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Educated, Urbanized – and
Narrow-minded? A Comparative Analysis of
Political Ideology in Local Parties Zürich, May 2009
Abstract This paper aims to explore the strength and causal determinants of
ideological thinking within political parties. The degree of “ideologization”
includes two dimensions: “horizontal couplings”, as they are manifested in
intercorrelations between different beliefs or opinions; and “vertical
couplings” as they appear in the degree to which specific beliefs are related
to more abstract concepts like “left” and “right” The results presented show
shockingly high trends of ideologization at least on the left-center section
of the spectrum, especially in the vertical dimension. Urbanization stands
out as a major causal factor: On both sides of the spectrum, ideological
constraints are significantly higher in larger than in smaller communities,
and more pronounced in suburban settings than in villages far from the next
city. Only in rather small communities, it is found that ideologization
correlates positively with the educational level and the modern occupational
background of party members, with the exposition of the local sections to the
programs of supralocal mother parties, and with the number of other local
parties with which they have to compete. In communities of given site,
ideological thinking is more pronounced when parties possess a small share of
political power (or none at all). Finally, there is evidence that ideological
constraints in party policy has increased since the late eighties of the last
century, and that it may increase further because younger age cohorts are
more prone to clustering issue positions tightly and for relating them
closely to abstract notions of “left” and “right”. In contradiction to most
conventional wisdom, we may tentatively conclude that political thinking is
more “rational” (or at least more flexible and pragmatic) at the peripheries
than in the more central spheres of modern societies. 1. „Ideology“ as an ambiguous
concept 2. Left-right ideology: conceptual
and theoretical issues 3. Local parties as a field for
studying "ideological cultures" 4. Reseach
questions and Hypotheses
7. Conclusions Bibliographische
Zitierung: 1. „Ideology”: an
ambiguous concept In everyday talk as well as in
political discourses and scientific theory building, the term
"ideology" has many different, even contradictory, connotations. On the one hand,
"ideological thinking" denotes a tendency
Therefore, there is always a
tendency to attribute ideological thinking to adversaries, while exempting
oneself from this stigma.
In Marxism, there is an equally
negative tone that stresses the causation of ideologies by underlying
economic conditions and their function to support reigning power systems by
propagating systematically distorted views of society and social relations. On the other hand,
there is also a long tradition in social science to see ideology in a much
more positive way: as a correlate of higher intellectual sophistication. In
this view, ideological thinking is characterized by high stability, internal
logical coherence and consistency, based on the capacity to relate specific
issues to more abstract principles and to organize different attitudes to
logically consistent wholes (Allport 1962; Converse 1964; Gerring 1997). This
view gave rise to the notion that people with high political interest and
expertise are most likely to structure attitudes toward political issues in
ideologically consistent ways (Converse 1964; Zaller 1992; Federico/
Schneider 2007), while most ordinary citizens (especially the less educated)
lack ideological thinking because their political views are found to be
incoherent, volatile and logically flawed. (Bishop 2005; Converse 1964;
McGuire 1985/1999). "....the fact remains that many citizens are
unable to understand and structure their preferences in terms of the abstract
ideological concepts that organize elite political discussion and activity,
perhaps compromising their capacity to effectively engage the political
system." (Federico/Schneider 2007:222). Following Federico
and Schneider (2007), two dimensions of ideological attitude-structuring may
be distinguished: "Horizontal constraints": or
"political belief consistency" (Converse 1964). This concept
relates to the degree to which issue opinions among are interrelated among
each other: so that to know one attitude helps much to infer all the others.
Scaling methods as well as factor-analytic and cluster-analytic approaches
are useful to detect such patterns of mutual interrelation. In this
perspective, left and right (or liberalism vs. conservatism) are not
ideological poles endowed with an ex ante determined content, but just
clusters of issue opinions that appear inductively when intercorrelation
matrices are analyzed and dimensionally reduced. This accords with
Gabel and Huber who assert that methodologies aiming to place reliably
political parties on the left-right dimension in a consistent manner impose
no a priori meanings on the concepts of left and right. Consequently the most
successful methods are those that locate parties with the "vanilla"
method, which reduces ideology to a consistency constraint on parties' issue
positions (Gabel and Huber, 2000: 96). "Vertical
constraints" (or "Level of conceptualization" (Converse 1964): This concept
denotes the tendency to relate specific issue opinions hierarchically to
higher order constructs of ideology, e. g. one's placement on the left-right
continuum (Federico/ Schneider 2007: 232 passim). Such vertical patterns are
manifested by measuring differences between issue-attitudes and ideological
scale values, or by calculating the correlations between these two. By
applying these concepts, experimental research studies have found for
instance that survey respondents who are asked to think carefully about a
variety of issues show greater constraint among attitudes toward these
different issues (Judd and Downing 1990; Lavine et al. 1997). However, this "rationalistic"
perspective has been heavily attacked by psychologists who again stress the
importance of non-rational factors in the genesis of ideological thought. For instance, Federico and Schneider
criticize such views as unduly "cognitivistic" and stress the
importance of motivational factors in processes of ideological structuring:
e. g. the (situationally conditioned) subjective needs, wants and goals that
promote tendencies to aggregate and constrain perceptions, opinions and judgments
(Federico/Schneider 2007). In a similar vein,
Jost et al. have argued that ideological thinking may well derive its
internal coherence not from logics, but "acquires coherence and
structure from psychological needs, motives, and constraints that vary both
situationally and dispositionally." (Jost et. al. 2008). Especially
"conservatism" has been widely interpreted as a highly synthetic
world view that encompasses
Such views lend themselves
easily to the negative evaluation of ideological thinking as a weakness
rather than strength: a disposition to let political attitudes and decisions
be governed by emotional factors, character traits or habitualizations -
factors related to the evaluating subject rather than to the evaluated
cause. While psychologists
are professionally disposed to focus on intrapersonal motivations and
dispositions, sociologists - even when they are not Marxists - are more
inclined to include factors related to social interaction, collective group
formation, society and culture. Adopting this perspective, it is fascinating
to learn that, there are pronounced differences between various segments of
societal elites. First of all, it has been found that highly consistent
belief systems are highly pronounced among cultural elites, while they less
prevalent among elites highly involved in (political or economic) decisions.
