Measuring Ideology in the Croatian Context: Testing the Left-Right Scale

In: Politička misao: croatian political science review = Political thought, Band 57, Heft 4, S. 123-151

Abstract

The goal of this paper is to examine the relationship between the unidimensional‎ left-right measure of ideology and more nuanced measures of major political‎ ideologies as well as to ascertain the validity of the left-right measure of‎ ideology as a conceptual tool for analysing ideological preferences within the‎ Croatian context. This was accomplished by deploying an online questionnaire‎ on a convenient, non-representative sample of students from the University of‎ Zagreb, Croatia. The students were recruited via various social media student‎ groups. The paper starts by theoretically exploring the six major ideologies‎ from which it develops a pool of items for measuring said ideologies. The data‎ acquired via the aforementioned questionnaires was then analysed with the‎ goal of assessing the best items to measure each ideology. The paper goes on‎ to assess the relationship between the respondents' support of major ideologies‎ and their self-positioning on the left-right ideology scale. The acquired results‎ demonstrate that the respondents possess a general understanding of the ideological‎ left-to-right scale and are coherent in their preferences with the values‎ of their ideology of choice. They further demonstrate that the correlations between‎ the participants' self-positioning on the left-right continuum and level‎ of support for particular ideologies follow the expected direction. Therefore,‎ while taking the limits of the deployed sample type into account, the paper reaffirms‎ the validity of the left-right measure of ideology as a conceptual tool‎ for analysing ideological preferences within the Croatian context.‎