The Contours of Left-Right Disagreement in Western European and Anglo-American Democracies: Right-Wing Fragmentation and Left-Wing Coherence in Comparative Perspective*
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: This paper explores the fragmentation of the political right and the coherence of the political left on three dimensions of left-right disagreement in twenty-one Western European and Anglo-American countries. Drawing on expert survey data from Benoit and Laver (2006), the analysis indicates that party positions on wealth redistribution, immigration and social liberalism are organized coherently among parties on the left, but not among parties on the right. The second stage of the analysis turns to individual-level public opinion data from the European Social Survey. The results of this analysis indicate that left-right opinions are not organized coherently in the population as a whole. The final section of the paper offers explanations for right-wing fragmentation, left-wing coherence, and the disconnect that exists between the organization of party policies, on the one hand, and the patterns of public opinion on the other.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".