The same Left-Right across the Atlantic? Comparing the dimensionality of the issue space across seven countries

While the literature has so far suggested a different relevance and meaning of left-right ideology in Western Europe compared to the United States, we test the hypothesis that citizens in such different contexts share a common spatial structure for the organization of policy issues. The question concerning a comparative assessment of the role of left-right orientations is particularly salient in this moment, when many western democracies are contemporaneously facing growing inequalities, which might provide a possible explanation for such unprecedented transatlantic ideological uniformity. We use data from an ad hoc CAWI survey conducted by Yougov in Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the US. The data contain a set of twelve policy issues, uniform across the seven countries, where we measure self- and party placement for each of the relevant parties in that system. The issues cover a wide range of policy dimensions, including welfare, immigration, gay rights, job market regulation, and income inequality. We show that in all of the seven countries a traditional left-right dimension emerges, linking together at the individual level progressive views on social and immigration policies with pro-labor stances on the economy – and socially conservative with pro-market economic views. We finally find that voter-party proximity on this ideological dimension is an important predictor of party preference and vote choice for the different parties.