Abstract and Keywords

This article discusses leftright orientations; the leftright dimension has been described as a shorthand device that helps facilitate comparisons through space and time. It first examines the acceptability of left and right and the referents of left and right. The last two sections of the article focus on the blurring and the resilience of left and right. It is noted that the left right schema was able to offer something in structure and substance that helped facilitate efficient communication and orientation.
leftright orientations, leftright dimension, shorthand, comparisons, referents, blurring, resilience, acceptability, leftright schema, efficient communication and orientation
The most basic rule of comparison is that it requires shared standards and common terms of reference. This is true for comparisons among individuals, among groups, among nations, and over time. In practice, this means that comparisons at any of these levels must use concepts that can travel and that mean more or less the same thing in all of the different settings that are compared. It also follows that the more extensive the comparisonthat is, the more units that are involved and the greater the range of settings in which they are foundthe more abstract is likely to be the concept that is employed in the comparison (Sartori 1970). It is largely for these reasons that leftright orientations, and the search for placements along a leftright dimension, have proved such an enduring element in comparative political analysis.
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Ever since the seminal work of Downs (1957), students of political behavior and party strategy have become accustomed to think of party competition and voter alignments in unidimensional leftright terms. This was the spatial model that Downs had adapted from theoretical arguments originally developed by Hotelling (1929) and Smithies (1941) to account for the relationship between the location of competing stores on a high street (or icecream vendors on a beach) and the behaviour of their customers. In fact, the initial unidimensional scale that Downs adapted to his own theory of democracy, like those used by Hotelling and Smithies, ran from left to right simply in typographical terms, and Downs linked it to left and right in an ideological or substantive sense only when he added the assumption that all political questions could be treated as having a bearing on one crucial question or issue: how much government intervention in the economy should there be? (Downs 1957, 116). This was then further specified through the assumption that the left end of the dimension represented full government control of the economy, while the right end represented a completely free market, and that every interval from extreme left (0) to extreme right (100) denoted the percentage of the economy that an actor at that point preferred to remain in private hands. This, for Downs, offered the opportunity to rank parties according to their views on the issue of government control in a way that might be nearly universally recognized as accurate (1957, 116) and hence that approximated to the real world situation. At the same time, he also admitted to a lack of realism in the approach, in that a number of extreme rightwing parties were fascist, and hence opposed to the free market, thereby inclining towards the extreme left position on this single dimension, while most other parties were in practice leftish on some issues and rightish on others (1957, 116) and did not have a single or unequivocal position on the scale. Moreover, while it made a lot of sense to posit the notion of a single dimensiona single street or a beachfrontwhen dealing with stores and their customers, it was much less intuitively meaningful to speak of a single dimension when dealing with a virtual political reality (Sartori 1976, 326). On the other hand, by staying with a single dimension, and by identifying this dimension with a leftright ideological scale, it certainly became much easier to model party strategy and voter behaviour and to test the assumptions in a wide variety of different settingsthat is, to travel. This capacity to abstract and generalize on the basis of the leftright dimension has always remained a key element in the appeal of these particular terms of reference and has stimulated an ever
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growing interest in the spatial theory of electoral competition (Ferejohn 1995; Benoit and Laver 2006). The distinction between left and right, and the widespread use in scholarly analyses of the leftright dimension, has been usefully described as a shorthand devicesomething that provides a general orientation toward a society's political leaders, ideologies and parties and that thereby facilitates comparisons through space and time (Inglehart and Sidjanski 1976, 225). In other words, although parties and their policies may change and develop, the notion of left and right affords a more abstract standard which can be applied more or less uniformly in different settings and periods. This was a construct which, as Inglehart and Sidjanski went on to state, simplifie[d] a complex reality and generate[d] a handy set of decisionrules which could then be posited for use by voters as a standard that facilitated choice between parties as well as the switching between parties, and for use by leaders of coalitionseeking parties as a standard against which to line up potential allies. It was also a division which, when Inglehart and Sidjanski were making these arguments, appeared to be acquiring even more weight and utility. As Inglehart and Kingemann (1976, 243) noted in another contribution to the same collection of essays, the concepts of left and right were even then taking on new life and new meaning for Western publics. Leftright terms of reference, and the classifications which they entailed, have not always been accepted by parties themselves, howeveror at least not by all parties. Some parties have obviously had no problem with deliberately aligning themselves in leftright terms, or in expressly pushing for the formation of broad leftwing