is the striking case of Israel, another country with a proportional
representation system and one of the highest mean deviations in our
sample (note that, for the sake of presentation, the vertical scale varies
from one case to another).
One should note, as well, that averages mask important variations
in the strength of the center, which ranges from very low scores in
Vietnam (3 percent), Israel (13 percent), Nigeria (14 percent),
Tanzania (15 percent), Albania (16 percent), Uganda (17 percent),
and Algeria (18 percent), to about half the electorate in Hungary
(52 percent), Slovenia (51 percent), Croatia (51 percent), Pakistan
(50 percent), Bosnia and Herzegovina (49 percent), India (47 percent),
Latvia (45 percent), and the United Kingdom (45 percent). Present
and relevant everywhere, the left and the right clearly tell different
stories about the political life of each society.
Divided over equality
The universal prevalence of the left–right labels does not prove that
they mean the same thing everywhere, let alone that they reflect the
coherent values one expects from people on the left and on the right.
The literature on public behavior and voting does suggest that left and
right self-placement corresponds to predictable patterns of attitudes
and electoral preferences.^14 This literature, however, is usually based
on a smaller group of countries than that presented here, and it is
often guided by questions only tangentially related to the left–right
cleavage.
This section considers the world as a whole to test whether, in a
global perspective, left–right self-placement truly corresponds to the
expected attitudes about equality, government intervention, or social
justice. Table2.2 presents the relationships between a person’s ideo-
logical stance and a number of relevant questions. All these questions
asked respondents to locate themselves on a scale from 1 to 10, 1 to
5, or 1 to 4. The answers can therefore easily be correlated with
(^14) Ronald Inglehart,Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society, Princeton
University Press, 1989, pp. 292–93; Inglehart,Modernization and
Postmodernization, p. 320; Russell J. Dalton,Citizen Politics: Public Opinion
and Political Parties in Advanced Industrial Democracies, third edition,
Chatham, NJ, Chatham House, 2002, pp. 201–03; Norris,Electoral
Engineering, p. 118.
42 Left and Right in Global Politics