explaining the salience of left-right ideology in postindustrial democracies. timothy hellwig

8/3/2019 Explaining the Salience of Left-right Ideology in Postindustrial Democracies. Timothy Hellwig

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Explaining the salience of leftright ideology in postindustrial

democracies: The role of structural economic change

TIMOTHY HELLWIG

Department of Political Science, University of Houston, USA

Abstract. Does leftright ideology structure electoral competition? While many studies

show that ideology is a powerful determinant of party choice, a growing number of scholars

claim that the salience of left and right has declined in recent decades. These contrastingviews motivate a consideration of whether the salience of the leftright dimension varies

across political parties and national contexts. Drawing on recent advances in the study of the

welfare state, this article argues that just as policy appeals expressed in the language of left

and right crystallised during a period of economic change, changes in the organisation of

postindustrial economies should weaken the leftright bases of competition. Analyses of 87

parties in 16 parliamentary democracies show that occupational heterogeneity in postindus-

trial economies indicated by employment in the private service sector and in industries

exposed to international competition reduces the salience of the leftright dimension for

the vote. The implications of study findings for future work on policy responsiveness and

electoral change in advanced capitalist democracies are discussed.

Introduction

To what extent does leftright ideology structure policy competition in

advanced industrial democracies? By assimilating the many issues that appear

before the electorate, the language of left and right provides parties andvoters with a shared policy space and students of politics with a powerful tool

for evaluating elitemass correspondence over policy. It should come as little

surprise, therefore, that studies of many electoral contexts find that leftright

ideology ranks as one of if not the largest determinants of party choice.

These findings appear inconsistent with research heralding a decline in

the salience of leftright orientations in many advanced industrial societies

(Inglehart 1990; Kitschelt 1994; Kitschelt & Rehm 2005; Kriesi 1998; Kriesi

et al. 2006; Manza & Brooks 1999). According to the latter perspective, the

utility of the leftright continuum for structuring competition in established

party systems has waned for some time, so much so that traditional socio-

economic cleavages now risk becoming secondary in importance to other

dimensions of policy contestation.

European Journal of Political Research 47: 687709, 2008 687doi: 10.1111/j.1475-6765.2008.00778.x

2008 The Author(s)

Journal compilation 2008 (European Consortium for Political Research)

Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,

MA 02148, USA


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While it is commonplace to show that ideology in terms of left and right

influences the voters decision, no research has directly examined whether

the salience of the leftright dimension varies across political parties or elec-

toral contexts and, if so, whether this variance can be explained systemati-

cally. An understanding of the salience of leftright appeals, however, is

important for several reasons. First, a single encompassing dimension of

political contestation helps the voter sift through the many issues in election

campaign and select the party that comes closest to his or her own prefer-

ences. Second, thinking in terms of left and right provides a concise means

for elites to relate to one another. In this way, it serves as a coordinating

device for avoiding cyclical majorities. Perhaps most important, the existence

of a salient super-dimension is normatively appealing. To select parties on

substantive policy grounds rather than on less tangible factors like personalappeals requires that voters evaluate the policy positions of competing

elites in relation to each other. When parties become inseparable on policy

grounds, substantive political representation is likely to suffer as a result

(Pitkin 1987: 210213).

The purpose of this article is to examine the salience of left and right in

light of the now well-documented changes in advanced capitalist society.

My argument is that the salience of political ideology is a function of socio-

economic heterogeneity. Just as the socio-economic leftright divide solidi-fied in what were relatively homogeneous societies, so has leftright

ideologys salience declined as electorates have become more diverse. I iden-

tify two sources of heterogeneity: occupational change and dependence on

world markets. These factors increase the heterogeneity of the electorates

preferences and, in turn, diminish the utility of single-dimensional policy

voting. The argument is tested using representative sample surveys from 16

parliamentary democracies. Consistent with expectations, results demon-

strate that the salience of the leftright dimension is weaker for thoseemployed in services or in traded industries. Study findings carry implica-

tions for voting behaviour, party strategies and electoral change more

broadly.