or broad rightwing alliances. In other cases, however, the classification can sometimes be rejected out of hand. In 1984, Jonathan Porritt, then a leading member of the emerging British Green party, was very clear in asserting that his new movement stood outside the leftright divide: We profoundly disagree with the politics of the right and its underlying ideology of capitalism; we profoundly disagree with the politics of the left and its adherence, in varying degrees, to the ideology of communism. That leaves us little choice but to disagree, perhaps less profoundly, with the politics of the center and its ideological potpourri of socialized capitalism (Porritt 1984, 43).1 Yet other parties that accepted the terms sought to place themselves in the center, consciously rejecting a position on either the left or the right. Such was the case with the former agrarian parties of Scandinavia, for example, each of which was redefined as a Centre party in the wake of a
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series of organizational and programmatic reforms in the 1950s and 1960s (Daalder 1984; see also Hazan 1997). Moreover, the appeal of the leftright dimension is also somewhat imbalanced. Although a reasonably large group of parties seem happy to use the term left in their titles, and although even more parties employ some version of the term center, it is relatively difficult to find parties which are willing to use the label right. That is, while parties may be located on the right, they are reluctant to associate themselves specifically with the label. One exception is the small Right Block in the Czech Republic, which polled 0.6 percent in the parliamentary elections of 2002, and the now defunct Czech Right, although the comprehensive handbook edited by Szajkowski (2005) does include references to various coalitions which also admit to being on the right, including the Rightist OppositionIndustrialists, New Rights in Georgia, the ephemeral Union of RightWing Forces in Romania, and the Union of Rightist Forces in Russia. It should also be noted that the literal translation of the prominent Norwegian party Hyre is also the Right, even though it is now usually given as Conservative.2 1 The Acceptability of Left and Right At a minimum, the leftright division appears to offer both sense and shape to an otherwise complex political reality. This is true in the first place for voters, who appear to have the capacity to locate themselves and the parties within these terms of reference. And it is true for scholars, who, since Downs (1957), have employed versions of the leftright dimension to classify parties and governments, and who used these data to predict voter utilities, policy performance, and coalitional behavior. It also appears true for the parties themselves, whose programs and policies are susceptible to interpretation and analysis in leftright terms. Let us briefly look at these threevoters, researchers, and partiesin turn. Already in 1973, according to data from the then newly established nine country European Community survey, some 83 percent of European voters could locate themselves on a leftright scale, ranging from a low of 73 percent in Belgium to a high of 93 percent in West Germany. Most of these voters could also locate the parties in their systems along this same dimension (Inglehart and Klingemann 1976). Thirty years later, according to data from the European Social Survey of 2004, an average of 88 per cent of respondents in more than twenty countries could place themselves in leftright terms, although in this case also the variation across countries is quite pronounced (see Table 11.1). More than onethird of Portuguese
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respondents were unable or unwilling to define themselves in leftright terms, for example, as were more than onefifth Greek respondents. By contrast, very few of the respondents in the Nordic countries demurred. These data also demonstrate the broad acceptability of the leftright distinction in the newer postcommunist democracies. In this case, unsurprisingly, the degree of incapacity or unwillingness of respondents to locate themselves in leftright terms is higher than in western Europe, and it is also more or less consistent across the four cases involved. But even here, the acceptability rate in 2004 is more than 75 percent, and in none of the four postcommunist cases does the level fall as low as that recorded in Portugal. In the earlier round of the ESS survey in 20023 the acceptability rate was even higher, at around 83 percent. In European politics, in sum, the division between left and right is sufficiently meaningful to allow the vast majority of voters to recognize themselves within these terms. This appears to be less true beyond Europe, however, and certainly when we travel beyond the world of the established European and AngloAmerican democracies. The detailed World Values Survey figures reported in Dalton (2006), and which are drawn from surveys in 19992002, reveal a handful of countries where the percentage of respondents willing to locate themselves in leftright terms falls below 50 percentAlgeria and Columbia (where only 46 percent of the public placed themselves on a leftright scale), Jordan (36 percent), Morocco (27 percent), and Pakistan (12 percent). As Dalton notes, the acceptability and/or understanding of the leftright dimension seems particularly weak in Arab states, although it is interesting to note that in two largely Muslim states outside the Arab world, Turkey and Indonesia, some 93 and 82 percent of respondents respectively did locate themselves in leftright terms. Despite some exceptions, levels of selfplacement were also relatively low in the former republics of the Soviet Union. All of this suggests that there is probably a reasonably pronounced cultural bias in the acceptability for these terms, a bias that may be compounded by a lack of experience with democratic political competition. There is less of a problem when it comes to the use of the terms by observers and analysts. For example, the first expert study of party positions in the early 1970s asked respondents to identify up to three dimensions of competition in a number of countries, to indicate which of these could be regarded as primary and which Table 11.1 Proportion of respondents unable or unwilling to place themselves on a leftright scale, 20022004
