ABSTRACT
The idea that political life can usefully be described in terms of spatial dimensions seems to stem from an improbable juxtaposition of French Revolutionary legislature seating plans and the geography of American small towns. The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ are usually thought to have come from the relative seating of the commoners and the aristocrats during the meetings of the Estates General in France in 1789, though had this directly led to a spatial model it would be unlike the ones we are used to. For one thing, the seating was in a semicircle, and for another the clergy, forming one of the three estates, were in the centre. Yet the idea that the clerical position was in any useful sense half way between the commoners and the aristos is unclear. In fact 1789 would have lead directly to a multidimensional model – something not to trouble political science until much later. Left and right, useful or otherwise, is a simple dichotomy which does not necessarily entail any dimensional model at all. Dimensionality probably made its real impact on political science when Anthony Downs adapted Harold Hotelling’s model of spatial competition between retailers in linear American urban environments. There were many other influences on social science thinking in the early and mid-1950s which helped spread the idea of dimensional analysis. Hans Eysenck produced a study of political psychology which made extensive use of multidimensional depictions, following his general dimensional approach which had been first published in 1947 and much read by those seeking a new, more ‘scientific’ way of studying politics.1 The original Michigan school of electoral studies was deeply influenced by social psychology, and whilst this did not predispose them to the rational choice approach, it did lead to them seeing spatial descriptions of politics as natural. And, of course, there was factor analysis. Again, using factor analysis does not require one to think dimensionally. At its most innocent it is just a technique for extracting a measure of an assumed underlying variable from repeated measures. But because the mathematical model which underlies it, principal components (also, revealingly, known as principal axes), is inherently spatial it
was a short leap to taking this ‘behind the scenes’ spatial model seriously in giving intuitive accounts of politics. For these and other reasons it rapidly became normal to describe differences between political actors as at least akin to distances in a space, and to conjure with the dimensionality of this space. Little thought was – or is now – given to whether such approaches are metaphors or analogies, and whether, either way, they are useful. Perhaps there was no particular need to worry, but it would be wrong to dismiss discussion about the number of dimensions underlying political space as useless ‘Angels on Pin Heads’ discourse. (Not that the medieval debates thus referenced were in fact useless.) Some, at least, wish to claim a reality to their preferred dimensional models which profoundly affects how we go about theorising about politics. Some caution does seem to be required, some thought needs to be undertaken before we describe politics, anywhere, as dimensional, or before we assert the primacy of one, or the necessity of N, dimensions. As in any academic discourse, it is dangerous to play fast and loose with terminology.
