Exploring Ideology in 3D: Economic, Cultural, and Social Dimensions

The left-right spectrum remains the most prominent and widely recognized framework for situating political actors, ourselves, and others within ideological coordinates. Many studies have broken this spectrum into two sub-dimensions: economic and cultural. Building on this framework, we propose a third dimension that captures political positions through varying degrees of a societal vision prioritizing either individual values or collective/community-oriented values, which we term the social dimension. This dimension serves a dual purpose. First, it disentangles state intervention in the economy from the advocacy of more individualistic or collective perspectives of social organization. Second, it separates post-materialist and authoritarian values from collective and individual values, respectively. We implement our approach by leveraging large language models to analyze textual data from the Party Manifesto Project. By validating this third dimension, we aim to provide a deeper understanding of political parties' ideological positions, offering a robust predictor for various political phenomena, including voting behavior, legislative roll-call votes, and public policy outcomes.