How do US ideological labels match up with European parties?
We created a quiz to see what political party from Germany, France, or the United Kingdom people would support based on their responses to American political questions. You can read more about it here and take the quiz yourself.
At the end of the quiz, we asked people how they would identify themselves in American ideological terms. This gave us the chance to match how the parties align with with the American left-right spectrum. Here we have the breakdowns for the preliminary set of respondents.
Now, there are of course some caveats before we start drawing conclusions. This is not a representative sample of the American population; one person’s liberal might be another person’s very liberal; and this was some educated guesses in matching European parties to American policies. To turn this into an academic paper would require a longer research process.
With all that being said, there are some interesting findings.
There is considerable overlap between ideological splits for almost each party. Respondents whose best fit was the Green Party of Germany, for example, were evenly divided between calling themselves “liberal” and “very liberal.” Other than the CDU/CSU, every party straddled a divide in American terms.
The American mapping approximately matches the European spectrum. The Labour Party is left of the Liberal Democrats, which most UK political observers would agree, and En Marche is to the right of the PS.
But not exactly. The FDP was the party for conservative respondents, while the CDU/CSU (which could be seen as more conservative in German terms) was the party only for those who deemed themselves moderate or independent.
We’ll update this post as more people take the quiz. For now, it is interesting that as political news more easily crosses oceans and global governance requires more coordination that those who work in politics professionally may have an incentive to pay closer attention to who is winning and losing elections in other countries.
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