Political spectrum


A political spectrum is a system to characterize and classify different political positions in relation to one another. These positions are typically placed on one or more geometric axes that represent independent political dimensions. The expressions political compass and political map are used to refer to the political spectrum as well, especially to popular two-dimensional models of it.
Most long-standing spectra include the left–right dimension as a measure of social, political, and economic hierarchy which originally referred to seating arrangements in the French parliament after the Revolution, with radicals on the left and aristocrats on the right. While communism and socialism are usually regarded internationally as being on the left, conservatism and reactionism are generally regarded as being on the right. Liberalism can mean different things in different contexts, being sometimes on the left and other times on the right. Those with an intermediate outlook are sometimes classified as centrists. Politics that rejects the conventional left–right spectrum is often known as syncretic politics. This form of politics has been criticized for tending to mischaracterize positions that have a logical location on a two-axis spectrum because they seem randomly brought together on a one-axis left–right spectrum.
Several political scientists have noted that a single left–right axis is too simplistic and insufficient for describing the existing variation in political beliefs and include other axes to compensate for this problem. Although the descriptive words at polar opposites may vary, the axes of popular biaxial spectra are usually split between economic issues and socio-cultural issues.

Historical origin of the terms

The terms right and left refer to political affiliations originating early in the French Revolutionary era of 1789–1799 and referred originally to the seating arrangements in the various legislative bodies of France. As seen from the Speaker's seat at the front of the Assembly, the aristocracy sat on the right and the commoners sat on the left, hence the terms right-wing politics and left-wing politics.
Originally, the defining point on the ideological spectrum was the Ancien Régime. "The Right" thus implied support for aristocratic or royal interests and the church, while "The Left" implied support for republicanism, secularism and civil liberties.

Academic investigation

For almost a century, social scientists have considered the problem of how to best describe political variation.

Leonard W. Ferguson

In 1950, Leonard W. Ferguson analyzed political values using ten scales measuring attitudes toward: birth control, capital punishment, censorship, communism, evolution, law, patriotism, theism, treatment of criminals and war. After submitting the results to factor analysis, he identified three factors, which he named religionism, humanitarianism and nationalism. He defined religionism as belief in God and negative attitudes toward evolution and birth control; humanitarianism as being related to attitudes opposing war, capital punishment and harsh treatment of criminals; and nationalism as describing variation in opinions on censorship, law, patriotism and communism.
This system was derived empirically, rather than from a political model devised purely on theoretical grounds and testing it, Ferguson's research was exploratory. As a result of this method, care must be taken in the interpretation of Ferguson's three factors, as factor analysis will output an abstract factor whether an objectively real factor exists or not. Although replication of the nationalism factor was inconsistent, the finding of religionism and humanitarianism had a number of replications by Ferguson and others.

Hans Eysenck

Shortly afterward, Hans Eysenck began researching political attitudes in the United Kingdom. He believed that there was something essentially similar about the fascism of the National Socialists on the one hand and the communists on the other, despite their opposite positions on the left–right axis. As Hans Eysenck described in his 1956 book Sense and Nonsense in Psychology, Eysenck compiled a list of political statements found in newspapers and political tracts and asked subjects to rate their agreement or disagreement with each. Submitting this value questionnaire to the same process of factor analysis used by Ferguson, Eysenck drew out two factors, which he named "Radicalism" and "Tender-Mindedness".
Such analysis produces a factor whether or not it corresponds to a real-world phenomenon and so caution must be exercised in its interpretation. While Eysenck's R-factor is easily identified as the classical "left–right" dimension, the T-factor is less intuitive, as high-scorers favored pacifism, racial equality, religious education and restrictions on abortion, while low-scorers had attitudes more friendly to militarism, harsh punishment, easier divorce laws and companionate marriage.
According to social scientist Bojan Todosijevic, radicalism was defined as positively viewing evolution theory, strikes, welfare state, mixed marriages, student protests, law reform, women's liberation, United Nations, nudist camps, pop-music, modern art, immigration, abolishing private property, and rejection of patriotism. Conservatism was defined as positively viewing white superiority, birching, death penalty, antisemitism, opposition to nationalization of property, and birth control. Tender-mindedness was defined by moral training, inborn conscience, Bible truth, chastity, self-denial, pacifism, anti-discrimination, being against the death penalty and harsh treatment of criminals. Tough-mindedness was defined by compulsory sterilization, euthanasia, easier divorce laws, racism, antisemitism, compulsory military training, wife swapping, casual living, death penalty, and harsh treatment of criminals.
Despite the difference in methodology, location and theory, the results attained by Eysenck and Ferguson matched. Simply rotating Eysenck's two factors 45 degrees renders the same factors of religionism and humanitarianism identified by Ferguson in America.
Eysenck's dimensions of R and T were found by factor analyses of values in Germany and Sweden, France and Japan.
One notable result identified by Eysenck in his 1956 work was that in the United States and the United Kingdom, most of the political variance was subsumed by the left/right axis, while in France the T-axis was larger and in the Middle East the only dimension to be found was the T-axis: "Among mid-Eastern Arabs it has been found that while the tough-minded/tender-minded dimension is still clearly expressed in the relationships observed between different attitudes, there is nothing that corresponds to the radical-conservative continuum".