The next section reviews the ways past research has measured and used

leftright ideology to understand political competition. Building on ideas that

new politics issues pose a challenge to the dominance of traditional policy

appeals, I then advance the claim that two structural factors deindustrialisa-

tion and globalisation may account for whether voter decisions continue to

be made in leftright terms. The fourth section reports results from an empiri-

cal analysis of recent national-level elections from 16 democracies. I conclude

with a discussion of study implications for future work on electoral change in

postindustrial societies.

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The salience of leftright ideology

The salience of political ideology for structuring political competition raises at

least three questions: How do we measure it; what does it mean; and how

important is it for the things we care about? Regarding the first question,

scholars have measured leftright placements using three principal means:

from surveys of party experts, from public opinion surveys and from party

manifestos. Internal validity checks and comparisons across data sources have

found these measures to do a satisfactory job of capturing policy-based politi-

cal competition, particularly in the developed democracies (Benoit & Laver

2006; Budge et al. 2001; Gabel & Huber 2000; Huber 1989; Huber & Inglehart

1995; Marks 2006; Warwick 2002).1 For empirical studies of representation, this

means that the leftright scale can be used as a kind of super issue dimensionto assess the preferences of citizens and policy makers. The leftright dimen-

sion also has been used to examine how party strategies affect vote outcomes

and in conjunction with other factors like partisan loyalties or performance

evaluations to judge the relative contribution of policy considerations to

party choice (e.g., Blais et al. 2004; Duch & Stevenson 2008; Lewis-Beck 1988:

84). In short, leftright ideology is widely shown to have a strong influence on

the voters decision.

Less attention has been given to the content of the leftright scale. Manyanalysts shy away from confronting the issue of content and instead leave it to

the individual respondent (either a respondent on a public opinion survey

or an expert tasked to judge party positions). Nearly all empirical studies,

however, conclude that party placements along the leftright scale are struc-

tured to a great extent by positions on state involvement in the economy.

Huber and Inglehart (1995) find that economic issues were cited as the most

important component of the leftright dimension in all but five of the 42

countries they examined. In a secondary analysis of Laver and Hunts (1992)expert judgments, Warwick (2002) shows that the leftright scale loads most

strongly on a set of economic issue items. And analyses of Markss and Steen-

bergens (1999) expert survey finds that their general leftright scale correlates

highly with an explicitly economic leftright scale (r= 0.92), indicating that the

two scales tap the same policy orientations for most parties. All told, evidence

from empirical investigations support Downs (1957) claim that party compe-

tition takes place along a leftright dimension based on disagreements over

the scope of government intervention in the economy.

Finally, researchers have been concerned with the third question about the

importance of left and right. A key question in comparative political

economy, for example, is whether and how government partisanship matters

for actual policy outcomes (e.g., Rueda 2005). This research programme

the salience of leftright ideology 689

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assumes that party policy preferences can be assimilated onto a single left

right dimension. Likewise, studies of dyadic representation often employ left

right orientations to link citizens to elites (e.g., Miller et al. 1999). As Pierce

(1999: 30) puts it, the issue to which [voters] are likely to give high pri-

ority . . . is the ideological super-issue. . . . Voterparty congruence on more

specific issues, even those that are traditionally linked to the ideological

dimension, is much more limited.

The salience of leftright ideology, however, has been shown to be in

decline in Western democracies for some time. Some 25 years ago, for example,

only a third of French respondents agreed that ideas of right and left are

obsolete. By 2002, however, fully 60 per cent believed this to be the case (TNS

Sofres 2007). Instead of old socio-economic, class-based conflicts easily sum-

marised by left and right, scholars argue that an alternative dimension of policycompetition tapping non-economic, non-class-based concerns is growing

in salience. This alternative dimension has been variously termed post-

materialist-materialist (Inglehart 1990), libertarian-authoritarian (Flanagan

& Lee 2003; Kitschelt 1994; Kitschelt & Rehm 2005), green/alternative/

libertarian traditional/authoritarian/nationalism (Hooghe et al. 2002) and

integration-demarcation (Kriesi et al. 2006). As evinced by the various labels

employed, there is some disagreement over this second dimensions policy

content. Yet among its proponents, there is no disagreement that these issuesare distinct from the traditional socio-economic divisions associated with the

traditional leftright divide.

