Abstract
Reviewed by : Dubi Kanengisser, University of Toronto
“Left” and “right” as political labels are two of the most ubiquitous terms used by politicians, social scientists, and the general public, but they have proven remarkably resistant to definition. Although people generally “know them when they see them”, attempts to give a comprehensive explanation of just what it means to be left or right usually fail. This has led some to abandon the terms altogether, declaring that they have no coherent, consistent meaning.
In Left and Right, Christopher Cochrane, a political scientist at the University of Toronto, takes a new approach to defining these terms. Cochrane describes the political field as a network of ideas, where different actors (e.g. parties) can support, oppose, or be neutral toward each idea, and their support or opposition may vary in strength. Using graph theory and the impressive database of party platforms from the post-Second World War period created by the Comparative Manifesto, 1 Cochrane shows that far from being inconsistent, the network of connections can successfully distinguish between left- and right-wing parties even across vast expanses of time and space. Left and right do have meanings, but only when one considers ideas within a network; once an idea is viewed in isolation, the meaning of left and right collapses. In other words, the multilateral relationships between parties and their ideologies, not their position on a single dimension or even in a multi-dimensional space, create a sense of being “on the left” or “on the right”.
Cochrane uses the metaphor of a family resemblance to explain how right-wing parties are alike and left-wing parties are alike, without all sharing some unifying quality or, for that matter, each wing being the opposite of the other. A family resemblance is composed of a number of characteristics (ears, eyes, nose, hair), none of which must appear in each member of the family, and no member of the family must have all of them. Two family members may share no characteristics (for example, one may have the family hair and nose, and the other the family eyes and ears), but when viewed in the context of the family as a whole, they will both clearly belong within the family resemblance. Similarly, political family resemblance comprises a group of opinions, but no single opinion must appear in all parties in a certain political wing, and no party need espouse all these views at once. Nevertheless, when the parties are viewed as a group, the family resemblance is clear. Thus, parties on the left are generally characterized by ideas such as social justice, opposition to militarization, support of market regulation, and the welfare state, while parties on the right are generally characterized by support of free enterprise, militarization, traditional morality, and opposition to labour unions. However, no single issue unites all parties on either side of the political map, and two parties on the same side may not have a single issue on which they agree. Their family resemblance to the left or right is based on the network as a whole, not on the isolated comparison of individual issues.
Cochrane’s choice to describe the degree of having family features as moving a party “to the left” or “to the right” is, however, problematic. Given the sense normally given to the terms “far right” and “far left”, this phrasing is decidedly misleading. The far right, for example, is not simply “the right, but more so.” In fact, Cochrane’s approach demonstrates that, if anything, the far right is peripheral to the right, with its focus on issues such as immigration and the rejection of multiculturalism, and the relatively smaller place it accords to more core issues of the right, such as economic orthodoxy. This is also borne out by Cochrane’s formula for identifying the degree of right-wingness or left-wingness of each party. The highest score for a right-wing party will be achieved by a party whose entire platform is dedicated to nothing but promoting free enterprise, while a party whose entire platform is nothing but a diatribe against multiculturalism will score a far lower right-wing ranking. Clearly, what Cochrane is describing is not how much “to the right” a party is, but how much “of the right” – a term much more appropriate to the metaphor of family resemblance, which eschews spatial conceptions.
That Cochrane’s explanation rids our concepts of left and right of their spatial dimension is also evident in his finding that the centre, rather than being a moderate position between the more extreme positions of left and right, is in fact a vacuum, devoid of any characteristics whatsoever. While many individuals choose to position themselves in the political centre, when they are asked to rate their views of various political parties, centrist individuals are less likely to view centrist parties favourably than they are to view parties on the centre-right or centre-left favourably. A position on the centre, therefore, is not a position at all, but merely an indication of the lack of a clear position, or indifference between the two sides.
Finally, Cochrane applies his approach to the Canadian case to examine whether Canadian politics truly are devoid of left and right, and whether they have changed in recent decades. He demonstrates the lack of coherent positions of the Liberal and Progressive Conservative parties throughout the mid-twentieth century, during the era of brokerage politics, and the clear realignment of the Conservatives on the right and the Liberals on the centre-left, beginning in the late 1970s. Cochrane further demonstrates how the Canadian public slowly picked up on this change over the subsequent decades and eventually aligned itself along these new party lines. Having achieved this alignment of voters, Cochrane argues, the new structure of the Canadian political map is likely to endure into the future.
This novel approach to understanding the structure of the political map offers a useful analytical tool to examine changes and shifts in both political parties and the electorate. Cochrane’s answer to the age-old question of the meaning of left and right in politics is certain to make a substantial contribution to our understanding of the political world and will prove useful to academics, practitioners, pundits, and the politically engaged public as a whole.
