A new study suggests that voters use political labels like “left” and “right” as mental shortcuts to guess a politician’s policy stances, even when the voters’ own political identities do not strictly match their actual policy preferences. These findings indicate that while ideological labels help voters navigate elections, they often function in a minimal way rather than as a perfect reflection of policy alignment. The research was published in the journal Public Opinion Quarterly.
Political scientists Sarah Lachance and Clareta Treger conducted the study to explore exactly how voters use ideological labels when evaluating political candidates. The authors wanted to test whether identifying as left-wing or right-wing actually means a voter holds a strict set of corresponding policy beliefs.
“We had both substantive and methodological motivations for exploring this topic,” explained Treger, a Lady Davis postdoctoral fellow in the department of political science at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. “Substantively, we were interested in how Canadians use left and right ideological labels, given that Canada is a multiparty system that has been polarizing, especially at the elite level, but remains less ideologically sorted than the United States.”
The Canadian political system has historically relied on brokerage politics, which involves political parties making compromises and remaining flexible to maintain national unity. In recent years, Canadian political parties have become more ideologically distinct, providing an ideal testing ground to see if voters have adapted to these shifts.
“Methodologically, we saw the Canadian case as a useful opportunity to disentangle policy-based uses of ideology from identity-based ones, precisely because ideology, party, identity, and policy preferences are less tightly bundled than in the U.S. context,” Treger said. “This allowed us to ask whether voters use left-right labels to infer policy congruence with candidates, or whether they use them more minimally, to infer candidates’ likely policy positions even when their own ideological self-identification does not fully align with their policy preferences.”
Lachance and Treger distinguish between two forms of ideological thinking. The first is a maximal approach. This perspective assumes a person’s ideological self-placement perfectly summarizes their policy preferences across various issues. Under this approach, voters would compare their own label to a candidate’s label to judge how well their policy ideas align.
The second approach is a minimal theory. This idea suggests that voters might have mixed or inconsistent policy preferences themselves, but they still use a candidate’s left or right label to infer what policies the politician supports. Under the minimal theory, voters do not need to have perfectly aligned beliefs to find political labels useful.
To evaluate these two theories, the researchers designed an online survey experiment. The sample included 1,087 adult Canadian voters. After removing incomplete responses, the scientists used data from 983 participants for the final analysis.
In the first part of the survey, the researchers measured the participants’ ideological self-placement. Participants ranked themselves on a scale from zero to ten. On this metric, zero represented the extreme left, five represented the center, and ten represented the extreme right.
The scientists also asked participants about their policy preferences on four specific issues. These issues included government deficits, climate action, immigration, and COVID-19 vaccine mandates. The researchers chose these specific topics because they strongly relate to the traditional understanding of the political left and right, which centers on the desired level of government intervention in socioeconomic affairs.
Next, the respondents participated in a conjoint experiment. A conjoint experiment is a statistical technique where participants are asked to choose between different profiles that have randomly assigned characteristics. In this study, participants reviewed pairs of hypothetical political candidates and were asked to state their voting preferences.
The candidate profiles included traits like gender, ethnic background, and political ideology on the zero to ten scale. All candidates were labeled as members of the Canadian Liberal Party. The researchers held the political party constant because the Liberal Party is a centrist organization that has historically adopted a mix of left-leaning and right-leaning policies, making different ideological labels believable to the participants.
The scientists randomly divided the participants into two groups to test how information changes voting behavior. Half of the respondents saw full candidate profiles that included the candidates’ specific policy positions on the four issues. The other half saw reduced profiles that did not include any information about the candidates’ specific policy stances.
By comparing these two groups, Lachance and Treger tested whether having explicit policy information changed how much voters relied on ideological labels. If the maximal theory were accurate, voters would rely heavily on ideological labels when policy information was missing. They would then abandon the mental shortcut when they had the actual policy details in front of them.
The researchers found that a large portion of the electorate does not hold policy preferences that perfectly match their ideological self-placement. This mismatch was especially common among people who identified as right-leaning. The data showed that forty-three percent of self-identified right-leaning voters actually supported mostly left-leaning policies.
“We were surprised by the finding that, among a large share of voters, especially those on the right, policy positions are not consistent with ideological self-placement,” Treger told PsyPost. “Specifically, right-wing identifiers support many policies that are more left-leaning on the policy issues we examined. This may mean that right-wing voters use the right label more symbolically than in policy terms, and more so than left-wing identifiers.”
For instance, even on the traditional economic issue of the government deficit, more than half of the voters who identified as right-leaning took a leftist position. They supported increasing the deficit to spend more on social services. Left-leaning voters, on the other hand, tended to hold more consistent policy views that matched their political labels.
When it came to voting choices, the authors observed that people generally preferred candidates who were ideologically closer to them. Providing participants with explicit information about the candidates’ policy positions did not meaningfully change how much the participants relied on the candidate’s ideological label. Because the presence of policy information did not weaken the effect of the ideological labels, the findings fail to support the maximal theory of ideological thinking.
Instead, the data provides evidence for the minimal theory. When participants in the reduced information group had to evaluate candidates without knowing their specific policy stances, the voters successfully used the candidates’ left or right labels to infer what those candidates likely stood for.
Specifically, voters who held mostly right-leaning policy preferences were more likely to vote for a candidate labeled as right-leaning, even without seeing the candidate’s exact policy platform. Shifting a voter’s own preferences from exclusively left-leaning policies to exclusively right-leaning policies increased their likelihood of voting for a center-right or right-labeled candidate by eleven percentage points.
Similarly, voters with left-leaning policy preferences favored left-labeled candidates. This suggests that people use political labels to make educated guesses about a politician’s platform, even if the voter’s own political identity is somewhat disconnected from their specific policy views.
“The main takeaway is that ideological labels such as ‘left’ and ‘right’ do not always mean the same thing to voters as they do to parties, politicians, or political analysts,” Treger noted. “For many Canadians, especially those who identify as right-leaning, ideological self-placement is not fully aligned with policy preferences, meaning that voters may support a mix of policies that could be classified as left- and right-leaning.”
She added that when voters use ideological labels, they might not be trying to find perfect policy matches. Instead, they might use the labels to infer a candidate’s general inclinations or to respond to what those labels symbolize regarding identity, values, or group belonging.
“This matters for representation: if voters’ ideological identities do not align with their policy preferences, but they still choose candidates based on ideological proximity, legislatures may not fully reflect the public’s policy preferences, though this may be less concerning if voters care about other dimensions of representation beyond policy,” Treger said. “At the same time, this is also an avenue for political compromise, since we show that across the political spectrum, voters support both left- and right-leaning policies.”
While this research offers new insights into voter behavior, the authors note a few potential limitations. One limitation is the specific set of policy issues included in the experiment. The scientists focused strictly on socioeconomic issues that deal with government intervention. It is possible that voters use ideological labels to infer candidate positions on different topics, such as cultural or moral issues, which were not tested in this survey.
Regarding how far these findings extend, Treger provided a specific caveat. “Our findings are relevant for multiparty systems with electorally viable center parties or parties with flexible platforms, as well as for systems that are not fully ideologically sorted,” she said.
The scientists suggest that future research could expand on these findings by including a wider variety of policy dimensions. Exploring how identity and emotion factor into these political shortcuts remains an interesting direction for future political science research.
The study, “Thinking Ideologically: The Limited Role of Left and Right Labels as Policy Shortcuts,” was authored by Sarah Lachance and Clareta Treger.