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20022003
2004
Austria Belgium Denmark Finland France Germany Greece Ireland Italy Luxembourg The Netherlands Norway Portugal Spain Sweden Switzerland United Kingdom Czech Republic Estonia Hungary Poland Slovenia Western Europe (mean) Eastern Europe (mean)
14.0 14.0 7.1 5.4 6.8 7.5 23.2 17.5 22.4 23.5 4.4 2.3 19.5 19.1 5.4 8.2 10.2 10.2 na 17.1 17.3 21.3 12.4 16.5
14.8 9.5 6.5 4.6 na 10.4 18.9 na na 17.6 na 2.2 34.1 14.9 4.9 8.2 10.4 18.4 24.3 na 20.1 28.3 12.1 22.8
Source: European Social Survey I and II.
auxiliary, and to locate parties along these dimensions (Morgan 1976). As Morgan reported (1976, 454), slightly more than half of all the scales listed by the scholars were versions of the leftright scale, including more than 75 percent of the socalled primary scales. In other words, among expert
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observers, the leftright dimension proved to be indisputably the most common scale referent in every country and over the entire time for which [the] data are valid (Morgan 1976, 454). Almost twenty years later, in an extensive survey of expert placements of parties in fortytwo polities, depicting the principal political conflict in terms of left and rightalso the default optionwas the preferred option of some 80 percent of the expert respondents, while a further 5.5 percent opted for the essentially comparable terms progressive and conservative. Indeed, among the fortytwo polities covered in the survey, it was only in South Korea that a majority of experts preferred not to use the terms left and right (Huber and Inglehart 1995, 81). Parties were also clearly located in leftright terms by respondents in the CastlesMair expert survey of European party systems in 1982 (Castles and Mair 1984), as well as by the respondents in the expert survey on attitudes to European integration conducted by Marks and his colleagues in 1999, and which probed positions on what was termed an economic leftright dimension (see Hooghe, Marks, and Wilson 2002). The most recent expert survey that covers this ground recorded successful expert codings of party positions on the leftright scale in 47 polities across the world, with in this case almost none among the more than 1,500 experts who were polled finding it impossible to apply the left right terms of reference (Benoit and Laver 2006).3 Finally, the terms have emerged as the single most pervasive political division identified in a series of wideranging crossnational analyses of party programmes and election platforms (see, inter alia, Budge, Hearl and Robertson 1987; Laver and Budge 1992; Klingemann, Hofferbert, and Budge 1994; Budge et al. 2001). Much of the dimensional analyses from this research program inevitably concerns nationspecific oppositions. When framed in more abstract terms, however, and when generalized to more conventional ideological terms, most of these oppositions center around one version or another of the leftright divide. As the original authors of the study put it, a content analysis of the party programmes reveals that in almost all countries some form of LeftRight dimension dominates competition at the level of the parties (Budge and Robertson 1987, 94). Indeed, in a later analysis of the same crossnational data, the leftright scale was assumed to be the core dimension of policy positions alignment, and it was chosen a priori as the basis of a common scale for the parties in the different systems (Laver and Budge 1992, 256). As van der Eijk and Oppenhuis (1988, 29) once noted in a quite different analysis of mass political ideology, such a degree of shared crossnational meaning is itself evidence of the common
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foundation of substantive political ideas from which leftright positions and ideological labels derive their meaning (see also Mair 1997, 2431). 2 The Referents of Left and Right But while the terms of reference may be widely shared, it is not clear that a genuinely common foundation exists. That is, while European or Anglo American voters, observers, and even political actors themselves may be happy to use the terms left and right, it is not always that they all share the same meaning of the terms.4 On the one hand, the distinction between left and right is clearly overdetermined. Already in 1979, for example, Klingemann noted the quite pronounced variation both across countries and within countries in the way the distinction was interpreted by the public. Citing data from the eightnation Political Action survey, he pointed out that many respondents were unable to give any meaning to the terms, while others reversed their meaning; some had a more ideological understanding, while others read it simply in partisan terms; and some associated the distinction with particular social groups, while in others it stimulated a moral or affective response (Klingemann 1979, 2301). A few years later, in an analysis of the same eightnation data and the 1976 Eurobarometer data, Sani and Sartori (1983, 3109) showed how leftright orientations tapped into, and correlated strongly with, attitudes towards inequality, change, and the Cold War divide, as well as towards religion, the clergy, big business, and the police. Elsewhere, Evans (1993) found a close relationship between the politics of gender and leftright positioning, suggesting that this newly politicized divide was becoming absorbed within the older terms of reference. This was also soon the case with Green politics, for despite initially seeking to forge a dimension of competition quite removed from conventional left right oppositions, the Green alternative quickly became associated with the broad coalition of the centerleft, both in the perceptions of voters as well as in terms of the strategy followed by the parties (e.g. Inglehart 1987; Mair 2002). In sum, a lot of quite different oppositions appear to feed into and determine leftright identification and positioningturning it into a sort of super issue (van der Eijk et al. 2005, 167; Knutsen 1995). On the other hand, the distinction between left and right is also indeterminate and highly fluid. As is well known, the distinction first came into common usage in the early period of the French Revolution, and referred to the seating arrangements in the Legislative Assembly of 1791, in which
