A summary indicator providing a snapshot of political opinions when variables are ordinal

This paper deals with the evaluation of the relative performance of different groups when the achievements of the members of a group are summarised by the relative distribution of these achievements across various ordered categories. After reviewing a previous attempt by Herrero and Vilar to deal with this issue, we propose to adopt an approach introduced recently by Apouey, Silber and Xu who derived a measure of achievement that, in the case of ordinal variables, takes account of both the inequality and the location of a distribution. Their approach is then applied to the analysis of political opinions, using the International Social Survey Programme for the year 2009. We compare questions dealing with respectively the need for the government to reduce income inequality, the duty of the government to help poor and unemployed individuals and the inequality of opportunity in health and education. It appears that the correlations obtained for our summary indicator of political opinions, based on the data covering 41 countries, reflect quite well the distinction we made between the three types of questions on political opinions. In addition, regression results show that generally the higher the inequality in a country, the more likely it is that people will approve government intervention aimed at reducing inequality and poverty.