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Sunday, February 05, 2006
The dimensionality of politics Libertarians (another unusual minority) also are vigorously opposed to a single Left/Right dimension. They are always promoting a two dimensional description of political attitudes. The political compass and the "World's Smallest Political Quiz" are popular applications of such theories. Below is one example of such a description:  Unfortunately, though I am a libertarian, I am also an academic who has specialized in surveys of political attitudes and I regret to report that we seem to be pretty stuck with the old Left/Right schema. So let me give you a quick tour of the academic literature: Academics have been talking about this for a long time. Various authors (e.g. Eysenck, 1954; Rokeach, 1960; Kerlinger, 1967) have proposed that an adequate description of world politics really needs two dimensions. They propose, for example, that the Left-Right dimension be supplemented by an Authoritarian/Permissive dimension. So that democratic Leftists and Rightists are Permissive Leftists and Rightists whereas Communists and Fascists are Authoritarian Leftists and Rightists. Although such proposals have considerable intuitive appeal, they do not, unfortunately, seem to coincide with how people's attitudes are in fact organized when we do surveys of public opinion. It is very easy to find people's attitudes polarizing on a Left/Right dimension but nobody has yet managed to show in a satisfactory way any polarization of attitudes on the postulated second dimension (Ray, 1980 & 1982 -- online here and here). The summary from my 1982 paper published in The Journal of Social Psychology reads as follows: The Eysenck/Rokeach/Kerlinger theory that social attitudes are two dimensional suffers from disagreement about what the second dimension should be called and how it should be measured. The present work tests the proposal that there is a dimension of libertarian/authoritarian attitudes orthogonal to radicalism/conservatism. A set of items designed to maximize the likelihood of such dimensions appearing was administered to a random postal sample of Californians. No real evidence of the proposed second dimension appeared. It was concluded that authoritarianism is a personality variable only. "Orthogonal" is statistician-speak for "unrelated" or "at right-angles to". The correlations observed in the data showed that people who agreed with one conservatism statement, no matter how it was conceived, tended to agree with all other conservatism statements. Similarly for expresions of Leftist views. But "authoritarian" or "libertarian" statements did not cluster together at all. Your being a libertarian on one issue did not mean that you would tend to be libertarian on other issues. So it is solely the Left/Right dimension on which people in general in fact polarize. Those are the facts, Ladies and Gents. Enjoy other theories but do get in touch with the real world at times too. (For more postings from me, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and DISSECTING LEFTISM) Blogger News Network is advertiser-supported, and your visits to our advertisers help BNN to meet its expenses. Help keep us afloat! posted by JR at 6:34 AM |
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