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those more sympathetic to the monarchy sat on the right, while those more opposed to the monarchy sat on the left. That is, the distinction referred to a position rather than to an identity. Thereafter the use of terms spread more widely (Ignazi 2003, 419; Lukes 2003; Benoit and Laver 2006) and, though most usually linked to the division between more radical and more conservative positions, the sets of actors with which it was associated, and hence also the ideological profiles, inevitably shifted. As once leftwing groups were challenged by even more radical opponents, they became more closely identified with the center and right, while their new leftwing rivals, in turn, were sometimes later pushed towards the center by the mobilization of still more radical groups. In other words, although the terms left and right entered ever more common usage, their referents slowly changed as the political spectrum as a whole shifted in a more radical direction through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Thus the once leftwing Venstre, which opposed the more rightwing Hyre in late nineteenthcentury Norway (see above), was itself pushed to the right following the mobilization of the Norwegian Labor party in the early part of the twentieth century, while the Labor party in its turn was pushed to the right following the emergence of the smaller Socialist Left party (venstreparti) in the late 1970s. The development of the leftright dimension over time has in this sense proved comparable to a sandbank, in which a shifting tide uncovered ever more ground on the left, while slowly washing away the space on the right, often leading to a convergence among those conservative forces who still sought to maintain their positions on ever narrower ground. This shift in meanings has always made it difficult to pin down a substantive and enduring policy division that corresponds to left and right positioning. In a brief but wideranging theoretical analysis, Bobbio (1996) attempted to narrow the range of meanings by linking the leftright divide to the more concrete distinction between equality and inequality, associating the left with a demand for greater social equality, and the right with the demand foror at least an acceptance ofgreater inequality (see also Lukes 2003). Lipset and his colleagues also emphasized this association in an early analysis of the psychology of voting: By left we shall mean advocating social change in the direction of greater equalitypolitical, economic or social; by right we shall meanopposing change towards greater equality (quoted by Fuchs and Klingemann 1990, 224). Fuchs and Klingemann's own work on the popular understanding of the terms in three democracies, by contrast, suggested that there was a huge variety of meanings associated with notions of left and right, ranging from those linked to more abstract values
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or ideologies to those linked to specific parties and groups, even though in many cases this variety was reducible to oppositions revolving around the core class divide. The most stable denotation for the leftright divide has come through its longterm association with the class conflict. Even in this case, however, the association is also unbalanced. For while the term left is easily associated with a specific class and with a broad set of political alternatives, the term right is far less clearly delineated. Left in this case, as in Bartolini's (2000, 10) usage, for example, is tied to a specific set of ideas and political and social organizations stemming from the Industrial Revolution and refers to the programmes, ideology, and political values of a distinct group of socialist and communist parties. That is, we use historical or sociological referents, rather than, as in Bobbio's case, a theoretical or philosophical referent: the left is the class left. Beyond this boundary, however, the distinctions become more clouded. The right, or what remains beyond the left, is varied, and includes secular as well as religious groups, and more liberal as well as more conservative orientations. Indeed, if the right extends across the full space that is left vacant by the left, and if identified by default, then it runs the entire gamut from moderate liberalism through to orthodox fascism, and defies organizational, sociological, or programmatic specification. For this reason, various scholars have sought to distinguish an independent center lying between left and right (e.g. Daalder 1984). Others, however, most notably Duverger (1954, 215) have argued that the center as such cannot exist, and that it is simply a meeting place between the moderates of the left and those of the right. If the left can be pinned down to the class left, and to an identity that is shared by traditional socialist and communist parties, it then follows that the leftright dimension is closely linked to socialist vs. nonsocialist (again, the default definition) preferences on economic and welfare policiesthe core concerns of that class left (see also Knutsen 1995). Issues that fall outside this limited set of preferences may well be found to correlate with the leftright dimensionattitudes to gender, to the police, to the international order, and so onbut they would not be seen to form an intrinsic element of that dimension. Budge and Robertson's (1987, 3945) analysis of party programmes and election statements also reached this conclusion, finding that the leftright dimension was primarily concerned with economic policyconflictsgovernment regulation of the economy through direct controls or takeoveras opposed to free enterprise, individual freedom, incentives and economic orthodoxy.