This regularity may
indicate that high involvement in powerful roles may be incompatible with the
maintenance of ideological consistency because there is too much need to do
justice to each particular problem and to adapt to issue-specific and
situational conditions. On the other hand, ideologies may well flourish
within powerless groups who can easily cultivate consistency because they are
not forced to test out whether such views could be upheld "in
practice". Secondly, it has been found that ideological thinking is more
ubiquitous among human science academics than among those with a background
in natural or applied sciences (Lerner et. al. 1990). This may indicate that
ideological patterns are heavily conditioned by factors not related to
politics at all: in this case: variables related to professional
socialization. 2. Left-right
ideology: conceptual and theoretical issues While originating
from mutually very distant disciplines (like sociology, psychology, sociology
and political science), most studies on ideology converge in the point that
ideological thinking in politics is mainly organized along a single dimension
spanning between "conservative vs. "liberal" or
"left" vs. "right". A wealth of
empirical evidence shows that the left-right axis is almost ubiquitously
salient in two ways in a wide range of different countries: as a polarity
that structures bipolar political conflicts and as a continuum that
allows differentiated comparisons on an ordinal or interval scale (Castles
& Mair 1984; Gross & Sigelman 1984; Janda 1980; Laver & Budge
1993; Warwick 1992). Thus, most citizens in most developed democratic
countries (including the United States) are willing and able to place
themselves on the left-right dimension: a scale usually ranging from 1-10 or
from 0-10. (Inglehart/Klingemann 1976; Colomer/ Escatel 2004: 3). Similarly,
voters as well as political elites use the LR scale for characterizing social
movements, political parties, candidates, news media, issue positions,
political programs and governing regimes. It is well known
that the political left-right dimension has originated in France at the time
before the revolution, some weeks after the convention of the Estates General
in June 1789 (Laponce 1981:47). As an intuitive variable derived from the
seat order in parliament, it filled the vacuum created by the demise of
estate membership as a dominant criterion of classification. Like the
top-bottom model of social stratification, the LR scheme is a simple spatial
metaphor that has the characteristic of being translatable in all languages
and being potentially adopted by all human cultures (Laponce 1981: 27).
The ubiquity of
such one-dimensional schemes is best explained by the
"functionalist" theory which assumes that the salience of the LR
continuum is particularly high under conditions of high political complexity
and low political information (Fuchs/Klingemann 1990). As a starting premise, the theory assumes
that most people spend little efforts for acquiring and synthesizing
political information, because they have little skills to do that or no available
time. However, under conditions of political democracy, all citizens are
called to make decisions despite the fact that most of them are unable or
unwilling to collect much detailed information on the political sphere. Given
these conditions, they have a great need for simplifying stereotypes helping
them to decide which parties, leaders or political programs they should
support.
Especially when
political conditions are highly complex and non-transparent, citizens tend to
rely on rather simple heuristic shortcuts in order to gain orientation and to
come to non-ambiguous voting decisions with a minimum of personal efforts
(Berelson, Lazarsfeld, and McPhee 1954; McKelvey and Ordeshook 1986; Neuman
1986; Popkin 1994; Hinich and Munger 1994). Such labels facilitate also
political communication, because they create a common background of meaning
that can be presupposed ex ante, so that it has not to be created on every
single occasion. The salience of the left-right dimension can be minimal in
two party systems, because party preferences can easily be built up without
referring to ideological notions. In more complex and competitive multiparty
systems, however, many voters will feel a need to locate themselves on the
left-right scale in order to identify the parties and candidates most akin to
his own views (Fuchs/Klingemann 1990; Knutsen 1998), and parties will use
ideology as an indispensable tool for "branding their products" in
political campaigns (Downs 1957; Colomer/Escatel 2004). In conformity with
Converse's observation that highly educated and politically interested
individuals were more inclined to think in ideological terms (Converse 1964),
various more recent studies have shown that politically sophisticated
individuals are better able to make use of political labels like “left” and
“right” because they are better informed about their meaning (Sniderman
et.al. 1991; Kitschelt/Hellemans 1990; Klingemann 1979 etc.), and that issue
positions and left-right self placements are more tightly correlated when the
level of political cognition is high (e. g. Inglehart/Klingemann 1976). This level of
political cognition has been shown to be critically dependent on
political interests and activities on the one hand and the educational level
on the other (Inglehart/Klingemann 1976).
However, this of
course presupposes that there exists a relatively consensual, culturally
anchored conception of “left” and “right” in the given national society: so
that it is just a question of cognitive capacity whether it is perceived
adequately or not. Nie and Andersen have found high consistency and
intercorrelations among elites’ responses on a wide range of issues
concerning the scope of government activity enabling them to identify clear
“liberals” and “conservatives.” On the level of uneducated strata, however, “there
is little or no interdependence … in mass attitudes, because mass publics
have neither the educational background, the contextual knowledge nor the
capacity to deal with abstract concepts that sustain an organized set of
beliefs over a wide range of political issues” (Nie/Anderson 1974). Given
the high causal relevance of political interest and political communication,
it is to be expected that political elites are most likely to maintain tight
relationships between left-right self placements and issue positions. In
fact, Eurobarometer studies have shown that within a sample of political
candidates, the statistical variance explained was four times as high than
within a sample of ordinary voters (Inglehart 1989: 368).[1] The astonishing
permanency of the spatial left-right metaphor contrasts sharply with extreme
variations of the meanings associated with these two terms during history and
across different cultures. Whoever identifies leftism with socialism should
well remember that in the beginning 19th century, it was mainly associated
with individualism, free enterprise, national independence and - following
Rousseau - an endeavour to restore a more perfect form of human society as it
had presumably existed in the past (Laponce 1981: 118ff.). Between about 1850 and 1960, leftism was
almost exclusively amalgamated to socialist and communist ideologies
associated with the various labour movements - thus giving priority to questions
of economic organization, class relations and social welfare. Given the long
duration of this phase, several scholars have tried to identify the
“invariant core” of substantive values and political issues that define
difference between left and right. While S M. Lipset
(1954) defined leftism as the fight for more equality, Downs has tied it down
to governmental economic interventions (Downs 1957). A comprehensive attempt
to identity the transnational semantics of left-right ideologies was made by
Laver and Budge on the level of Paneuropean Manifesto data. Applying factor
analysis, they have extracted 26 items defining leftist and rightist party
positions. On the left side, the list includes issues like governmental
control of capitalism, nationalization of enterprises, internationalism and the
expansion of social services, while rightist parties were consistently
characterized by an emphasis on traditional morality, law and order, free
enterprise and national autonomy (Laver/Budge 1993). In the late
sixties, the civil rights movements and the student revolts gave rise to a
new, more encompassing understanding of leftism (or: "radicalism"):
including the perspective of extending basic standards of human rights and
welfare to all kinds of discriminated population segments (like non-whites,
females, gays, starving poor in underdeveloped nations etc.). In a broader
sense, there emerged potent movements of "social liberalism"
directed against all traditional values and habits that sought to prevent
full individual self-determination (e.g. the feminist and
"pro-choice"-movement). Within the same time period, ecologist
issues gained increased prominence on political agendas and were
incorporated in programs aiming to catalyze societal and economic change.
