Are Most People in the World Left-Wing or Right-Wing? | Examining the Top 40 Democracies
Channel: History of Elections
Date: 2024-04-07

Five Additional Rules to My Methodology: 

1. When tallying the votes of each ideological camp, I sometimes lump political parties together to one side if they are all in the same category within the left-right spectrum. This means some parties will be lumped together under the category of “Right-wing” or “Left-wing,” even if they were rival parties competing for the same voting bloc.
So, for example, in tallying the results for the 2020 U.S Presidential Election, I combined under “Right-wing” both the Republican Party and the Libertarian Party when it reached the one-percent threshold. So, to the 74.2 million that the GOP got I added the 1.8 million that the Libertarians received, for a combined total of over 76 million votes. 

2. For presidential elections that have a two-round system (like Brazil, Turkey, and France), I tallied the results of the final round. While we can speculate on the significance of first-round vote totals, it seems best to go with the destination that an electorate reached regardless of the route it may have taken to get there.

 3. In Germany, Japan, and Thailand, for instance, people actually get two votes. One vote is for a representative within a multi-member constituency elected by proportional representation. And another is a vote for a representative in a single-member constituency through a “first-past-the-post” system. Since we are trying to determine the inclinations of the electorate through the popular vote, rather than how many seats each political party wins, it is necessary to tally one of the votes depending upon the context. Sometimes I tally votes from the multi-member constituencies, and at other times from the single-member constituencies. But we cannot include both at the same time, as it may end create the illusion that the voting population is twice as big in reality.

4. In parliamentary elections that include races for both a lower and an upper house, I tally the results from the lower house.  For the same reason that we cannot count voters twice in mixed electoral systems, we can only tally the votes from just one of the houses, or we will get a result where each voter is counted twice. So, for the sake of this research, I count the votes from the lower houses. For the case of Italy, I count the votes from the Chamber of Deputies and not the Senate. In the case of Australia, the House of Representatives. For Poland, the Sejm.

5. When categorizing certain governments as Left-wing or Right-wing, I go with what the voters assumed how the parties would govern, instead of how they actually ended up governing. So, for Peru, where the Left won 2021 the election but then veered to the Right afterwards, I decided to categorize Peru as Left-wing since the purpose of this research is to assess the inclination of the voters. When there was a “bait and switch,” I focused on the bait.

And one minor correction: during the intro, I use a photo of the 2019 Indonesian election results, but I actually tallied the Feb 2024 election for my research. 

Music used: 
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30 Million Times (instrumental) by RYYZN  / https://soundcloud.com/ryyzn
Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported  — CC BY 3.0
Free Download / Stream: http://bit.ly/-30-million-times
Music promoted by Audio Library  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IpVOhMdN_9w
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Air Hockey Saloon by Chris Zabriskie http://chriszabriskie.com
Creative Commons — Attribution 4.0 International — CC BY 4.0
Free Download / Stream: https://bit.ly/air-hockey-saloon
Music promoted by Audio Library  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NEsfl50G7s
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Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
03:35 Defining the Ideologies
13:04 Which Elections Are Legitimate? 
20:30 What the Numbers Tell Us

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#election #politics #politicalscience