What determines the left-right positions of voters? How many and which dimensions of value orientations underlie the voters’ left-right self-placement? Do voters and parties act in the same or at least similar ideological space? These questions are the concern of this proposal and are of interest both for studies of voting behavior as well as for comparing democracies. For the voters attitudes I will rely on the data of the EVS, for parties’ position on the Chapel Hill expert survey (Hooghe et al 2010). As it is today widely uncontested that on the ‘demand side’ of politics voters can be placed in an at least two-dimensional space combining ‘new’ and ‘old’ politics (e.g. Flanagan 1987; Kitschelt 1994; Knutsen 2009), there is still an ongoing debate whether on the ‘supply side’ of politics parties place themselves in an one- or more dimensional space. For instance, van den Brug and van Spanje (2009) criticize on the base of an expert survey the findings of Kriesi et al (2008) in favor of a two-dimensional policy space on the party side.
Using several indicators based on the EVS data I first analyze voters’ ideological space. An exploratory principal component analysis reveals that (a) a Morality vs. Technology Dimension is important in each European country, (b) in each country an “Anti-Immigration”- Dimension exists, (c) environmental protection forms an own dimension, and (d) Libertarian-Authoritarian values are not clearly linked to „New Politics”. Then, using the Chapel Hill expert survey (Hooghe et al 2010), I show that without doubt there exists also on the supply side an at least two-dimensional policy space. Finally I demonstrate that on the aggregate level at least two-dimensional expert data deliver good predictions on voters’ left-right placement, which is in all cases superior to one-dimensional analysis of the political space.