Finally, processes of globalization and regional supranational integration
(within Europe) have given rise to new controversies where basic strategies
of foreign policy are at stake. However, there is
no agreement whether all these "postmaterialist" issues become
increasingly assimilated to "leftism", or whether they are the
nucleus of a second (orthogonal) ideological dimension. On the one hand,
there is considerable evidence that no amalgamation is taking place. Thus, Inglehart presented convincing
empirical data which showed that the attitudes of the general electorates of
seven European countries toward "materialist" issues and toward
"postmaterialist" issues are rather weakly correlated with each
other. As correlations are particularly low among younger age cohorts, it is concluded
that intergenerational change is contributing to a growing independence of
these two dimensions (Inglehart 1984, 25ff; Inglehart 1989: 372ff.). Following a similar
argument, Clark and Lipset suppose that rising affluence and
intergenerational change contribute to a growing salience of "social
value issues" which constitute "a distinct political dimension from
more traditional economic or fiscal issues." (Clark/Lipset/Rempel 1993:
305). According to Clark, a "new political culture"(NPC) is
emerging, particularly among the young and better educated strata, in which
"leftism" becomes
In contrast to
socialist collectivism, this new leftism is more associated with
individualism: implying an affirmative position toward markets and private
actions, and a growing skepticism toward governmental bureaucracy. All these
ideological changes are facilitated in wealthier environments
(Clark/Inglehart1998). In a similar vein, Kitschelt has argued that in
addition to the traditional LR dimension, a second axis extending between an
"authoritarian" and a "libertarian" pole is gaining
weight (Kitschelt 1994). Besides
social liberalism, ecologism is also said to constitute a new
ideological dimension less and less associated with conventional radicalism.
Thus, a cross-national study (comparing the populations of England, Germany and
the United States) has found that ecologist attitudes are not correlated with
standings on traditional left-right issues (like governmental control)
(Kessel/Tischler 1984). Finally, Simon Hix
and Fritz Scharpf claim that processes of European integration have
given rise to a new dimension that divides those who favor this process from
those who want to preserve national autonomy (Hix 1999; Scharpf 1996). They
both assert that the public attitudes toward issues of European integration
tend to be correlated with Left-Right positions, but constitute a distinct
dimension of political conflict in Western Europe. On the other hand, there is also evidence
that attitudes toward "old" and "new" political issues
are significantly interrelated, and that this linkage has not been eroded by
either socio-economic development or intergenerational change.
In a sophisticated
empirical study, Weakliem (1991) has shown that the "materialist" and the
"postmaterialist" dimension
of political ideology show considerable values of interfactor correlations (between .40 and
.60). This is quite consistent with Inglehart's findings that, at least for political elites, materialistic and postmaterialistic issue positions appear to remain more closely
linked and to be components of an overarching left-right dimension encompassing economic as well
as non-economic issues. (Inglehart 1984: 33). According
to Inglehart, the functional needs for organizing politics along a single "left-right"-dimension
are so imperative that -
in the long run at least - postmaterialistic
issues will become assimilated to this dimension rather than evolving to an independent
second ideological axis (Inglehart 1984: 37). All this conforms
to Sani and Sartoris view
that Left and Right are just "empty containers" that can be filled
with various meanings by anybody (Sani/Sartori 1983). In her extensive
study based on Eurobarometer data from 1999, Corrie Potter concludes that
Evidently, the LR-dimension has an astounding capacity to absorb new
political values, issues and strategic goals (e. g. of social movements) (Mair 1997: 26; Inglehart 1984; Knutsen 1995). However, these new aspects seem to
complement and overlay the old ones without replacing them. Some researchers
dealing with the semantics associated with the LR
scale have also indicated that basic asymmetries exist between the two poles.
Thus, it has been found that post-materialist values are strong predictors of
left placement, while opinions on materialist are more determinative for
rightist positions (Potter 2001). In several other empirical studies, it was
found that rather tight correlations between issue positions and left-right
self ratings exist for the left half of the continuum, while on the right
side, the explanatory power of political attitudes is much reduced. As Laponce concludes from a metaanalysis
of such studies, this is true for most issues conventionally related to the LR-continuum: e.g. attitudes toward economic regulation,
nationalism or gender equality (Laponce 1981: 158ff.). As the author himself has verified in a study on
local parties in Switzerland, the same is also true for items related to
financial policy, immigration policy or environmental protection (Geser 1992). [2] In fact, there is
wide agreement that the general decline of class voting has not at all
contributed to a decline of such ideological factors. To the contrary, it has
caused political thinking to be more determined by subjective attitudes,
among which ideological concepts of leftism and rightism
are still of paramount importance (Knutsen 1988;
Kim/Fording 1998; Freire 2006: 367 ). As a consequence,
the correlations between LR-self-placements and
political attitudes may be become even more conditioned by individual
education and individual political exposure: because individuals have to
learn the exact meanings of left and right in their respective society, and
they have to synthesize different values and issue positions in order to get
an overall value on the one-dimensional LR
scale. While it is universally
acknowledged that ideological contents vary according to the flow and ebb of
different political issues, it is sometimes still upheld that such variabilities are just peripheral changes that don’t
affect an invariant conservative core:
In the era of
conventional class politics, ideological cores were sufficiently defined by
stable interests deriving from the position of collectivities within the
socio-economic system. In post-materialist ages where particular interests
are substituted by generalized "values", this specificity and
stability has evidently been lost. Instead, ideologies become more dependent
Consequently, we
may well see a higher variability of "leftisms"
and "rightisms" in the future, while the
degree of ideological cohesiveness may well remain the same, because the same
needs for simplification are persisting on the individual as well as on the political
level. However, it cannot
be denied that all these different issues were too heterogeneous (and too
variable) to be part of a logically consistent ideological belief system. [3] Thus, the notion of "postmaterialism"
(Inglehart) reflects just the fact that the new
issues are not primarily related to vital interests of specific societal
groups, while the concept of "new liberalism" focuses on a highly
generalized attitude of "cosmopolitanism" and "anti-institutionalism"
particularly prominent among highly educated younger cohorts (Bell 1979, Brint 1984).
