Højre, venstre eller midte? Et empirisk perspektiv på partirummet i dansk politik

”Right, left or centre? An empirical perspective on the party space of Danish politics”: In order to predict the outcomes of parliamentary voting and coalition formation, etc., it is necessary to have information about how the political actors are located relative to each other. We identify four different data sources that have been used to establish the empirical location of parties in the Danish political space along a uni-dimensional left-right continuum: Voter surveys; expert and elite surveys; voting data; coding of political texts. Furthermore, we identify a large number of quantitative methods with which such data, covering the years 1920-2007, have been aggregated into party spaces. A tentative comparison of two selected sub-periods displays a considerable consistency between the different methods, although a few methods seem visibly less consistent with the rest. The tales of the demise of the left-right scale seems exaggerated in the case of Danish politics; while policies may change, the underlying dimension seems more or less unchanged