Strategic and Sincere Left-Right Placements of Political Parties for 245 Voter Preference Studies
(Based on “A Strategic Ideological Vote”, Duch, May and Armstrong 2008)

In “The Strategic Ideological Vote” paper we describe two different methods for locating political parties on the left-right ideological continuum: a conventional “sincere” left-right location and a weight strategic left-right location.  Both the sincere and strategic terms use respondent's self-placement on a the left-right ideological continuum as a point of departure.  The left-right self-placement questions we employ typically had wording similar to: ``In political matters, people talk of `the left' and `the right'.  How would you place your views on this scale? 1=Left 10=Right."  The left-right scales were of different ranges across the surveys (some were 10-scale, others 7-scale, etc.) but were all standardized to have mean zero and unit variance to facilitate comparisons across surveys. 

We measure party placement with the mean of the left-right placement of the voters for each party.   Using this measure we were able to estimate ideological distance for all of the 245 voter preference studies in our sample.

As we describe it in “The Strategic Ideological Vote,” each party, when each survey is conducted, has a weighted location on the left-right ideology dimension that reflects the ideological composition of the historical coalitions in which it has participated and the seat shares it was allocated.  The red squares, text and predictions represent those left-right party placements calculated with the strategic voting calculus discussed in “The Strategic Ideological Vote”

The black points, text and predictions represent those generated assuming voters are employing a conventional sincere Euclidean distance calculus.

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