Likewise, it is not evident why these new issues can easily amalgamate
wit the old "materialist" contents of left and right, as it is
almost impossible to find the commonalities that make them parts of a
coherent ideological whole. For
instance: if it's true that conservatives have an increased need for
security: why are they more prone to carry the risks connected with nuclear
power plants? And why are leftist parties fighting so vigorously for the
abandonment of atomic energy, when this results in such cost increases for
electricity that they risk to lose their traditional electorate (lower social
strata). Similarly, it is
not evident that attitudes toward EU membership and European integration have
become a left-right issue in many countries. Why are the leftist (e. g. in
Switzerland) in favor of such a project which is associated with so many
developments they don't appreciate: the liberalization of trade and labour markets, the intensified fight against immigration
from Southern countries; the demise of national worker protection? [4] If highly educated strata are more prone to
maintain tight constraints among opinions to all these issues: why does this
indicate that their thinking is in any way more sophisticated than the less
interrelated attitudes of less educated citizens? Doesn't this manifest just
the contrary: that educated people are more disposed to take over ready-made
collective stereotypes that to rely on autonomous individual reflection, more
eager to create in-group conformity than to generate guidelines for pragmatic
judgments and decisions? 3. Local parties as
a field for studying "ideological cultures" The following
empirical study intends to shed a light on the actual ideological culture in
Swiss politics and on its relationship to the status-characteristics of
politically active populations. In contrast to the "political
culture" which encompasses more basic "rules of the game",
ideological cultures may be seen as more variable pattern co-varying with
long-term changes of societal value systems as well as more short-term
developments on the level of social movements, salient issues or attitudinal
"fashions". Nevertheless, the concept of "ideological
culture" implies the existence of collective political perspectives,
values and goals governing the behavior of individuals and organizations that
are transmitted by regular processes of socialization. In general, average individual citizens are rather
poor informants of "culture" because their thinking is heavily
shaped by psychological idiosyncrasies and because they often lack the
cognitive and intellectual capacities needed to perceive and interpret these
collective patterns adequately.
Studying politically active elites may be a better approach,
but it still assumes that cultural patterns are adequately mirrored in the
subjective consciousness of individual minds. By studying groups and
organizations, more justice can be done to the basic fact that culture is
primarily expressed in the outcomes of collective communications and
activities: e.g. in the explicit results of discussions, negotiations and
deliberative procedures, in formally stated decisions and action programs or
at least in mutually recognized "majority opinions". Political parties have particularly
strong links to ideological culture because it is their job to contribute to
the aggregation and articulation of collectively shared opinions, values and
goals. It is evident that
in general, party groupings will tend to maintain more consistent and
integrative ideological standings than individuals, because
This implies that
high intercorrelations between different issue
opinions (like "socialism" and "ecologism")
among parties may not at all reflect a similar covariance on the level of
their individual members: but rather their particular success in aggregating
"socialist factions" and "ecological factions" into an
overarching party platform (e.g. for simple tactical reasons of winning
elections). In an even wider and
longer perspective, political parties can be seen as active agents that
define for everybody else in society what is the (current) meaning of
"left" and "right".
Local party
sections have the additional virtues of being so numerous that rigorous
multivariate methods of comparative analysis can be applied, and of being so
low in organizational complexity that a single central member is capable of
delivering all the relevant information. Switzerland is outstanding for the
fact that formalized part groupings are astonishingly wide-spread even among
very tiny municipalities (of 500 or less inhabitants), and that they control
to a high degree all major political processes on the communal level (Geser et. al 1994: passim). Given the mix
between direct and representative democracy typical for Swiss politics, most
of these local parties have the dual function of influencing elections on the
one hand and decisions about specific political issues on the other. With a
total number of about 200000 participative adherents (= ca. five percent of
Swiss voters), these groupings encompass the major part of all politically
active citizen in the country. 4. Reseach questions and Hypotheses In the following,
we want to explore some factors that determine to what extent the issue
positions, goals and action courses of political parties are structured by
ideological constraints. Two aspects of
"ideologization" have to be
distinguished: 1) "Horizontal constraints"
consist in the mutual interrelationships between different issue positions.
In operational terms, they reach their maximum when knowing the opinion on
issue A allows me to predict with certainty the opinions on issues B, C, D...
to Z, and they are minimal when no predictions are possible because intercorrelations are zero. Evidently, horizontal
constraints can effectively be assessed by factor-analytic methods that
explore to what degree intercorrelation matrices
between issue opinions can be reduced to very few common dimensions. 2) "Vertical constraints" are
defined by the degree to which attitudes to specific issues are related to
higher-order ideological concepts like "liberalism" vs.
"conservatism" or "left vs. right". In operational terms:
they can be assessed by the certainty and precision with which the placement
on such ideological scales can be predicted when opinions on all particular
issues (A,B,C.... to Z)
are known. Evidently, such assessments call for multivariate regression
methods that allow to measure the cumulative
explanatory power of all the issues in questions. Minimal ideologization would be defined as a totally
unconstrained political standing where the opinion about each issue is
generated independently and without guidance by superordinate
"Weltanschauungen" or programmatic
structures: on the basis of its own intrinsic merits and by adapting to
particular needs and problems, current trends in the media or demoscopic surveys, and specific situational conditions.
