Perceptual Spaces of Party Politics in Six European Countries

The way people think of politics on their own, without reference to dimensions that have been pre-defined by the analyst, has been rarely looked into. In surveys, respondents are commonly asked to evaluate parties on given dimensions, most often the left-right dimension. This forces them to think in terms of a spatial metaphor, which might not reflect their complete understanding of political space. The current paper focusses on a method of data collection and analysis that would enable to assess perceptions of party politics without relying on pre-defined dimensions. It uses pairwise comparisons of parties as a survey instrument and multidimensional scaling and property fitting to uncover the true underlying spatial structure that people have in mind thinking about parties. It relies on a nationally representative face-to-face survey data from Estonia (n=1000) as well as online panel data from Estonia plus five other counties (Germany, Netherlands, Denmark, Poland, Czech Republic; n=350). The objective of the paper is first, to assess the utility and possibilities of this method for the inductive analysis of political spaces and second, to give an account of how respondents in these countries understand their political landscapes. Is there evidence of a common political space or is there a diversity of different understandings? What are the dimensions that structure these spaces? Is there a clustering of parties across coalition-opposition lines? These are some of the questions that this paper will aim to answer.