Conceptualizing political orientation in Canadian political candidates: A tale of two (correlated) dimensions.

Political orientation is often operationalized as a unidimensional left–right continuum. However, some research suggests that this conceptualization might be overly simplistic. The present study examined the structure of political orientation in a sample of 190 politicians who were candidates in the 2006 Canadian federal election. Participants completed measures of attitudes toward specific political issues (social conservatism issues, economic competition issues), ideological beliefs (right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation), and abstract values (conservation, self-enhancement) as indicators of political orientation. Confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated that the structure of political orientation was explained best by 2 moderately correlated dimensions: social left–right and economic left–right. Differences in the political orientation indicators between political parties are also discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)