A Survey Experiment on the Contents and Understanding of the Left-Right Dimension

When people talk about politics, they employ the notions of Left and Right quite intuitively. Left-Right is widely thought of in political science as an `information shortcut' which summarizes different issues and thus allows judgments about the positions of political actors without having to learn about each and every issue. Political parties arguably play an important role for how this mechanism works on the individual level because by combining different idea elements in their platforms, they provide the context within which citizens make up their minds about politics. Still, it is not exactly clear what information the Left-Right scheme contains and how it summarizes this information, more so since empirical party positions often do not align unidimensionally. While existing research stresses the `high absorptive capacity' of Left-Right when it comes to its issue content, there seems to be little empirical knowledge on what it actually means to voters, and even less work on how they handle it in the face of multidimensional issue contexts. To provide more insight on these aspects, this paper reports the results of a survey experiment designed to clarify how citizens understand and construct ideological positions. I present participants of a German online access panel with vignette questions, containing hypothetical party manifestos that vary in the issue positions they combine and whether or not they create cross-cutting issue emphases. I use conjoint analysis to examine if and how they are able to place these manifestos in a consistent, transitive left-right order.