The emergence of a new set of issues carries several implications, including

the fortunes of class/mass political parties, the emergence of anti-system

parties, and, in general, the increase in electoral volatility and, possibly, elec-

toral dealignment. Have changes in electorates diminished the utility of the

leftright dimension as a coordinating device connecting voters to parties?

And if so, what explains variations in the salience of the leftright dimension?The next section advances the claim that the utility of a single super-dimension

for structuring party choice can be related to the diversity of the electorate

and, moreover, that this diversity can be attributed in part to structural change

in advanced capitalism.

Explaining the salience of the leftright dimension:

Socio-economic heterogeneity

Political parties may be conceived as group-based organisations charged with

maximising the utility of their constituencies. These constituencies have tradi-

tionally been characterised by inter-group differences in the direction of policy

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and by intra-group homogeneity over the salience (rank order) of policy

priorities. If the electorate is composed of two groups (e.g., the working class

and the middle class), delineated according to preferences in a single issue area

(e.g., concerns for redistribution), then a single leftright dimension provides

order to policy competition. However, if either the range of between-group

preferences over the direction of policy declines or the diversity of within-

group preferences over issue salience rises, then masselite congruence based

on a single dimension will weaken.

To illustrate, consider two ideal-type scenarios. In both cases, the parties

announce a set of coherent policy proposals known to all. In the first scenario,

all voters are assumed to have identical rankings in terms of the salience of

the issues. The only difference among citizens rests in the direction of their

positions. These directions define the parties constituencies. Here, the votersdecision problem simplifies to a task of identifying the party closest to his or

her preferred position on the most salient issue. All other issues are collapsed

into a dominant policy dimension or are discounted such that their effect on

the voters choice is indistinguishable from zero. In this scenario, a single

dimension works well for structuring electoral competition.The issue environ-

ment changes, however, when the salience of preferences within the party

constituencies becomes more diverse. Some voters may be concerned prima-

rily with issues of economic equality and economic efficiency, while others caremainly about issues that are not explicitly economic- or class-based, such as

health care or the environment. In this second scenario, this diversity of con-

siderations strains the capacity of parties and voters to communicate using a

single policy dimension.

A consideration of the role of voter heterogeneity coupled with a Down-

sian understanding that the content of the leftright dimension is dominated

by socio-economic/class-based concerns directs our attention on factors

expected to contribute to socio-economic heterogeneity. I identify two suchfactors: the expansion of the service sector and the exposure of national

economies to world markets.

Expansion of the service sector

The policies that emerged in the years following the Second World War were

a product of the conditions prevailing at the time a time in which economies

were organised for producing and competing in the manufacturing sector.

Industrialisation provided a vocabulary for mass politics as well. The working

class identified with positions on the left side of the continuum, while employ-

ers and capital owners identified with the right. These positions were linked

closely to policy-oriented parties. As Hibbs (1977: 1470) put it: Although the


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importance of socioeconomic status as a basis of electoral cleavage varies

substantially across party systems, the mass constituencies of political parties

in most advanced industrial democracies are distinguished. . . by class, income

and related socioeconomic characteristics. The implication was that party

issue positions could be readily arrayed along the traditional leftright spec-

trum. In this way, the economic leftright dimension crystallised in lock step

with the rise of industrial societies. Election outcomes were shaped by collec-

tive preferences for state involvement in industry and protecting the rights of

the industrial working class, on the one hand, and preferences for free markets

and limited government, on the other (Borre 2001).

