New Study: 'Left vs. Right' Fails to Explain Politics in Most Countries

To find out what actually divides societies, researchers harmonized 1,299 items from nine cross-national survey programs and 23 national election studies, placing 1.14 million people from 141 countries on four dimensions: social liberalism, economic left-right, democratic commitment, and anti-elite sentiment. The result: a single left-right axis does not describe political division in most of the world. The median within-country correlation between a person's social and economic positions is just -0.015. Instead, societies differ in what they are divided about, and by region: European countries divide most often over social liberalism, East Asian and Arab countries over democratic commitment, Latin American countries over economic left-right, and African countries over anti-elite sentiment. Of the 81 countries measured on all four dimensions, 39 are most divided on a dimension no left-right scale would capture. Most political disagreement lies within countries rather than between them, at 58 to 88 percent of the variance. Ideological constraint holds in only nineteen of the eighty-three countries the authors could test, most strongly in the United States at +0.70, where it is concentrated among the politically attentive. The authors argue that understanding political conflict requires asking not how polarized a society is but what it is polarized about — and they released their item bank and fitted parameters so respondents from any future survey can be placed on the same scale without re-estimation, once that survey's items are harmonized to the bank.