Note On the Use of the Left-Right Dimension

T 0 OBTAIN precise information on the political perceptions and verbalattitudes of a subject, the surest way is, of course, through lengthy tests and questioning; however, for the sake of economy-intellectual as well as financial-we usually resort to short cuts such as asking party affiliation, broad ideological preference, or left-right position. But, even when we have gathered detailed information, we still need to define an individual by a few characteristics or preferably a single characteristic, in order to facilitate handling of data, a characteristic alike to the mean of a distribution in that it marks the ideal central point of an individual’s scatter of opinions. Left and right are often used as such markers. How good a discriminator are they? How do they compare with party prefer-ence? Can a left to right dimension, beyond the nominal and the ordinal, lend itself to interval scale measurement? at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 15, 2016cps.sagepub.comDownloaded from [482] Partial answers to these questions were obtained from a questionnaire survey of French, American, and Canadian students in social science department. 1 The respondent was asked to locate himself as well as names of politicians, states, and selected political concepts in a left to right space presented visually as extending from the left side to the right side of the questionnaire’s page.2 The words to be classified were listed in the middle of the page, one under the other. The subject had to draw an arrow starting from the center and extending as far as he wished toward either side (see figure 1).3