In recent decades, however, economies have experienced large-scale struc-

tural change. While social classes have never acted as monolithic entities,

recent changes have made it particularly dubious to assume preference homo-geneity within class groups. Changes include the decline in union power,

decreasing employment in manufacturing, the growth of Post-Fordist produc-

tion technologies and the outsourcing of product inputs. A defining feature of

advanced capitalism, then, has been the decline of the industrial working class

and its replacement by the white-collar service sector.As Figure 1 shows (solid

line), the average share of workers employed in the private service sector

relative to the public and industrial sectors of the economy has grown steadily

over the past 30 years in OECD countries.2The effects of deindustrialisation range beyond the individual workers

material well-being. As Iversen (2005; see also Iversen & Cusack 2000; Iversen

& Wren 1998) argues, the size of the welfare state expanded as a kind of

compensation strategy to counteract the dislocating effects of service sector

employment. Via labour market deregulation and the curtailment of active

forms of employment protection, governments encouraged the growth of the

service economy as a strategy for coping with the constraints of otherwise

non-expansionary postindustrial economies. In this way, employment in theservice sector comprises a distinct welfare-production regime, separable from

regimes that rely on public sector employment or forms of social insurance as

forms of welfare compensation.3

In sum, if the leftright basis for political competition crystallised during

the period of industrialisation, its decline might be attributed to deindustriali-

sation.4 If true, then the leftright dimension should be less salient for voters

employed in the service sector of the economy relative to the electorate

overall. This brings us to our first testable hypothesis:

Hypothesis 1: Leftright ideology is less salient for voters employed in the

service sector of the economy than for those not employed in the service

sector.

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Economic globalisation

Along with occupational change, the growth of the international economy

ranks as the most fundamental change to domestic economies since thepostwar era. In 1970, the average level of trade (exports plus imports) as a

share of gross domestic product (GDP) averaged less than 50 per cent across

21 OECD countries. By 2000 this share was nearly 75 per cent (Figure 1,

dashed line). Exposure to the world economy may affect the salience of the

leftright dimension in two ways. First, like deindustrialisation, economic inte-

gration affects the heterogeneity of constituency preferences.As classic studies

by Gourevitch (1986) and Rogowski (1989) have shown, exposure to interna-

tional trade shapes political alignments within countries, creating tensions

between industry- and class-based coalitions. While domestic cleavages due to

preferences toward the international economy are not unique to postindustrial

economies, global markets affect larger shares of electorates now than at any

time in the past 60 years. Resulting tensions between left versus right and

30

32

34

36

38

40

42

44

1975 1980 1985 1990 1995 2000

Year

Percent

40

45

50

55

60

65

70

75

80

85

Private Services Employment,

% of Workforce

Trade as % of GDP

Figure 1. Employment in business services and trade openness: select countries, 19752002.

Notes: Services Employment (solid line, measured on the left-hand axis) is the number of

workers in the business service sector as a per cent of all workers for 13 OECD countries

(Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Great Britain, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway,

Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and the United States).Trade Openness (dashed line, measured on

the right-hand axis) is measured as exports plus imports as a per cent of GDP for 21 OECD

countries (Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Great

Britain, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain,Sweden, Switzerland, and the United States).

Sources: OECDs Industry Structural Analysis (STAN) database and World Banks World

Development Indicators.


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open versus closed makes the task of representation through political

parties more difficult. In open economies, parties must respond not only to

their constituencies in the domestic market, but also to the overlapping and

cross-cutting interests of capital and labour in the import-competing sectors of

the economy. This increases the chances that social cleavages will be cast in

terms of preferences for free trade versus protectionism rather than for or

against market regulation in general.

Globalisation might also affect the salience of the leftright dimension

through a separate channel: the policy capacity of national officials. The utility

of leftright policy voting or any sort of voting over policy, for that matter

should depend on the capacity of politicians to control policy levers. Rational

voters should make decisions based on preferences over the type and direction

of government action only if they believe that public intervention has thecapacity to affect citizen welfare. Dependence on global markets, however,

may compromise this capacity. If globalisation reduces parties ability to

pursue their preferred economic policy positions (in terms of lowering interest

rates or raising corporate taxes, for example) and if the public knows this to be

the case (as previous work indicates: Hellwig 2001; Hellwig et al. forthcoming),

then voters have little incentive to maximise utility in terms of leftright policy

congruence.5

This argument translates directly into a second expectation of how occu-pational alignments should affect policy voting: If opening up the economy

makes for more heterogeneous electorates, then the leftright dimension

should be less salient for voters employed in the exposed sector. This is our

second hypothesis:

Hypothesis 2: Leftright ideology is less salient for voters employed in

traded industries than for those not in industries exposed to competition

from abroad.

