The multidimensional nature of party competition

Abstract

Left—right is a convenient tool for summarizing the complexities of voter—party linkages in a manner that is comparable across contexts and that avoids the pathologies of preference aggregation in higher dimensions. Yet several reasons exist to believe that left—right is increasingly incapable of summarizing political behavior: the inability of left—right to capture policy concerns beyond economics and religion; the accumulation of new issue concerns over time; pressures for policy convergence stemming from the globalization of the world economy; and the decline of social cleavages that historically structured vote choice. This paper shows that parties are indeed talking about a growing number of issues, they are converging on the left—right scale, and the ideological cues they are sending to voters are growing increasingly ambiguous. Social democratic parties have in particular been affected by these trends.