Iran, France, the Russian Federation, and Slovenia have means below 5,
and at the other, Algeria, El Salvador, Venezuela, the Philippines,
Taiwan, Indonesia, Puerto Rico, Colombia, the Dominican Republic,
Mexico, Tanzania, Bangladesh, and Vietnam are above 6. In Spain,
for instance, 40 percent of respondents locate themselves between 1
and 4, and only 26 percent pick scores between 6 and 10. In Taiwan,
by contrast, merely 4 percent of citizens chose 1, 2, 3, or 4, and
70 percent opted for a score of 6 or above.
Overall, there are more left-leaning countries in Eastern and Western
Europe and more right-leaning ones in Latin America and Asia. This
result seems in line with Inglehart’s characterization of Latin America
and Asia as poorer, more traditional societies.^11 The presence of many
outliers, however, warns us against sweeping cultural accounts. Chile
and the Republic of Korea, for instance, have left-leaning scores,
whereas Finland and the Czech Republic have rightward ones. As
political categories, it needs to be emphasized, the left and the right
are always constructed through a country’s history.
Using a different dataset, Pippa Norris finds a strong correlation
between left–right self-placement and voting behavior.^12 Given her
theoretical preoccupations, Norris tends to assume that personal
ideology determines voting, which is not wrong, of course, at the
individual level. In a broader social perspective, however, left–right
self-placement can also be understood as reflective of the varying
success parties have had in defining the relevant political alternatives
for a country’s electorate. Norris also lends support to this comple-
mentary hypothesis, with her findings on the impact of electoral
rules. Compared to majoritarian or combined electoral systems, pro-
portional representation systems give parties less incentive to adopt
catch-all, centrist platforms, and they tend to make political cleavages
more pronounced, accentuating the difference between the left and
the right.^13 Figure2.2 illustrates this conclusion, with the contrast-
ing distributions of left–right self-placement in first-past-the-post
Britain and in proportional representation Netherlands. Also included
(^11) Inglehart,Modernization and Postmodernization, p. 335.
(^12) Pippa Norris,Electoral Engineering: Voting Rules and Political Behavior,
Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 104–19. Norris used the data provided
by the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems team (see footnote 4, this
chapter).
(^13) Ibid., pp. 119–23.
40 Left and Right in Global Politics