Analysis

In order to assess the influence of leftright ideology on the vote, I employ a

simple spatial model of voter utility. Spatial models express individual utility in

terms of the distance between the issue position of the party and the position

of the voter. This can be written in one dimension using a quadratic proximateutility model as:

U v p zij i j j i= ( ) + 2

, (1)

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where Uij is the utility of voter i for party j, vi is the ideal point of voter i on the

leftright dimension, pj is the corresponding position of party j and b is a

salience parameter greater than zero.The minus sign in front of the expression

denotes that utility is negatively related to the spatial distance between the

voter and the party. The vector dj represents the effect of non-policy consid-

erations zi on voter utility.

Using data from public opinion surveys, I estimate a statistical model for

multinomial choice where pij is the probability of individual i (i = 1, 2, . . . , n)

voting for party j(j= 1, 2, . . . , m).The model predicts that the probability that

i selects jis a function of the voters utility for jtaking into consideration his or

her utility for all other parties such that:

vote j

v p z

v p zi ij

i j j i

i k k i

=( ) = ( ) +

( ) +

exp

exp

2

2

=km

1

. (2)

Equation (2) can be estimated using conditional logit.6

Models akin to Equation (2) found in the literature generally assume that

all voters place the same weight, or salience, on elitemass policy congruence

(vi - pj). This assumption, however, may be inappropriate in some, if not most,

election contests, as work by Rivers (1988) and Glasgow (2001) suggests. Inorder to test research claims about the bases of leftright salience, I allow the

magnitude ofb to vary according to the voters occupational sector.According

to the research hypotheses, the utility gained for voter i from proximity to

party j on the leftright dimension should be less (in absolute magnitude) if i

is employed in the private service sector or in an import-competing industry.

These expectations pertaining to heterogeneity in the electorate can be incor-

porated into the model by interacting the leftright distance measure(vi - pj)2

with indicator variables for respondent occupation.

Data and measures

The empirical approach entails estimating party choice models using

individual-level data from 16 parliamentary democracies between 1999 and

2003. I use post-election surveys for Finland, Germany, Ireland, the Nether-

lands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland provided by the second

module of the Comparative Study of Electoral Systems project (CSES 2006).

Due to missing or incomplete data on key variables, these studies are supple-

mented with data from the original national election studies surveys for Aus-

tralia (Bean et al. 2002), Denmark (Goul-Andersen et al. 2003) and Great

Britain (Sanders et al. 2002), and with data from the European Social Survey


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(ESS) for Austria, Belgium, France, Greece, and Italy (Jowell et al. 2003). I use

these data to estimate separate party choice models for each country.7

Models have the following variables in common. The dependent variable,

Party Choice, is coded with as many categories as there are parties standing

in the election. Those parties that lack measures on the leftright scale in the

survey or obtain less than 5 per cent of the vote are omitted from the analy-

sis, per standard conventions (e.g., Alvarez et al. 2000; Blais et al. 2004; Duch

& Stevenson 2008).8 For the election study surveys, the item asks for respon-

dent vote choice in the current election. For surveys from the ESS, respon-

dents are asked which party they voted for in their countrys most recent

national election. The Appendix lists elections and parties included in the

analysis.

The main explanatory variable, LeftRight Distance, is measured as thesquared distance between the voters position on the leftright scale, vi, and the

partys position, pj. For the voters position, I use the standard 11-point ques-

tion: In politics people sometimes talk of left and right. Where would you

place yourself on a scale from 0 to 10 where 0 means the left and 10 means the

right? For the CSES and election study surveys, the partys position is taken

from the mean of the respondents placement of the party on the identical

scale.9 For the ESS studies, I use leftright position as identified by experts

from Benoit and Laver (2006).10Finally, all country surveys include measures of respondent occupation.

