ABSTRACT
Introduction Since their debut at the French Assembly during the revolution, the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ have connoted two distinctive political ideologies and lifestyles, which have persisted through time. Voters, politicians, journalists and political scientists alike use these terms to describe political preferences. Parties, candidates and voters are mapped onto the left-right dimension, which is used as a ‘political Esperanto’ (Laponce, 1970). The political ‘left’ represents socially progressive and economically redistributive values, while the political ‘right’ stands for socially conservative and economically liberal values. Overall, this offers a schema of political identification that is recognizable and accepted as a common research tool. To a large extent, its semantics also structures real-world political debate. Despite this, recent real-world events such as the European financial crisis have put their mark on the structure of party competition, by introducing new issue dimensions and challenging the meanings associated with the dominant left-right dimension. This study examines how deeply economic and political crises affect the way people identify with politics. Specifically it explores how the current crisis shapes the content of left-right identification and imposes a new dimension of political identification. The current financial crisis has disrupted the normal course of politics, and caused confusion in the political arena. Various mechanisms have been set in motion, such as high salience of the economy, low clarity of blame allocation, a loosening of party loyalties and high insecurity. Our hypothesis is that these changes have reset the meaning of left-right identification. Voters have had to base their understanding of the political spectrum on issues that allowed maximum differentiation among parties on the two extremes of the spectrum, shaping their left-right identification. This is in line with findings suggesting that left-right identification is influenced by current conflicts within a political system (Adams, De Vries and Leitner, 2012; Adams, Green and Millazo, 2012; Freire, 2006). Based on this, we test the idea that the issue creating the highest tension between the two extremes of the left-right dimension affects voters’ left-right identification the most.
