Christopher Cochrane

The asymmetrical structure of left/right disagreement Left-wing coherence and right-wing fragmentation in comparative party policy

The left/right semantic is used widely to describe the patterns of party competition in democratic countries. This article examines the patterns of party policy in Anglo-American and Western European countries on three dimensions of left/right disagreement: wealth redistribution, social morality and immigration. The central questions are whether, and why, parties with left-wing or right-wing positions on the economy systematically adopt left-wing or right-wing positions on immigration and social morality. The central argument is that left/right disagreement is asymmetrical: leftists and rightists derive from different sources, and thus structure in different ways, their opinions about policy. Drawing on evidence from Benoit and Laver’s (2006) survey of experts about the policy positions of political parties, the results of the empirical analysis indicate that party policy on the economic, social and immigration dimensions are bound together by parties on the left, but not by parties on the right. The article concludes with an outline of the potential implications of left/right asymmetry for unified theories of party competition.

Individualization In Europe And America: Connecting Religious And Moral Values

After reviewing the major variations in how individualization is interpreted and explained, this article turns to the World Values Survey (WVS) data to empirically investigate one central aspect of individualization, namely, the connection between religiosity and moral values. That analysis demonstrates, first, that rates of decline in levels of religiosity in most advanced industrial states have been quite modest. The rate of change in moral outlooks, by contrast, has been much more striking. Those two core findings, we argue, draw attention to the question of what explains these cross-national and cross-time variations. The remainder of the article empirically explores a variety of plausible explanations. The results of that analysis reveal not only significant variations between European and North American publics, but also that associational behavior plays a significant role in gearing the dynamics of individualization.

Measuring Emotion in Parliamentary Debates with Automated Textual Analysis

An impressive breadth of interdisciplinary research suggests that emotions have an influence on human behavior. Nonetheless, we still know very little about the emotional states of those actors whose daily decisions have a lasting impact on our societies: politicians in parliament. We address this question by making use of methods of natural language processing and a digitized corpus of text data spanning a century of parliamentary debates in the United Kingdom. We use this approach to examine changes in aggregate levels of emotional polarity in the British parliament, and to test a hypothesis about the emotional response of politicians to economic recessions. Our findings suggest that, contrary to popular belief, the mood of politicians has become more positive during the past decades, and that variations in emotional polarity can be predicted by the state of the national economy.

Digitization of the Canadian Parliamentary debates

This paper describes the digitization and enrichment of the Canadian House of Commons English Debates from 1901 to present. We start by laying out the general framework in which this project took place and then present the structure of the database and provide guidelines to prospective users. The paper concludes with the introduction of www.lipad.ca, an online platform designed as a hub for archiving Canadian political data, with the parliamentary proceedings at the centre of its architecture.

The Effects of Islam, Religiosity, and Socialization on Muslim-Canadian Opinions about Same-Sex Marriage

Critics of Islam often frame anti-Islamic positions as a defense of tolerance against intolerance, and of equality against inequality. Islam, for this perspective, poses challenges for the ideological integration of Muslim immigrants in Western societies. This paper examines Canadian Muslims’ opinions about same-sex marriage. The analysis suggests that Canadian Muslims, as a group, do have distinctively negative opinions about same-sex marriage, but that there is substantial and systematic variation in opinions about this issue within the Muslim-Canadian community. Indeed, it is religiosity in general, rather than Islam in particular, that generates negative opinions about gay marriage. Exposure to the Canadian context, and especially postsecondary education, largely undoes the distinctiveness of Canadian Muslims’ opinions about this issue.