For all studies, I make use of occupational codes from the International

Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO-88).11 I use these data to clas-

sify respondents according to whether or not they are employed in the

service sector of the economy or in a traded sector of the economy. Codes

for service industry employment are informed by Iversen and Wren (1998)

and approximate those in Kitschelt and Rehm (2005). Respondents are

classified as belonging to the service sector if they identify themselves asclerks (ISCO-88 codes 411-422), service workers and market sales workers

(511-523), or sales and services elementary occupations (911-916). Following

Hays et al. (2005), I identify traded sectors using the OECDs Industry Struc-

tural Analysis (STAN) database. Respondents employed in traded industries

are those who identify themselves as skilled agricultural and fishery workers

(ISCO-88 codes 611-21), as craft and related trade workers (711-44), as plant

and machine operators and assemblers (811-34), or as working in elementary

occupations in agriculture, mining, manufacturing and transportation

(921-33).

In addition to measures for party choice, ideological distance and occupa-

tion, each country model includes a battery of individual-specific covariates as

informed by prior voting behaviour research.

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Results

Before reporting results across the 16 countries, I use the 2001 Danish Election

Study data to illustrate the analytic approach. The Danish party system

includes representatives from most major party families, making it an appro-

priate case for illustrative purposes. I begin with estimating the conditional

logit model. Model estimates are reported in Table 1. The dependent variable

is self-reported vote choice for one of the six largest parties in the Danish

Folketing (parliament). The second through fifth columns of the table report

the effects of individual-specific predictors on the vote, with the incumbent

Liberal Party (V) arbitrarily selected as the base category. Our primary inter-

est is with the first column, which reports results of the choice-specific policy

distance measure. As expected, the coefficient on LeftRight Distance is nega-tive and precisely estimated. This means that the greater the distance between

the voter and the party, the less likely the voter will be to select the party.

The magnitude of this effect, however, is contingent on occupational sector.

Coefficients on the two interaction terms, LeftRight Distance Service Sector

and LeftRight Distance Traded Industry are both in the expected positive

direction.

These results support the argument that leftright ideology is less salient

for voters who earn their income from the private services and traded sectorsof the Danish economy. Leftright placement, however, may be more critical

for some parties than others. Specifically, older mainstream parties such as the

Danish Social Democrats or Liberals have more invested in appealing to

class-based constituencies using a language of left and right than do parties less

than a decade old, like the Danish Peoples Party.12 However, since LeftRight

Distance is modeled as choice-specific, results reported in Table 1 do not allow

us examine the differences in the salience of political ideology across the party

choices (Train 2003). Post-estimation analyses are in order. I first obtain a setof predicted vote probabilities by drawing a vector of coefficients from a

distribution with mean equal to the vector of parameter estimates and vari-

ance estimated from the variance-covariance matrix. I then calculate the pre-

dicted probability that a hypothetical voter, i, selects party jusing the formula

for the conditional logit model (see Equation 2).13 In order to provide a

common benchmark for gauging leftright salience, for each party I set vi equal

to pj. This enables me to estimate the probability that i chooses j if is policy

preferences are identical to js position on the leftright scale.14

I perform this exercise three times corresponding to three occupational

profiles. Results are reported in Table 2. The first column of predicted prob-

abilities displays the probability that the voter selects the party when he or she

is employed neither in the service sector nor by an industry susceptible to


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Table 1. Conditional logit estimates of the 2001 Danish election. Dependent variable:

Respondent Vote Choice (Liberal Party coefficients normalized to zero)

SD/V DF/V KF/V SF/V RV/V

Choice-specific

LeftRight Distance

(LRD)

-0.232**

(0.018)

LRD Service Sector 0.137**

(0.023)

LRD Traded Industry 0.144**

(0.022)

Individual-specific

Service Sector 0.063 -0.056 0.194 -0.128 -0.080

(0.272) (0.339) (0.324) (0.451) (0.411)