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The point was also reinforced by the expert survey of Huber and Inglehart (1995, tables 3 and 4), who found that in twentyfive of the fortytwo countries surveyed, the leftright divide was seen as revolving principally around issues relating to the economy or to class conflict. Outside Europe, however, as Dalton (2006) observes, and particularly in Asia and Africa, economic divisions can prove relatively independent of leftright divisions, and this again suggests that the linkage visible in Europe is a product of a particular pattern of party political mobilization. In other words, left and right often take on and maintain the particular meanings that proved dominant when mass politics was first institutionalized (see also Fuchs and Klingemann 1990, 233). 3 Blurring Left and Right All of this suggests that we can come close to a stable set of referents, both in terms of actors and in terms of policy preferences, albeit one that is more clearly specified at the left end of the dimension than at the right end, and that proves more coherent in the European context than elsewhere. But, much as proved to be the case with the seating arrangements in the original French Assembl, even this way of conceiving differences between left and right has been recently subject to change and has been undermined by a series of separate developments: first, by the emergence of a new ideological left in many western democracies that has sometimes little to do with the traditional alternatives; second, by the gradual waning of policy opposition between the traditional left and the traditional right, and their increasing convergence on a consensual centre; third, by the changing character of the party alternatives on both left and right, and by their increased emphasis on officeseeking rather than policyseeking goals; fourth, by the somewhat confounding patterns shown in the new alignments that have emerged in postcommunist Europe, in which some of the more conventional positioning associated with left and right has been turned on its head; and finally, by the rise of ostensibly rightwing populist parties which, at the same time, promote the defence of values traditionally associated with the liberal left. Let us look at these more closely. The first important development in this regard is the growth of a distinct ideological left since the late 1960s, which has little in common either organizationally or sociologically with the traditional class left. Although initially emerging as an offshoot of established communist and social democratic parties, this new left was boosted and effectively transformed by the student protests in 1968, and gradually grew into a cluster of radical,
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postmaterialist, and often green political parties. This network remained quite removed from the conventional workingclass organizations that dominated the class left. Kitschelt (1988, 195) has usefully defined this group as leftlibertarian, with political goals which conform neither to traditional conservative nor to socialist programs, but link libertarian commitments to individual autonomy and popular participation, with a leftist concern for equality. The group is not particularly strong, as such, and usually polls no more than 10 percent of the vote in a number of advanced industrial democracies (Mair 2002). But its own distinct profile, both programmatically and electorally, and the force of the competition that it has waged with conventional parties of the left, has undermined the promulgation of class appeals more generally. With time, this new left drifted closer to traditional socialdemocratic parties in both a programmatic and a strategic sense. Green and new left parties now either remain independent and compete on their own, or they join forces with elements of the traditional left. Indeed, to date, despite various attempts to woo their support, these new parties have never aligned themselves with either center or right parties, and have entered executive office through coalition with the left in several established party systems. This results in the emergence of a broad left that proves more powerful in electoral termsas witnessed by the electoral successes of the broad left in Italy in 1996 and 2006, in France in 1997, and in Germany in 1998 but that is much less distinct in ideological or socialstructural terms. Indeed, the broadening of the term left, on the one hand, and the general decline in the cohesiveness of socialstructural identities, on the other, have probably accounted for the generally weak levels of association between social background and leftright orientations in recent years (see van der Eijk, Schmitt, and Binder 2005). The second key development that has undermined the traditional distinctiveness of the left is the narrowing of the differences between left and right, and the increasing convergence on a shared or consensual center. Two related factors are involved. First, the combination of the end of the Cold War, the victory of democracy, and the absence of any serious contemporary alternative to the market economy inevitably leads parties on both left and right to share more and more of their policy priorities. As Perry Anderson (2000, 17) has put it, in this new post1989 world, there are no longer any significant oppositionsthat is, systematic rival outlookswithin the thoughtworld of the West; and scarcely any on a worldscale either. This clearly has impacted on the capacity of the left to maintain a distinct profile.