Evidently, such openness would have to be payed
with heavy loads of permanent information gathering, communication and
consensus-building procedures, and it will make it difficult for a party to
formulate programs and to establish and maintain a consistent and clear-cut
public identity. Theoretically,
these two aspects could vary independently of each other. Thus, dense
horizontal clusterings could be found without any
relation to more abstract ideological notions, or issue positions may be
tightly coupled to ideological concepts despite the fact that they are
mutually unrelated. (This second case is easily identified by multivariate
regression equations where different issue positions maintain high
explanatory power despite the fact that their mutual interrelationships have
been eliminated (by means of statistical controls). However, notions like
"leftism" or "rightism" always
imply a combination (and positive covariation) of
horizontal clusterings and vertical couplings:
especially among more educated and politically sophisticated respondents who
have enough knowledge about the current meaning of ideological labels and
skilled enough in processes of mental abstraction. On a general level,
it has to be expected that in contrast to supralocal
(especially national) party organizations, local parties may well maintain a
much lower level of ideology, because in the realm of community politics,
issues are often defined as non-political problems to be solved by mere
common sense or technical expertise (Vidich/Bensman 1968, Geser 2003).
Nevertheless, we expect that local parties are basically also subject to the
same patterns of one-dimensional left-right polarity as it is reigning in the
encompassing political system. 1) We expect that a
certain degree of horizontal as well as vertical ideologization
is present among all political parties, and that these clusterings
and constraints can be unambiguously identified in conventional terms of
"left" vs. right". 2) It is to be
expected that this main ideological dimension encompasses a broad range of
"materialist" as well as "postmaterialist"
issue positions. Other ideological dimensions (e. g. related to social
liberalism, ecologism, international openness etc.)
may also be found, but they are likely to be of secondary importance. 3) We acknowledge
the possibility that there are asymmetries between "leftism" and
"rightism" in the degree of ideologization. On the one hand, we are open for the
notion that "conservatives are the real dogmatists" because they
have a heightened need for cognitive structures and a decreased capacity to
tolerate ambiguity and change. We recognize that since Adornos
seminal work on the “authoritarian personality" (Adorno
et. al. 1950) until today, a horde of liberal psychologists have taken great
efforts to denounce conservatives as "closed minds" - while
asserting at least implicitly that liberals (= they themselves) are exempt
from such restrictions by being more open, rational - and better human beings
in most relevant cognitive and moral aspects (e. g. Tomkins 1963; Wilson
1973; Altemeyer 1998; Jost
et. al. 2003; 2008). On the other hand, we take into account the thorough
empirical evidence that falsifies such claims: e. g. the impressionistic
historical regularity that leftist (e. g. socialist and communist) movements
and parties have been forerunners in political ideologization
since the middle of the 19th century, while ideologies on the rightist side (including
national socialism) were mainly reactive and have remained on lower levels of
coherence and consistency. In more rigorous quantitative terms, this
regularity has been corroborated by several studies that have found vertical
couplings between issue positions and ideological self-placement to be much
stronger on the left-to-center than on the center-to-right section of the
Left-Right scale (see. Laponce 1981:158ff;
Geser 1992; Potter 2001). 4) It is expected
that ideologization is conditioned by various
characteristics of the social and cultural setting within which parties
operate. Given the notoriously low salience of ideological thinking in
(especially rural) communal politics (Vidich/Bensman 1968; Holler 1981), we will expect ideology to
become more prominent with increasing city size (or proximity to bigger
cities) and increasing degree of "communal politicization". On a more general
level, we follow Converse, Inglehart/Klingemann and many others in assuming that the meaning
of left and right is an ingredient of political culture in which not all
citizens are equally involved. Therefore, take into consideration the
possibility that political ideology is predominantly articulated in the very
centers of society and by the more educated strata (Converse 1964; Laponce 1981: 158ff.;Gerring
1997; Bishop 2005). Consequently, especially vertical couplings should be
highest in parties that operate in an urban (or suburban) municipality with a
highly educated population. 5) For the same
reasons, ideological constraints are likely to covary
with party membership composition. In particular, we expect higher ideology
when larger percentages of party activists stem from modern sectors of the
economy and have higher educational degrees. 6) In addition to
socio-economic conditions, cultural factors are also likely to affect the
tendencies toward ideological constraints. Considering the results of an
earlier comparative study conducted by this author, it might be expected that
at least vertical constraints are more pronounced in the German-speaking
parts of Switzerland than in the French and Italian region (Geser 1992). Such divergences may well be caused by the
higher political autonomy of communities and the more pronounced traditions
of direct democracy in the German speaking cantons. 7) We remember Lerners's finding that ideological thinking is most
pronounced within marginal (e.. g. cultural) elites not involved in
far-reaching (political or economic) decisions (see above). This could result
from the fact that high policy involvement creates pressures to adapt
pragmatically to particular problems and situational conditions, while
powerlessness offers better opportunities to preserve "ideological
purity" because no full "reality tests" have to be faced. By
following this argumentation, it can be assumed that conditions for
maintaining coherent ideological beliefs may be better when a party doesn't
actively participate in executive political power, or when its share of
formal power is rather small. Very high political involvement (e. g. when a
party reigns with absolute majority) will be incompatible with high
ideological consistency for several reasons: e. g. because such parties have
to be responsive to the total population (not only to narrow electoral
clienteles) and because taking concrete decisions usually imply that parties
adapt to pragmatic conditions hic et nunc,
irrespective of precedences, other political issue
positions and more abstract ideological stances. 8) We expect that
in municipalities of given size, ideological constraints will rise with the
number of competing political parties for two reasons. First, every single
party has more leeway to appeal to special electorate groups and give
priority to internal purity and coherence, because it has not to take the
overall perspective of the total community. Secondly - following the
functional theory of Fuchs and Klingemann (1990) -
parties in complex political systems have to streamline and simplify their
positions and programs, so that citizens are better able to make electoral
decisions without having to gather and synthesize much information. 9) Ideological
constraints should increase to the degree that local parties are penetrated
by supralocal mother parties: e. g. by taking over
and following their political programs. Especially in smaller communities
where endogenous ideology pressures are low, such exogenous influences are
likely to be pronounced. 10) Impressed by
the widely articulated mantra of "ideological revivals" (Hinich/Munger 1994; McCarthy/Poole/Rosenthal
2006; Baldassari/Bearman
2007 etc.), we ask how degrees of horizontal and vertical ideological
constraints change over time. Fortunately, our data sets allow detailed
assessments of changes and stabilities between 1989 and 2002, because survey
waves with partially identical questions were conducted at these two points
of time. Additional insights in current trends of intergenerational
ideological change are gained by comparing local party sections with older
and younger members Auch ein hoher Frauenanteil im Vorstand
scheint sich eher negativ als positiv auf die Einflussstellung von
Ortsparteien auszuwirken, die im Gemeinderat über keine dominierende formelle
Machtbasis verfügen (Tab. 8). 5. Data and
variables The following
empirical study is based on two mailed-out surveys (conducted in 1989 and
2002) that have included all (about 5000) local party sections in all (about
2800) Swiss communities of all three linguistic regions. The questionnaires
were sent by mail to the current heads of these sections. They were asked to
provide information about the political goals and values of their grouping as
well as on its membership composition, internal organizational structure,
political activities and relationship to the supralocal
party levels. As the return was about 50% in both waves, a rather large
sample of more than 2600 units was achieved: providing the basis for testing
rigorously a manifold of hypotheses with multivariate statistical procedures
(Table 1).
