however, suggests a different reading. Even though the scale goes
from 1 to 10 and has a middle point at 5.5, it is most likely that
respondents who want to locate themselves at the centre see 5 as the
middle and choose it accordingly. In this perspective, we would rather
say that 24.7 percent of the world’s respondents place themselves on
the left, 30.3 percent at the centre, and 45.2 percent on the right. Our
interpretation is indeed confirmed when World Values Survey data is
compared with other survey results.^4
Results from the World Values Survey suggest that all over the
world respondents understand the notions of left and right and are
able to apply them to interpret their own position. World respondents
also form a basically normal distribution, the most important cat-
egories being clustered around the centre. The World Values Survey
mean for the world is 5.66, and only Vietnam sticks out, with an
average that is more than 2 points away from this global mean.
(^64)
8.9 8.8 9.7
13.8
3.6
7.4 7.7
30.3
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
45
50
12345678910
LEFT
% of population
Self-placement on political scale RIGHT
Figure 2.1Left–right self-placement in the world, 1999–2001
Source:World Values Survey.
(^4) We compared the World Values Survey data with data from another
international team, the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems (CSES). The
CSES used a 0 to 10 scale, instead of 1 to 10, to evaluate the left–right self-
placement of respondents in 32 countries of Asia, Eastern and Western Europe,
South and North America, and Oceania, between 1996 and 2001. In the CSES
survey, 33.5 percent of the respondents located themselves at 5 (compared to
30.3 percent in the World Values Survey). When we combined the 0 and 1
positions of the CSES scale to have the same number of categories on each side
of the median, the correlation coefficient between the two distributions equaled
0.96. Seewww.cses.org.
34 Left and Right in Global Politics