engleski

Whom to trust: political scientists or voters? Left and right in party platforms and voters' attitudes in Croatia 1990- 2011

There are two basic approaches to the definition of the Left and Right in political science: the one that insists on the universal meaning and theoretically straight notion of the terms and the other, that is more open and empirical and take into consideration meanings attached to the terms by voters themselves. The article tests the two approaches in the case of the Croatian political parties and their issue stances in electoral races throughout the first two decades of the democratic life. Firstly, the party stances are evaluated within the Left-Right schema as it is defined by different authors who analysed party competition in the Western democracies. After that, party stances are interpreted within a more locally defined Left-Right scheme. The second approach found party competition in Croatia to be more pronounced and to fit more to the Left-Right as defined by the Croatian voters. Finally, issue stances of parties and voters are compared in order to determine the extent to which the Left- Right competition captures programmatic differences among parties and their voters. The main source of data is the content analysis of party platforms done within the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP) as well as the surveys on voters’ attitudes.

Left and Right; political parties; party platforms; Croatia

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