Given the
pronounced legal autonomy of Swiss municipalities (especially in the German
speaking cantons), it is not astonishing that local parties also have much
leeway in their relation to the supralocal mother
parties to which they formally belong. As a consequence, they are rather free
to define their political standings by adapting to characteristics of their
membership base and various conditions of their local setting. Among many
other questions, respondents were asked to place their party section on a
left-right scale ranging from 1 (extreme left) to 10 (extreme right). As seen from Table
2, more than 95% of all participants were ready and able to provide such a judgment,
and the whole range of values was actually used. Comparing the two waves,
there can be concluded that the notions of "left vs. right" seems to
have increased somewhat in salience, because the share on non-respondents has
considerably declined (from 4.3 to 2.9 percent); and that only minor changes have occurred in the
overall distribution. In particular, extremely leftist and moderately
rightist groupings have slightly increased, while sections on the extreme
right have lost ground.
Looking at Table 3, it is
remarkable that the frequency distributions on most items are highly skewed.
Social desirability factors may well have effected that informants were
inclined to "agree" to any items proposed: so that results may have
been somewhat different when alternative (negative) formulations would have
been used. As in Table 2, a closer inspection shows that no clear overall
shifts to the left or the right have occurred in the critical period, While
support for some leftist demands (budget expansion, closing of nuclear power
plants) has increased, welfare commitments to immigrants have declined and
critics of the Swiss financial sector (under heavy international attack
because of its banking secrecy practices) have lost ground. Table 3:
Distribution of party opinions on 15 salient political isses
1989 and 2002 (percentage values).
Considering the
semi-nominal character of these opinion scales, nonparametric methods of
analysis have to be applied. For assessing the horizontal constraints
(=interrelations between variables), Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA)
seems an adequate procedure because it parallels factor analysis in reducing intercorrelation matrices to a minimum number of
dimensions: with factor scores that indicate the relationship of each
variable vis-à-vis these extracted factors, and inertia values that measure
the percentage of total variance explained by each factor. The
vertical constraints are assessed by correlating issue opinions with the
values of the left-right scale by using Spearman's rank correlation
coefficients rho, and by calculating a multiple linear regression equation
with the LR scale as the dependent variable. Using
regression methods seems unproblematic because the (approximately normally
distributed) Left-Right scale may well be treated as an interval variable,
and because the method is known to be quite robust when nonparametric
predictors are included (Labowitz 1970; Anderson
1984). Additional data used in this study are taken
from Federal census data of 1990 and 2000, and from several Swiss community
surveys conducted in 1988, 1994 and 2005. In these mailed-out surveys, the
central civil service officials ("Gemeindeschreiber”)
were asked to provide information about the formal political and
administrative structure as well a about informal political processes in
their community and its relation to the supralocal
political levels. 6. Empirical results 6.1 Basic
ideological constraints in the total sample By tackling our
first, most basic hypothesis, we explore to what extent Swiss local party
sections operate under conditions of horizontal and vertical constraints,
whether such constraints are coinciding with notions of "left" and
"right", and whether they are equally or unequally pronounced on
the left and the right half of the LR scale. As the most conspicuous
result, Table 4 shows that very pronounced constraints exist on the left side
of the ideological spectrum. The dense interrelationships between the 15
issue opinions (horizontal constraints) is manifested by a very strong first
factor that absorbs 46.7% of the total variance and shows positive factor
loadings by all variables included. Such clusterings
go along with strong vertical constraints as they are visible in the high
correlation of each issue variable with the self placement value on the LR scale and in the high cumulative statistical
explanation achieved by the multivariate regression in which all issue
variables are included as (mutually independent) predictors (64.5%). Table 4: Horizontal
and vertical ideological constraints in the left-center and the center-right
section of the LR scale (total sample of Swiss
local parties) (wave 2002).1)
1) All data have
been arranged in way that more leftist positions score higher in positive
values and positive correlations indicate positive relationships with leftist
positions. Thus, the values of the four items that tap rightist issues have
been inverted. On the other hand,
no equivalent patterns of rightist ideology can be found. While the MCA
procedure produces also a predominant first factor, its
explanatory power (25.6%) as well as its scope are on a much lower
level. Similarly, vertical couplings to the left-right dimension are so loose
that by including all predictors in a linear regression, just 18% of the
total variance in LR placement can be
explained. Evidently, our data are
quite efficient to tap the ideological polarization between leftism and
centrist political positions, while they are inadequate to account for
differences that set centrist parties apart from the extreme right. As these
results conforms with several other studies (mentioned above), they invite
the question whether are caused just by a biased selection of political
issues, or whether they reflect the fact that "rightism"
is more defined by elements of political "style" and behavior
rather than by substantive stances toward political issues and goals. However, all speculations that the
traditional LR dimensions may be challenged by
other (e. g. postmaterialist) dimensions are
refuted. While a second sector has been extracted in both scale sections, its
profile is very weak and it is neither related to ecologism
nor to social liberalism or to nationalist-internationalist aspects as they
have been postulated by different scholars (see above section 2). 6.2 The impact of community size
and (sub-)urbanization If it is true that
urbanized settings promote higher degrees of ideologization,
we should find that horizontal as well as vertical couplings are more dense
when a community is either itself urbanized (by having a large number of
inhabitants), or when it is located in an urbanized agglomeration rather than
in rural areas. This second aspect has been measured by asking respondents
how much time is needed to travel from their community to the next larger
city (with more than 100 000 inhabitants) by means of public transportation. Looking first at
the impact of community size in the left-center part of the LR scale (Table 5a), it is
