What does ideological self-placement manifest? Structural associations with basic values and issue positions

Ideological self-placement often functions as a heuristic in public discourse to infer individuals’ deeper values and issue positions. However, research suggests that the relationship among ideological self-placement, values, and issue positions may be more nuanced and less strong than these heuristics suggest. While prior research has typically examined pairwise relationships along the left-right ideological dimension with either values or issue positions, our study aimed to go beyond pairwise associations and generate a more comprehensive understanding of ideological self-placement. Specifically, we investigated ideological self-placement (left-right, conservative-progressive), basic values, and issue positions jointly and accounted for their multidimensional structure. Using data from 1006 Dutch residents during the 2023 Dutch general election, we employed two complementary approaches to assess these relationships. Multidimensional Scaling analysis (MDS) revealed that the three constructs shared a coherent two-dimensional structure and conceptual similarities, mirroring how ideological self-placements are used in public discourse. However, correlation analyses indicated that the actual strength of these relationships was relatively weak. The contrast between the structural alignment and weak correlations adds important nuance to research on the relationships among ideological self-placement, values, and issue positions. Our findings suggest that public inferences based on ideological self-placement capture meaningful patterns, but the relationships among these constructs are more modest than public discourse might assume.