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Second, the constraints imposed by globalization and, within Europe, by Europeanization, limit the room for maneuver previously enjoyed by many governments, such that the range of national options becomes increasingly limited, with governments more or less obliged to pursue certain policies and desist from others. This is true for governments of both the left and the right, with the result that it becomes less and less easy to distinguish such governments according to their partisan colors. Given the limited options which they face, and given the extent to which decisions are also increasingly externalized to nonmajoritarian agencies or to European or other international decisionmaking institutions, governments tend to become national governments, with party government in policy terms becoming ever less marked. To be sure, these are contested assertions, and a number of recent contributions to the policy literature emphasize the continuing capacity of governments to shape the domestic order (see, for example, Scharpf and Schmidt 2000; Glatzer and Rueschemeyer 2005). Increasingly, however, it seems that it is primarily in the details that partisanship, like the devil, can be found, as well as in the legacies of the past. On the bigger stage, and increasingly so, as well as when heading towards an internationally more competitive future, options are clearly being foreclosed (Iversen 2005). Moreover, while the policies pursued at the national level in one polity may continue to differ from those pursued in another polity, thus limiting convergence between nations, there is often little option within each nation but to pursue an agreed domestic strategy. In this sense also, partisanship may count for little. As Dalton (2006) notes, certainly in the case of most of the advanced postindustrial democracies, it is now the large moderate center that dominates. The third key development that undermines the meaning of left and right is the change in the character of the parties themselvesthe shift towards more presidential as opposed to partygovernmental decision making, the emergence of cartelized party systems, and the professionalization of political leadership more generally (Katz and Mair 1995, 2002; Poguntke and Webb 2005). This promotes the prioritizing of officeseeking as opposed to policyseeking electoral strategies, and leads to a style of competition that is more closely engaged with issues of political management and efficiency rather than with substantive political or ideological oppositions. In this case, it is more difficult for left and right to distinguish themselves, in that the key binary dividing line becomes increasingly that of government vs. opposition, regardless of the partisan hue of either. Left and right orientations may still
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play a role at the mass level in this sort of politics, but their effect is likely to prove much less structured and more contingent (see also van der Eijk, Schmitt, and Binder 2005). The fourth key development is the character of the emerging alignments in the new party systems of postcommunist Europe. At one level, these new alignments clearly echo the more traditional leftright divides found in the older European democraciesthat is, issues involving support for the welfare state, for social protection, and for the rights of workers tend to be promoted by socialist parties, and resisted, or at least downplayed, by more centrist or conservative actors. At another level, however, and particularly on issues relating to the advancement of reform, traditional patterns are sometimes reversed. Socialist partiesusually postcommunist partiestake on the role of defending the remnants of the traditional power structure, and liberal and conservative actors promote the more radical reformist strategies. In other words, while divisions between left and right coincide with those between socialist and liberal on the economy and on equality, they tend to confound that division on issues of democracy and political reform. In this latter case, the right adopts the more radical stance. In some cases, moreover, the latter division predominates, in that economic issues play a secondary role in competition. This has been particularly the case during the early years of democracy among the former Soviet Republics, where support for the status quo and for communism was perceived to be a right wing position (Weels and Klingemann 1998, 78). In this case, then, the normal referents are turned on their head, with the right linked to a reform program which, in the West European context, would normally be associated with the left. As Markowski (1997, 223) has suggested, the fact that the left is identified with change and equality does not square with the East European reality. In fact, most of the impulses for change are associated with reducing equality. The final development is of much more recent origin, and involves the emergence in a number of western democracies of ostensibly rightwing populist parties that appeal to traditional liberaland hence, leftleaning values. The most prominent example is that of the Dutch Pim Fortuyn List (LPF), which took off in a sudden electoral surge just before the election 2002. In many ways, this was a conventional rightwing populist party advocating quite simple solutions to often complex problems, and basing much of its initial appeal on attacking the established political class. Its initial appeal also included antiimmigrant views, however, and was strongly critical of Islamic culture, and it was this latter part of its strategy that was grounded
