CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2011
| Author | Tyrala, Michael |
|---|---|
| Title | Left-Right Self-Placement in Western and Eastern Europe Is left-right self-placement an accurate mechanism reflecting the publics value positions? |
| Summary | While increasingly popular within electorates, the left-right discourse has become a stagnating area of political science, with comparative studies about the meaning of left and right to voters being particularly outdated. This thesis attempts to provide an overview of the general left-right discussion from the theoretical perspective of the related globalization literature and the typology of theories about the changing meaning of left and right – irrelevance, persistence, pluralisation and transformation. The main argument is that while the use of left-right self-positioning is on the rise, it increasingly fails to be a mechanism that accurately describes the value positions of those who use it. This is partly due to its sheer complexity, emanating from the historical ‘custom’ of inclusion of all new issue areas under its wings. This argument’s validity is tested by analyzing some of the most significant changes that Western societies have encountered in recent decades related to rapid economic globalization. If it is true that the socio-economic dimension has risen among the European publics so much as to make it by far the most visible aspect of society, as is argued here, it should also be the value dimension most strongly related to left-right self-placement. The socio-economic dimension is hypothesized to be particularly salient among the electorates of Central and Eastern Europe thanks to their unique overall position after the dissolution of the USSR and their gradual entry into the EU. The hypotheses are tested by way of bivariate and multivariate regression anlayses, with the dependent variable being the left-right self-placement of European electorates, and the independent variable being a battery of questions organized according to the different value dimensions of the left-right discourse (religious, socio-economic, postmaterialist, nationalist) into indices for each of the studied countries. Compared against the theoretical perspectives and older empirical studies, findings show that left-right self-placement’s relationship with the publics’ value positions is further decreasing. |
| Supervisor | Tóka, Gábor |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2011/tyrala_michael.pdf |
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