Do Citizens Perceive an empty Left-Authoritarian Quadrant? Citizen Perceptions of Parties’ Positions in a Multi-Dimensional Space
2026-06-11
Given that there are few parties in the left-authoritarian quadrant of a two-dimensional ideological space, citizens that combine economically left and socioculturally conservative attitudes have been described as lacking representation. We do not know, however, whether left-authoritarian voters perceive this lack of representation themselves. We collect comparative data that include perceptual measures of parties’ positions across economic and sociocultural issues in ten countries, allowing us to compare the objective and subjective distances between voters and parties. We find that left-authoritarians are objectively the least well represented ideological group but this gap appears to be unnoticed by left-authoritarians. We furthermore uncover that left-liberals systematically perceive the smallest distance to their parties, even though they are not particularly close to them objectively. In showing large differences between the objective and subjective gaps in representation, our work calls into question research that has argued that objective gaps in representation trigger citizen political disaffection.