Political spectrum

[2][3][4][5] Most long-standing spectra include the left–right dimension as a measure of social, political and economic hierarchy which originally referred to seating arrangements in the French parliament after the Revolution (1789–1799), with radicals on the left and aristocrats on the right.

In 1950, Leonard W. Ferguson analyzed political values using ten scales measuring attitudes toward: birth control, capital punishment, censorship, communism, evolution, law, patriotism, theism, treatment of criminals and war.

This system was derived empirically, as rather than devising a political model on purely theoretical grounds and testing it, Ferguson's research was exploratory.

While Eysenck's R-factor is easily identified as the classical "left–right" dimension, the T-factor (representing a factor drawn at right angles to the R-factor) is less intuitive, as high-scorers favored pacifism, racial equality, religious education and restrictions on abortion, while low-scorers had attitudes more friendly to militarism, harsh punishment, easier divorce laws and companionate marriage.

According to social scientist Bojan Todosijevic, radicalism was defined as positively viewing evolution theory, strikes, welfare state, mixed marriages, student protests, law reform, women's liberation, United Nations, nudist camps, pop-music, modern art, immigration, abolishing private property, and rejection of patriotism.

Conservatism was defined as positively viewing white superiority, birching, death penalty, antisemitism, opposition to nationalization of property, and birth control.

Tender-mindedness was defined by moral training, inborn conscience, Bible truth, chastity, self-denial, pacifism, anti-discrimination, being against the death penalty and harsh treatment of criminals.

[18] One interesting result Eysenck noted in his 1956 work was that in the United States and the United Kingdom, most of the political variance was subsumed by the left/right axis, while in France the T-axis was larger and in the Middle East the only dimension to be found was the T-axis: "Among mid-Eastern Arabs it has been found that while the tough-minded/tender-minded dimension is still clearly expressed in the relationships observed between different attitudes, there is nothing that corresponds to the radical-conservative continuum".

[16] Eysenck left Nazi Germany to live in Britain and was not shy in attacking Stalinism, citing the antisemitic prejudices of the Russian government, the luxurious lifestyles of the Soviet Union leadership and the Orwellian "doublethink" of East Germany's naming itself the German Democratic Republic despite being "one of the most undemocratic regimes in the world today".

This method has been criticized for its reliance on the experimenter's familiarity with the content under analysis and its dependence on the researcher's particular political outlooks.

Multiple raters made frequency counts of sentences containing synonyms for a number of values identified by Rokeach—including freedom and equality—and Rokeach analyzed these results by comparing the relative frequency rankings of all the values for each of the four texts: Later studies using samples of American ideologues[32] and American presidential inaugural addresses attempted to apply this model.

While factorially distinct from Eysenck's previous R factor, the S-factor did positively correlate with the R-factor, indicating that a basic left–right or right–left tendency underlies both social values and economic values, although S tapped more into items discussing economic inequality and big business, while R relates more to the treatment of criminals and to sexual issues and military issues.

Inglehart's two-factor solution took the form of Ferguson's original religionism and humanitarianism dimensions; Inglehart labelled them "secularism–traditionalism", which covered issues of tradition and religion, like patriotism, abortion, euthanasia and the importance of obeying the law and authority figures, and "survivalism – self expression", which measured issues like everyday conduct and dress, acceptance of diversity (including foreigners) and innovation and attitudes towards people with specific controversial lifestyles such as homosexuality and vegetarianism, as well as willingness to engage in political activism.

For Greenberg and Jonas, ideological rigidity has "much in common with the related concepts of dogmatism and authoritarianism" and is characterized by "believing in strong leaders and submission, preferring one's own in-group, ethnocentrism and nationalism, aggression against dissidents, and control with the help of police and military".

In its 4 January 2003 issue, The Economist discussed a chart,[35] proposed by Ronald Inglehart and supported by the World Values Survey (associated with the University of Michigan), to plot cultural ideology onto two dimensions.

On the y-axis it covered issues of tradition and religion, like patriotism, abortion, euthanasia and the importance of obeying the law and authority figures.

The x-axis deals with self-expression, issues like everyday conduct and dress, acceptance of diversity (including foreigners) and innovation, and attitudes towards people with specific controversial lifestyles such as vegetarianism, as well as willingness to engage in political activism.

[38] Mitchell grounded the distinction of archy and kratos in the West's historical experience of church and state, crediting the collapse of the Christian consensus on church and state with the appearance of four main divergent traditions in Western political thought: Mitchell charts these traditions graphically using a vertical axis as a scale of kratos/akrateia and a horizontal axis as a scale of archy/anarchy.

This puts left-wingers in the left quadrant, libertarians in the top, centrists in the middle, right-wingers in the right and what Nolan originally named populists in the bottom.

The distinction corresponds to the utopian versus dystopian spectrum used in some theoretical assessments of liberalism, and the book's title is borrowed from the work of the anti-utopian classic-liberal theorist Karl Popper.

Sulakshin also showed that in the short run the political spectrum determines the statistic indices dynamic and not vice versa.

Liberals are more likely to report greater emotional distress, relationship dissatisfaction and experiential hardship and are more open to experience and tolerate uncertainty and disorder better.