The Use of the Left-Right Scale in Individual's Voting Decisions

In modern politics, the left-right divide has served as a political schema classifying ideologies that has allowed parties to communicate with voters and the latter to orient themselves in a complex political world. Although the left-right scale has been the most extensive instrument used to identify party positions in the political arena, we have little comparative evidence of the way individuals use it in their voting decisions. We analyze the variance of individuals' perceptions of parties' positions on this scale to explore the usefulness of this metric for evaluating political parties and for voting decisions in comparative perspective. Our results show that parties that are ambiguous in their stance on the LR scale attract lower preferential evaluations from individual respondents and, as expected, individuals' level of misrepresentation of a party's left-right position is inversely related to their preference for that party. Not surprisingly, voters like less the parties about which they have less or noisier information. But we also find that ambiguity is strongly related to the likelihood of individuals voting for the proximate party. More uncertainty about where parties stand appears to encourage voters to bet on the higher probability that the party may be closer to them than where the electorate perceives it