Relationship between Eysenck's political views and political research

Eysenck's political views related to his research: Eysenck was an outspoken opponent of what he perceived as the authoritarian abuses of the left and right, and accordingly he believed that with this T axis he had found the link between Nazism and communism. According to Eysenck, members of both ideologies were tough-minded. Central to Eysenck's thesis was the claim that tender-minded ideologies were democratic and friendly to human freedoms, while tough-minded ideologies were aggressive and authoritarian, a claim that is open to political criticism. In this context, Eysenck carried out studies on Nazism and communist groups, claiming to find members of both groups to be more "dominant" and more "aggressive" than control groups.
Eysenck left Nazi Germany to live in Britain and was not shy in attacking Stalinism, citing the antisemitic prejudices of the Russian government, the luxurious lifestyles of the Soviet Union leadership and the Orwellian "doublethink" of East Germany's naming itself the German Democratic Republic despite being "one of the most undemocratic regimes in the world today". While Eysenck was an opponent of Nazism, his relationship with fascist organizations was more complex. Eysenck himself lent theoretical support to the English National Party, which also opposed Hitlerite Nazism, and was interviewed in the first issue of their journal The Beacon in relation to his controversial views on relative intelligence between different races. At one point during the interview, Eysenck was asked whether or not he was of Jewish origin before the interviewer proceeded. His political allegiances were called into question by other researchers, notably Steven Rose, who alleged that his scientific research was used for political purposes.

Subsequent criticism of Eysenck's research

Eysenck's conception of tough-mindedness has been criticized for a number of reasons.
  • Virtually no values were found to load only on the tough/tender dimension.
  • The interpretation of tough-mindedness as a manifestation of "authoritarian" versus tender-minded "democratic" values was incompatible with the Frankfurt School's single-axis model, which conceptualized authoritarianism as being a fundamental manifestation of conservatism and many researchers took issue with the idea of "left-wing authoritarianism".
  • The theory which Eysenck developed to explain individual variation in the observed dimensions, relating tough-mindedness to extroversion and psychoticism, returned ambiguous research results.
  • Eysenck's finding that Nazis and communists were more tough-minded than members of mainstream political movements was criticized on technical grounds by Milton Rokeach.
  • Eysenck's method of analysis involves the finding of an abstract dimension that explains the spread of a given set of data. This abstract dimension may or may not correspond to a real material phenomenon and obvious problems arise when it is applied to human psychology. The second factor in such an analysis is the second best explanation for the spread of the data, which is by definition drawn at right angles to the first factor. While the first factor, which describes the bulk of the variation in a set of data, is more likely to represent something objectively real, subsequent factors become more and more abstract. Thus one would expect to find a factor that roughly corresponds to "left" and "right", as this is the dominant framing for politics in our society, but the basis of Eysenck's "tough/tender-minded" thesis may well represent nothing beyond an abstract mathematical construct. Such a construct would be expected to appear in factor analysis whether or not it corresponded to something real, thus rendering Eysenck's thesis unfalsifiable through factor analysis.