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Political spectrum: Difference between revisions
Adding anchor to #Spatial model (for backwards compatibility to pages linking to this section) and changing section title to #Spatial models (and adapting text accordingly)
(Move horseshoe theory and additional constraints considerations to a separate section. Restore video of Telos model) |
(Adding anchor to #Spatial model (for backwards compatibility to pages linking to this section) and changing section title to #Spatial models (and adapting text accordingly)) |
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Many editors of [[electowiki]] prefer to think of the political spectrum as a multi-dimensional entity. Few editors agree on the best abstract definition of this spectrum.<ref>Refer to the [[EPOV|Electowiki Point of View (EPOV)]]</ref>
<span id="Spatial_model">
== Spatial models ==
</span>
{{main|Spatial models of voting}}
Many [[spatial models of voting]] put voters and candidates in a multi-dimensional space, where each dimension represents a single political issue,<ref name=":1">{{Cite journal|last=Davis|first=Otto A.|last2=Hinich|first2=Melvin J.|last3=Ordeshook|first3=Peter C.|date=1970-01-01|title=An Expository Development of a Mathematical Model of the Electoral Process|url=https://semanticscholar.org/paper/66661f9678dbe956e525e87a50b5b4ee6bf280f1|journal=The American Political Science Review|volume=64|issue=2|pages=426–448|doi=10.2307/1953842|jstor=1953842|quote=Since our model is multi-dimensional, we can incorporate all criteria which we normally associate with a citizen's voting decision process — issues, style, partisan identification, and the like.}}</ref><ref>{{Cite journal|last=Stoetzer|first=Lukas F.|last2=Zittlau|first2=Steffen|date=2015-07-01|title=Multidimensional Spatial Voting with Non-separable Preferences|url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/political-analysis/article/multidimensional-spatial-voting-with-nonseparable-preferences/112FA71B889588C52C011CE7CEBBDAF2|journal=Political Analysis|volume=23|issue=3|pages=415–428|doi=10.1093/pan/mpv013|issn=1047-1987|quote=The spatial model of voting is ''the'' work horse for theories and empirical models in many fields of political science research, such as the equilibrium analysis in mass elections ... the estimation of legislators’ ideal points ... and the study of voting behavior. ... Its generalization to the multidimensional policy space, the Weighted Euclidean Distance (WED) model ... forms the stable theoretical foundation upon which nearly all present variations, extensions, and applications of multidimensional spatial voting rest.|via=}}</ref> sub-component of an issue,<ref>If voter preferences have more than one peak along a dimension, it needs to be decomposed into multiple dimensions that each only have a single peak. "We can satisfy our assumption about the form of the loss function if we increase the dimensionality of the analysis — by decomposing one dimension into two or more"</ref> or candidate attribute,<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Tideman|first=T|last2=Plassmann|first2=Florenz|date=June 2008|title=The Source of Election Results: An Empirical Analysis of Statistical Models of Voter Behavior|url=https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228920943|quote=Assume that voters care about the “attributes” of candidates. These attributes form a multi-dimensional “attribute space.”|via=}}</ref> even including non-political properties of the candidates, such as perceived corruption, health, etc.<ref name=":1" /> Voters are then modeled as having an ''ideal point'' in this space, with a preference distance between themselves and each candidate (usually [[W:Euclidean distance|Euclidean distance]]), i.e. a voter may be closer to a candidate on gun control, but disagree on abortion. Voters are then modeled as voting for the candidates whose attributes or policy proposals are nearest to their ideal point (or [[Tactical voting|strategically voting]] to try to minimize their distance to the actual winner).<ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.pitt.edu/~woon/courses/ps2703_Lec4.pdf|title=Introduction to spatial modeling|last=Woon|first=Jonathan|date=|website=University of Pittsburgh|url-status=live|archive-url=|archive-date=|access-date=}}</ref> Other models that follow the idea of “closeness” are called proximity models.<ref name=":0">{{cite journal | last1 = Rabinowitz | first1 = George | last2 = Macdonald | first2 = Stuart Elaine | title = A directional theory of issue voting | journal = American Political Science Review | volume = 83 | issue = 1 | pages = 93–121 | doi = 10.2307/1956436 | jstor = 1956436 | date = March 1989 | ref = harv |url=|via=}}</ref>{{Rp|93, 96}}
Mathematically, a political spectrum is defined by:▼
* a '''dimension''' n, representing the number of independent issues under consideration. Voters are represented by points in V = [0,1]<sup>n</sup>.
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Ultimately, these are projections of [[Spatial model of voting|a multi-dimensional political space]] onto a space of fewer dimensions, to generalize and make discussion simpler.
== Nonlinear spaces ==
Not all ways of classifying a political ideology need map to a cube or use the standard p-norm distances.
Different political philosophers also argue that a good political ideology must also incorporate additional constraints. For instance, from the liberal economic
▲Different political philosophers also argue that a good political ideology must also incorporate additional constraints. For instance, from the economic right, Milton Friedman advocated for the necessity of putting one of two desired values ahead of the other by stating "A society that puts equality before freedom will get neither. A society that puts freedom before equality will get a high degree of both". From the economic left, anarchist Mikhail Bakunin argued that a good political ideology must have both significant amounts of freedom and equality, stating that "Freedom without socialism is privilege and injustice; socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality".
Such additional constraints would impose further structure on a political classification chart; however, it may still be useful to represent political ideologies that violate the constraints. Even if they are in some way suboptimal or are inherently self-contradictory, people may still hold them.
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