Toward a Common Dimensionality in West European Policy Spaces

Research on democratic government is currently hampered by the fact that, while theoretical work usually hypothesizes multidimensional policy spaces, empirical researchers have failed to reach a consensus on which dimensions characterize West European policy spaces (apart from the left-right dimension). In this paper, I present evidence that the expert ratings of political parties from Laver and Hunt's (1992) expert survey and the coding of party manifestos undertaken by the Comparative Manifestos Project both suggest the existence of three common dimensions in West European democratic systems: left-right, `social control', and post-materialism. I also show that these dimensions are not characteristic of just a few systems but rather divide parties significantly in most or all of the 16 countries examined.