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Political Preferences

Each preference a person or a political party holds is often related to another preference in a clear fashion. For example, if you have a preference for increased gender equality you are likely to also have a preference for increased minority rights. It is precisely because of this close relationship between different preferences that people like Dalton argue we can group them together and summarize them in a single dimension, such as the left–right. In contrast, Benoit and Laver were cautious of oversimplifying too much as people understand the left–right dimension to mean very different things in different contexts.

Most modern political scientists think in terms of two distinct dimensions that are not necessarily related to each other. The first dimension we can think of as an economic left–right dimension. This dimension is concerned with how far the state or the political majority should intervene in the economic freedoms of its citizens. It is comprised of issues such as attitudes towards the welfare state, taxation and market regulation, where the left believes the majority should intervene while the right believes that the majority should not be able to intervene. The second dimension is a social left–right dimension. This is concerned with how far the state or the political majority should intervene in the social freedoms of its citizens. It is comprised of issues such as minority rights and lifestyle choices. Here the left tends to advocate the belief that the majority should not intervene in the social freedoms of its citizens while the right is more in favor of social intervention. As such, the degree of intervention advocated by a person who places themselves on the left of a left–right dimension will depend on whether they are considering the economic or the social dimension.

Liberalism first emerged in the nineteenth century and was in favor of extending social freedoms to greater proportions of society and also extending economic freedoms. Conservatism, in many respects, evolved as a defense against the threat of liberalism to the social power of traditional authorities, such as the church and the aristocracy. As such, it was in favor of intervening in citizens’ lives socially, but it had common ground on the economic dimension with liberalism. Given the hitherto agreement on the economic dimension between liberalism and conservatism, the emergence of socialism was the first time that the economic dimension became activated as a source of political contestation. Socialism became a powerful political ideology with the extension of the voting franchise to working

class men. They represented a large mass of the population and they demanded redistribution of wealth through the welfare state.

However, this movement was, initially at least, socially conservative with many socialists reluctant to extend the voting franchise to women and hesitant with regard to issues such as immigration due to the threat these were perceived as posing to white, working class industrial men. As such, socialism was traditionally in favor of both economic and social intervention. The final ideology to consider is environmentalism, which evolved in the 1960s and 1970s and was non-interventionist on the social dimension, believing in the freedom of lifestyle choices, but much more comfortable with intervention on the economic dimension in order to protect the environment from abuse by private interests.