Traded Industry 0.539* 0.993** 0.188 0.631 -0.366

(0.279) (0.308) (0.355) (0.466) (0.552)

Age 0.026** -0.012 0.039** 0.055** 0.040**

(0.009) (0.011) (0.011) (0.016) (0.014)

Female 0.086 -0.240 -0.407 0.321 0.082

(0.225) (0.278) (0.281) (0.366) (0.325)

Income -0.055 -0.153** -0.057 -0.113 0.027

(0.048) (0.053) (0.048) (0.079) (0.063)

Education 0.023 0.037 0.505** 0.673** 1.108**

(0.122) (0.151) (0.158) (0.217) (0.240)

Union 0.677** 0.695** -0.192 0.908 -0.312

(0.277) (0.320) (0.268) (0.586) (0.358)

Rural -0.193 -0.238 -0.411 -0.208 0.141

(0.220) (0.257) (0.291) (0.395) (0.347)

Constant -2.080** -0.244 -3.925** -6.694** -7.423**(0.781) (0.953) (0.935) (1.348) (1.246)

-2 log likelihood 2500.37

N 1,044

Note: Cells report conditional logit regression coefficients with standard errors in paren-

theses. The Liberal Party is the reference category for the individual-specific coefficients.

V = Liberals, SD = Social Democrats, DF = Danish Peoples Party, KF = Conservatives,

SF = Socialist Peoples Party, RV = Radical Liberals. ** p < 0.05, * p < 0.10, two-tailed test.Source: Data are from the 2001 Danish Election Study.

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Table2.The

effectsofservicesectorandt

radableindustryonleftrightpolicyvoting2001Danishelection

Partyjequa

ls

LeftR

ightposition

o

fpartyj

Probability

ofchoosingj

ifvoterisnotin

serviceor

tradedsector

Probabilityof

choosingj

ifvoter

isinservic

esector

Probabilityof

choosingj

ifvoterisintra

dedsector

SocialistPeoplesParty(SF)

2.8

0.26

0.13

0.18

SocialDemocraticParty(SD)

4.4

0.60

0.41

0.45

RadicalLib

erals(RV)

4.6

0.10

0.06

0.03

Conservativ

eParty(KF)

7.0

0.18

0.18

0.13

LiberalParty(V)

7.3

0.61

0.51

0.37

DanishPeoplesParty(DF)

8.1

0.21

0.16

0.33

Note:Calculationsperformedusingestima

tesreportedinTable1.Cells

reportpredictedvoteprobabilitiesforahypotheticalvoter

whoismale,

belongstoau

nion,doesnotresideinaruralarea,andhasmeanvaluesonage,educationandincome.Forallpartiesthevoterspositionplaced

attheidenticalpositionastheparty,suchthatvi=

pj.

Source:Data

arefrom

the2001DanishElectionStudy.


2008 The Author(s)



14/23

international competition. Here we see that if the voter places himself or

herself at the same location as the Social Democrats on the leftright scale (4.4

on the 010 scale), then he or she will vote for that party with probability of

0.60. Likewise, if the voter locates themselves further to the right, at 7.3, then

he or she will select the Liberals with a similarly high probability estimated at

0.61. Leftright placement has less of an effect on the remaining four parties,

as we might expect. More to the point, however, is that in all but two of 12 cells,

party vote probabilities decline when we change the voters occupational

status. For example, if the respondent is employed in the service sector, the

probability of selecting the Social Democrats falls from 0.60 to 0.41; if he or she

is employed in a traded industry, then the probability declines to 0.45.15

Having illustrated the statistical approach using the Danish data, Table 3

reports conditional logit estimates for all 16 countries. Model specificationsdiffer only in terms of the number of party choices (ranging from 3 to 7) and

in the selection of model controls. Given these differences, estimates for the

individual-specific covariates are omitted from Table 3 to facilitate presenta-

tion.16 Results show that in all cases, the coefficient on LeftRight Distance is

negative and estimated with high precision. Again, however, our main interest

pertains to voter heterogeneity due to occupation. Results across the cases

show that ideological congruence tends to be less important for voters in

positions in services and in industries exposed to international competitionthan for voters whose livelihood does not depend on these sectors. The coef-

