Voter Ideology in Western Democracies: An Update

In this paper, we update and expand the measure of voter ideology we originally proposed in this journal in 1998. Our new measure combines party manifesto data most recently updated by Budge, et al (2001), with election return data. Assuming the comparability and relevance of left-right ideology, we estimate the median voter position in 25 Western democracies throughout most of the postwar period. With this measure we are able to make cross-national comparisons of voter ideology among these countries as well as cross-time comparisons within individual countries