Conférence organisée par la Chaire de recherche du Canada en études électorales (CRCÉÉ)

Par Eric Guntermann (Université de Montréal)

Résumé : Scholars have long argued that most citizens do not think in ideological terms. This conclusion is problematic given the other finding that citizens are poorly informed about politics. If citizens are poorly informed, it does not make sense to assess ideological thinking using answers to questions people know little about. We test the ‘innocence of ideology’ thesis in a novel way using survey data collected in multiple elections in five democracies as part of the Making Electoral Democracy Work project. Applying multidimensional scaling with bootstrapping, we produce two-dimensional representations of citizens’ party and leader preferences, how much they like or dislike each party. We find that citizens’ party and leader evaluations reflect an underlying ideological dimension in varied contexts in different countries.