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

Summary/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.

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