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on, and justified by a defense of the sort of liberal values that are usually promoted most strongly by the ideological leftthat is, the party stressed the need to protect the rights of women and of gays, and urged a clear separation of church and state (Akkerman 2005). Here too, then, traditional leftright positions become confused, and hence less meaningful, a problem that is compounded by the tendency of elements within the contemporary left to support some of the more conservative elements within the pro Islamic coalition (see Lappin 2006). On these particular issues, traditional leftist antiimperialism is almost wholly reduced to antiAmericanism, such that the conventional positions of the liberal left and the conservative right are sometimes reversed. 4 The Resilience of Left and Right But while all five of these developments may weaken or confuse the meaning and referents of the leftright division, it still remains the most widely used shorthand term that is applied in the comparison of voters, parties, and leadersacross both space and time. There remain two major reasons for this. The first is that it continues to offer the best default option, for even if the leftright dimension has lost much of its substance and potency, it remains unchallenged by any potentially competing set of referents. One possible and influential alternative has been the materialistpostmaterialist dimension which, as initially described by Inglehart (1977; 1984, and chapter in this volume), was seen to cut straight across the conventional leftright divide. This new dimension had a strong generational bias, and was tied to the wider process of cognitive mobilization, so it seemed to have the potential to surpass leftright orientations as a dominant determinant of political behavior in the advanced democracies. At the same time, however, rather than moving away from the leftright imagery, Inglehart explicitly retained the older terms of reference, suggesting that the nature of the policies and support groups of the traditional leftright divide were simply changing, and that a fading economic leftright opposition was being replaced by a newly emerging noneconomic leftright opposition. In other words, although the rise of postmaterialism tended to neutralize the class divide, the effect was not so much to create a wholly new dimension but rather to reshape and redefine an existing divide. Indeed, in one of his most sustained analyses of the relationship between the new politics and the traditional leftright opposition, Inglehart (1984, 689) concluded that the most likely future scenario would be the synthesis of both sets of concerns into a new and more inclusive dimension, in that support
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for postmaterialism on its own could prove selfdefeating.5 Kitschelt's (1995) more recent attempt to specify an alternative scale has also been presented in terms of a new politics dimension, one that polarizes libertarian and authoritarian values and cuts across the traditional leftright economic divide (see also Talshir 2005). Here too, however, it seems that the actors and voters that might be seen to have carved out a distinct position on this dimension also become at least partially absorbed by a more inclusive left right opposition, with leftlibertarian parties often casting in their lot with the more traditional but also adaptable left alternatives, and with the liberal right sometimes moving in a more authoritarian direction in order to head off new and more radical challenges (Akkerman 2005). Most recently, this new dimension has been highlighted once again as a possible explanation for differential party positions towards European integration (Hooghe et al. 2002), though whether it can retain its autonomy in this regard is still open to question. The second reason why leftright continues to be used as a shorthand term is that despite its various ambiguities, it continues to work. That is, predictions based on the leftright proximity of parties have proved relatively accurate in accounting for differential patterns of coalition formation (e.g. Laver and Budge 1992); analyses based on measuring the leftright balance of incumbent governments have proved reasonably robust in accounting for differential policy outcomes (e.g. Klingemann, Hofferbert, and Budge 1994); and, perhaps most importantly in this context, models based on the left right positioning of parties and voters have proved steadily successful in accounting for electoral choice and electoral change. In other words, the leftright divide, albeit not always uniformly specified, continues to serve as a powerful device in both national and crossnational explanations of political behavior, both at mass and elite levels. What is also interesting here is that notions of left and right, however variously defined, appear to retain an independent electoral appeal over above the particular appeal generated by the individual parties that are seen to be a constitutive part of that left and right. In terms of individual voting preferences, for example, van der Eijk and Niemller (1983) broke new ground in showing how voters in multiparty systems can maintain multiple party identifications arrayed within either the left or the right, and how these only rarely cut across this principal divide. A similar behavioral stickiness is visible at the aggregate level, in that the bulk of aggregate electoral volatility that can be measured in postwar Europe has occurred inside the traditional