ficient on the LeftRight Distance Service Sector interaction term is in the

expected positive direction in 12 of the 16 models and is statistically significant

in eight of these. Coefficients on LeftRight Distance Traded Industry also

are positively signed in 12 of the models, and nine of these estimates attain

acceptable levels of statistical significance. Equally impressive, in no instance is

an interactive coefficient large in magnitude and statistically significant with a

negative (unexpected) sign.And where results are weakest, this conforms withwhat we know about these political systems. Belgium and Italy are the only

cases where coefficients on both interaction terms are in the unexpected

negative direction, albeit with very large standard errors. Given the character-

istics of these democracies, these results should not be surprising. The Belgian

party system is structured based on linguistic cleavages as much as class-based

ones, and, given weak parties and high electoral volatility, we would not expect

strong findings for Italy.

Analysis of the Danish data showed the conditional effects of occupation

were greatest for the largest and oldest party on the centre-left, the Social

Democrats, and for the largest and oldest party on the centre-right, the Lib-

erals.To ascertain whether this finding generalises across the range of our cases

(i.e., that parties that have traditionally relied on leftright policy appeals have

700 timothy hellwig

2008 The Author(s)



15/23

Table3.The

effectsofservicesectorandt

radableindustryonleftrightpolicyvotingconditionallogitestimatesfor16countries

AU

2001

AT2002

BE1999

DK

2001

FI2003

FR

2002

DE2002

GB2001

LeftRightDistance

-0.085**

-0.097**

-0.047**

-0.232**

-0.137**

-0.121**

-0.122**

-0.191**

(0.007)

(0.008)

(0.006)

(0.018)

(0.014)

(0.012)

(0.009)

(0.016)

LRD

Serv

iceSector

0.027**

0.041**

-0.009

0.137**

0.052**

0.040**

0.056**

0.016

(0.013)

(0.017)

(0.016)

(0.023)

(0.020)

(0.020)

(0.014)

(0.030)

LRD

Trad

edIndustry

-0.005

0.016

-0.017

0.144**

0.039*

-0.004

0.057**

0.115**

(0.017)

(0.025)

(0.016)

(0.022)

(0.022)

(0.023)

(0.014)

(0.025)

-2loglikeli

hood

2314.27

2329.09

2202.59

2500.37

1988.69

1418.76

3857.24

2804.73

N

1,112

1,217

840

1,044

757

661

1,663

1,633

GR

2000

IE2002

IT2001

NL2002

NZ2002

NO

2001

SE2001

CH

2003

LeftRightDistance

-0.333**

-0.105**

-0.123**

-0.161**

-0.117**

-0.193**

-0.136**

-0.148**

(0.018)

(0.019)

(0.012)

(0.013)

(0.011)

(0.014)

(0.013)

(0.013)

LRD

Serv

iceSector

-0.135

0.045*

-0.023

-0.035

0.007

0.019

0.026

0.069**

(0.124)

(0.023)

(0.040)

(0.031)

(0.019)

(0.024)

(0.018)

(0.018)

LRD

Trad

edIndustry

0.070*

0.048**

-0.035

0.010

0.053**

0.061**

0.003

0.074**

(0.039)

(0.024)

(0.042)

(0.037)

(0.017)

(0.024)

(0.022)

(0.019)

-2loglikeli

hood

805.93

2663.44

1048.59

2274.74

1641.45

2713.23

1737.33

1632.31

N

1,208

1,102

506

829

715

1,023

1,044

783

Notes:Resultsreportonlythechoice-specificcoefficientswithstandarderrorsinparenthesesfromest

imatingak-choiceconditiona

llogitmodel

wherekisthenumberofmajorpartiescompetingintheelection.Resu

ltsoftheindividual-specificparametersareavailablefrom

theauthor.

**p

explaining the salience of left-right ideology in postindustrial democracies. timothy hellwig

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