In Vietnam, a country where the 2001 World Values Survey was one
of the first scientific public opinion surveys ever conducted, and where
many responses seemed to reflect a prudent and almost unanimous
expression of satisfaction with the existing communist regime,
65 percent of respondents located themselves on the extreme right
(at 10), and 86 percent at 8, 9, or 10. In this one case, responses may
be unreliable, or unrelated to the conventional understanding of left
and right in politics.^5
Another striking feature of Figure2.1 is the relative weakness, in
people’s self-placement, of the left compared to the centre and the
right. Psychologist Chris McManus found similar asymmetries in
older European data, with “a moderate but consistent excess of right
over left, there being almost three people on the right for every two on
the left.” In his view, this bias can be attributed to the fact that in all
cultures right is a positive word, associated with “the norm, the dom-
inant, and the good.”^6 In more political terms, one may hypothesize
that the left attracts people who question the established order and
seek change, an attitude that may be less prevalent than a bias in favor
of the status quo, especially in more traditional cultures.^7
Global patterns obviously mask important variations. The left–right
cleavage is first and foremost a political construction and, as such, it
is likely to be quite different from one country to another. Table2.1
presents the mean, the mean deviation and the percentage of non-
response for the different countries included in the 1999–2001 World
Values Survey, in increasing order of mean.
Consider, first, the percentage of respondents who said they did not
know or would not answer the left–right self-placement question.
(^5) The Vietnam survey is presented in Russell J. Dalton and Nhu-Ngoc T. Ong,
“The Vietnamese Public in Transition: The 2001 World Values Survey,” Center
for the Study of Democracy, University of California, Irvine, 2001
(www.democ.uci.edu). Doubts on the quality of responses given in a context
where people may be afraid of speaking against the authorities are raised in:
Minh Nhut Duong, “Grassroots Democracy in Vietnamese Communes,” Centre
for Democratic Institutions, Australian National University, 2004, p. 29
(www.cdi.anu.edu.au). For an even more critical point of view raising doubts
about the entire study, see the transcript of a 2001 interview with Vietnamese
6 dissident Duong Thu Huong (www.vietquoc.com/news2001/na122901.htm).
Chris McManus,Right Hand, Left Hand: The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains,
Bodies, Atoms and Cultures, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2002,
pp. 261–64.
(^7) Inglehart,Modernization and Postmodernization, pp. 70–71, 76–77, and 320.
A worldwide value divide 35