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class left bloc and inside the center and right, and only a relatively small amount of aggregate electoral instability can be accounted for by transfers across the leftright class cleavage boundary (Bartolini and Mair 1990). In other words, at least within the European context, voter choice is often limited and constrained not just by party preference, but also by a more general sense of identification with left or rightwhether this be motivated by economic considerations, or by identities based on culture, religion, or whatever. As Sani and Sartori (1983, 314) conclude, the leftright yardstick mirrors fairly well the voters' stands on some of the major conflict domains and echoes most of the voters' feeling towards significant political objects. 5 Conclusion It has often been remarked of institutions that if they are to remain the same, as Tancred remarks in Il Gattopardo, then they have to change. This also captures the essence of the leftright orientations. Indeed, it is precisely because of the flexibility of the leftright dimensionor what Gordon Smith (1989) has referred to as its plasticityand the ability of the terms left and right to accommodate new issues and new patterns of competition, that the terms themselves have proved so enduring. Left and right, from their beginning in the French Assembl, as now, are above all positions rather than identities, and they are variously occupied by parties, by voters, and by leaders. For a long century, running from the early mobilization of the first workingclass parties in the latter nineteenth century through to the beginning of the 1980s, the left position was principally occupied by, and took as its primary referent, the class leftsocialist parties and later communist parties, and their more or less shared programs and ideology. In politics, the left was essentially the class left, and the right was everybody else. By the beginning of the 1980s, however, that dominant association had begun to wane, first as a result of the mobilization of a newer and younger ideological left from the 1960s onwards, and later, at the end of the 1980s, as a result of the failure of the communist alternative and the global acceptance of the market economy. Yet, as Inglehart (1984) remarked, this did not mark the erosion in the importance of the leftright dimension as such; rather it involved a recasting of its referents, often away from classspecific issues towards a more generalized advocacy of equality. Even this latter element is now being undermined, however. This is partly as a result of the postcommunist experience, in which the left, and reformism
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more generally, sometimes came to mean an assault on traditional equality policies and structures, and partly as a result of the new populist mobilization, in which ostensibly rightwing parties have taken on the defense of leftleaning liberal values, while a number of forces on the left appear to be vocal in defense of more conservative positions. Should this new confusion continue, then the general utility of the leftright dimension is bound to be questioned. Scholars have favored the leftright dimension since, as noted above, it offers a means of simplifying and comparing multilayered realities. For voters, as Fuchs and Klingemann (1990, 233) have noted, the leftright schema offered something in both structure and substance that facilitated efficient communication and orientation, particularly in complex political environments. If, however, it appears that this shorthand device is itself becoming more complex and opaque, then it may no longer serve the purposes for which it was initially devised.
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Notes:
(*) I would like to thank Zsolt Enyedi and Joost van Spanje for their help in preparing this chapter. The usual disclaimer applies. (1) In the same vein, both American and German Greens sometimes adopted the slogan Neither Left nor Right but Forward, a phrase that was also later taken up by Charles Kennedy, then leader of the British Liberal Democrats. (2) Hyre initially mobilised in the late nineteenth century in opposition to Venstre, a party name which literally translates as the Left. (3) The experts were asked to locate each party on a general leftright dimension, taking all aspects of party policy into account. An earlier and more limited version of this recent expert survey did not include a general
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leftright scale as such, but instead sought to disaggregate the dimension into separate measures of party policy towards public finances, public ownership, social policy, and foreign policy (see Benoit and Laver 2006: Appendix A; Laver and Hunt 1992: 39). (4) Beyond these territories, of course, meanings differ even more dramatically (e.g. Dalton 2006). (5) This seems to have happened in practice. As Inglehart's (1987, 1299) own data later revealed, by the mid1980s a large majority of postmaterialists had fallen in with the left. In 1970, for example, some 40 percent of the group had been supporting parties of the center and right; fifteen years later, some 75 percent were voting for the left. By the end of the century, moreover, those Green parties that had entered into government had done so in coalition with their social democratic rivals. See also Dalton (2006) who cites global figures to conclude that postmaterialists are disproportionately Leftist, and this is the pattern in advanced industrial democracies, Latin America, Asian democracies, and Arab nations.
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The Oxford Handbook of Political Behavior: Peter Mair

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