evident that horizontal as well as vertical couplings are less pronounced in
smaller than in middlesized municipalities, and
reach maximal values in cities with more than15000
inhabitants. In addition, some shifts in the content of leftist ideology can
be observed insofar as "urban leftism" is more tightly associated
with the demand for expanding the budget for culture and with negative
attitudes toward tax cuts and the expansion of public security measures
(while the classical socialist issue of "worker empowerment" loses
ground). However, a rather generalized
tendency of leftist ideologization seems to go
along with increasing city size: encompassing 12 out of 15 items in the case
of horizontal coupling and 13 out of 15 issues in the realm of vertical
constraints. Inspecting the center-right part of the LR
scale (Table 5b), it is evident that rightist
ideologies are rather weak in smaller as well as middle-sized communities,
while winning considerable ground above the level of 15000. In these larger
settings, being "rightist" means particularly: favoring nuclear
energy and tax cuts, and opposing public budget expansion, help for asylum
seekers as well as subsidized kid daycare facilities and Swiss membership in
the EU. As a summary, we may conclude
that larger city size promotes ideological structuring on both sides of the LR scale, but somewhat more so in the vertical than in
the horizontal dimension. Table 5: Horizontal
and vertical ideological constraints: according to size of community (wave
2002). a) Left- center section of the LR scale
b)
Center-right section of the LR scale
As a next step, we
want to explore whether irrespective of community size, ideologization
is also affected by the degree to which a community is located in an
"urbanized" or "suburbanized" setting. The travelling
time needed to reach the next larger city (with more than 100 000
inhabitants) seems to be a fruitful indicator, because it taps not so much the
physical distance, but the "social distance" (e. g. relevant for
daily work commuting as well as leisure time inter action). In order to
exclude artifact effects arising from the positive correlation between city
size and "metropolitan proximity", only middle-sized communities
(with populations ranging between 2000 and 5000) are included in the
analysis. As seen from Table
6, vertical ideological constraints are consistently decreasing with
increasing metropolitan distance in the left as well as the right half of the
ideological spectrum, while horizontal issue clusterings
are only affected in the center-right section of the scale. Evidently, effects stemming from
urbanization are not restricted to endogenous factors resulting from higher intracommunal politicization, but also from exogenous
factors associated with the encompassing urbanized, sub-, peri-
or nonurbanized setting in which the community is
located. Table 6: Horizontal
and vertical ideological constraints in the center-right section of the LR scale: according travelling distance to the next
larger city (over 100 000 inhabitants) (only communities between 2000 and
10000 inhabitants)
6.3 Divergences between cultural
regions Switzerland is a
genuine "multicultural" country composed of three regions that
don't just differ in language (German, French and Italian), but in a large
number of cultural characteristics that also extend to ideological levels. In
a previous study (also using data from the nationwide party survey), the
author has found that vertical constraints (between specific issue opinions
and generalized self placements on the Left-Right dimension) were
considerably stronger in German-speaking parts of country than in the two
remaining ("Romanic") regions (Geser
1992). Within the theoretical framework presented here, this could well be
explained by the fact that German speaking cantons provide their communities
with larger autonomy, so that more Table 7: Horizontal
and vertical ideological constraints in the three linguistic regions of
Switzerland (only communities between 2000 and 10000 inhabitants). a) left-center scale section
b) center-right scale section
* Insignificant
correlation (p > .10) genuine "community politics" (instead of mere
administrative activities) take place. However, part of the divergences may
also be explained by the smaller community size in certain (especially
Italian speaking) regions. By focusing
on middle-sized communities, it is evident that leftist ideology is most
pronounced in the German region and least articulated in the Italian speaking
canton (Ticino), with the "Romandie" (=
French speaking Western Switzerland) falling inbetween
(Table 7a). At the same time, there are
considerable divergences on the level of content. In Germanic regions,
leftism is predominantly related to issues of fiscal policy and public
expenses, while in the Western French cantons, questions related to worker
empowerment and nuclear energy (and in Southern parts governmental regulation
issues and public security concerns) are of primary importance. Looking at the right scale section (Table 7b), it is evident that while horizontal clustering is
not affected by regional culture, vertical constraints are highest in the Romandie and fully inexistent within the Italian speaking
population, with German Switzerland occupying an intermediary position.
Again, attitudes toward fiscal and welfare policies are most tightly related
to rightism in German cantons, while in the French
regions, traditional class related issues (worker empowerment and tax-based
redistribution policies) are still occupying a crucial place. 6.4 Membership composition The well-documented
empirical regularity that educated people tend to more strict ideological
thinking is only partially reproduced. In small communities (with less than 2000
inhabitants), horizontal as well as vertical constraints increase
dramatically with rising percentages of highly educated active members, when
the total sample is considered. While this regularity may at least partially
be caused by the higher educational level in leftist groupings, it does not
completely disappear when the ideological direction of the party is
controlled. Thus, leftist sections show much higher vertical ideologization when many members possess higher
educational degrees. All this contrasts with the conditions in middle-sized
communities where overall impacts of education are weaker and more
concentrated to the center-right section of the scale (Table 8b). Apart from formal
education, we may speculate that insofar high as political ideologization is a correlate of modern urban society, we
will find that it is less pronounced in parties where a large percentage of
members stem from “traditional” occupations. For testing this hypothesis, we
calculate the percentage of active members who are farmers or self-employed
(excluding free professionals who are of course more numerous in modernized
settings). Similar to Table 8,
Table 9 shows that such occupational impacts are most pronounced in the
smallest communities. Here, trends toward tight ideology are highest in
leftist as well as rightist party sections in which the share of traditional
occupational strata is insignificant or nil (Table 9a).
