Europe’s Common Left-Right Space

This study presents a new method to estimate the locations of voters, parties, and European political groups in the same ideological space using left-right placements by voters. We apply our method to the 2009 European Election Survey and demonstrate that the improvement in party estimates that one gains from fixing various survey bias issues is significant. Our scaling strategy provides left-right positions of voters and party positions for 162 parties — more than traditional expert survey studies currently provide. We test the convergent validity of these positions in multiple ways and demonstrate how rescaled voter and party positions can be used in cross-national research. Acknowledgements: Financial support for this project was provided by the SFB 884 on the “Political Economy of Reforms” at the University of Mannheim. We thank Dominic Nyhuis and Steffen Zittlau for excellent research assistance.