Do citizens perceive an empty left-authoritarian quadrant? Citizen perceptions of parties’ positions in a multi-dimensional space
Ruth Dassonneville-Université de Montréal, Patrick Fournier-Université de Montréal, and Zeynep Somer-Topcu-University of Texas at Austin
Given that few parties in advanced democracies take positions in the left- authoritarian quadrant of a two-dimensional space, citizens that combine eco- nomically left and socioculturally conservative attitudes have been described as lacking representation. We do not know, however, whether left-authoritarian voters perceive this lack of representation themselves. We address this question by using a novel dataset that includes perceptual measures of parties’ posi- tions across economic and sociocultural issues in ten countries, allowing us to compare the objective and subjective distances between voters and parties. We find that left-authoritarians are objectively the least well represented ideological group—in terms of the party system overall and in terms of the party they vote for—but this gap appears to be unnoticed by left-authoritarians. Our analyses furthermore uncover that left-libertarians are also relatively underrepresented objectively, but do not perceive this gap themselves. In showing large differences between the objective and subjective gaps in representation, our work calls into question research that has argued that objective gaps in representation trigger political disaffection.
This content has been updated on 26 September 2024 at 7 h 54 min.
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