In middle-sized settings, however, such impacts can only be found in
groupings on the center-right section of the LR
scale – similar to Table 8a which shows the same
asymmetry in the case of education. These findings conform well with the
argument that leftist ideologies have always been conceived as a ready-made,
highly explicit constructions easy to grasp by low-educated people (e. g.
unionized workers), while rightist, conservative ideologies were less formal,
so that their grasping and precise definition depends more on factors of
individual motivation and skills. Table 8: Horizontal
and vertical ideological constraints in party sections with different
percentages of highly educated active members a) Communities below 2000 inhabitants
b) Communities between 2000 and 10000 inhabitants
Table 9: Horizontal
and vertical ideological constraints in party sections with different
percent-ages of active members who stem from traditional occupational strata
(farmers and self-employed). a)
Communities with less than 2000 inhabitants
a)
Communities with 2000-10000 inhabitants
* free
professionals excluded 6.5 Complexity of the communal party system Functionalist theories
predict that the salience of the left-right dimension increases with the
complexity of the political system, because it provides an easy categorical
scheme for comparing and evaluating large numbers of political positions,
politicians, regimes or political parties. By synthesizing their issue
positions to highly structured bundles labeled as “leftist”, centrist” or
“rightist”, even less interested voters can easily make up their mind about
their preferences without engaging in cumbersome information gathering and
multidimensional evaluations. While the high correlations of ideological
constraints with city size may well be partially explained by the fact that
larger communities tend to have more local parties, the number of parties may
well be a determinative factor independent of size. As seen from Table 10a and 10b, this hypothesis is
only borne out for leftist ideology in smaller communities between 2000 and
5000 inhabitants, while no effects are visible in larger communities and in
the right section of the scale. We may
speculate that in more sizable communities, ideological tendencies are
sufficiently supported by other factors (e. g. the high politicization of
community affairs (see 6.6) or the higher impact of supralocal
party politics (see 6.8), so that intracommunal
factors like the number of local party sections is no longer decisive. Table 10:
Horizontal and vertical ideological constraints of local parties according to
the total number of competing local parties in the community a)
Communities with 2000-5000 inhabitants
b)
communities with 5000-10000 inhabitants
6.6 Political and apolitical views
of community affairs Especially in
smaller settings, community affairs are widely considered as nonpolitical issues
to be settled by common sense, technical rationality or by applying supralocal legal rules and administrative procedures: so
that there is no place for power play and controversies on the level of
values and goals (Geser 2003). In the United
States, even larger cities have been affected by the "progressive reform
movement" which reinforced nonpartisan managerial conceptions of city
government dedicated general "community welfare", not to the
interest of particular groupings and electoral clienteles (Kemp 1999). Under
such conditions, we expect that the need for ideological structuring is much
less than in settings where "real politics" like on cantonal or the
national level takes place. For tapping this variable, party heads were asked
whether according to their own judgment, community issues were (overall)
"nonpolitical questions". Not unexpectedly, respondents who
disagreed were more likely to stem from leftist and urban than from rightist
and nonurban parties, so that it is indispensable to control these two
variables in order to find out whether "community politicization"
is an independent causal factor. Table 11:
Horizontal and vertical ideological constraints: according to (non)political
interpretation of community issues and LR scale
section (only communities between 2000 and 10000 inhabitants) a)
Communities with less than 2000 inhabitants
b)
Communities with 2000-5000 inhabitants
c)
Communities with 5000-10000 inhabitants
Inspecting Table
11, it is evident that in municipalities of various size,
the degree of horizontal ideological structuring tends to be higher when
community affairs are defined in political (rather than technical, legal or
administrative) terms. These trends are similarly strong in the left and the
right section of the LR scale. In the vertical
dimension, however, the results are much less consistent, except in the
largest size category (5-10000 inhabitants) where the salience of “left” and
“right” reaches maximum levels when a highly politicized interpretation of
community matters prevails. In
addition, Table 11 makes clear that the higher levels of ideology found in
leftist parties and sections in larger communities are partially caused by
the higher politicization levels of these same groupings, because divergences
shrink considerably (especially on the right side), when this variable is
controlled. 6.7 Power position of the party
within the community In well established
democracies like Switzerland, cynical sayings like "Power corrupts and
absolute power corrupts absolutely" (Baron Acton 1887) may only have
limited relevance, but they may not be completely mistaken. As in all
political systems, parties that without any share in political power have
least difficulty in maintaining "ideological purity", because they
are not involved in "compromising" decisions and because their
responsibility extends just to their members and voter clienteles, not to the
community as a whole. By contrast, parties reigning with absolute majority
have to shift ideological points of views into the background, because they
have to adapt to all sorts of pragmatic considerations (e. g. caused by
financial scarcities or organizational deficits) and because they or obliged
to focus on the general welfare of the whole population. Therefore, we expect
a negative correlation between a party's share of formal power (operationalized as the percentage of seats it holds in
the communal executive board) and its degree of ideologization. Table 12:
Horizontal and vertical ideological constraints: according percentage of seats
in the communal executive and LR scale section
(only communities between 2000 and 10000 inhabitants) [5]
As seen in Table 12,
this prediction is borne out very strongly in the total sample, but much less
in the subsamples representing the left and the right section of the scale.
Evidently, the total sample effect is mainly caused by the regularity that
powerless parties are more likely to be leftist parties - which maintain
higher degrees of ideology irrespective of any other conditions. Among
rightist parties however, the expected trend seems to hold: sections have
lowest levels of horizontal clustering and vertical couplings when they
control over 50% (= the absolute majority) of the executive seats. 6.8 Programs of supralocal parties Swiss local party
sections enjoy a rather high autonomy vis-à-vis their supralocal
mother parties which is based on formal statutes as well as on the fact that
they have to rely basically on their own financial means and organizational
capacities. Therefore, it is up to them to what degree they give much weight
to the values, goals and programs of the cantonal and national party.
Starting again with the premise that political ideologies are mainly
generated and maintained on the level of supralocal
politics, we expect higher ideological structuring among parties that open
themselves up to such influences, instead of cultivating their own local
perspectives. As in the case of politicization, it has to be considered that supralocal orientation is generally stronger in the case
of leftist and urban parties, so that ideological orientation
as well as community size have to be controlled.
Table 13:
Horizontal and vertical ideological constraints: according to the importance
given to nation al party programs and LR scale
section (wave 2002).
Table 14: Horizontal
and vertical ideological constraints: according to the importance given to
nation al party programs and community size (wave 2002)
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