Leftists Possess More National Consensus in Europe in One of Two Data Sets

Abstract

A regularity in the U.S. American politics is that liberals have more policy consensus than do conservatives, and both ideological groups have more consensus than moderates. One explanation for this is that conservatives’ local conformity paradoxically results in less consensus than liberals at the national level. If so, then the liberal consensus effect should also be observed in other countries. We test this using data from Europe. In the European Social Survey (country N = 38, participant N = 376,129), we find that on average leftists have more consensus than do rightists; however, we do not find this using the Eurobarometer (country N = 18, participant N = 375,830). In both data sources, we also observe variation in ideological differences between countries. These results suggest that there is a liberal/leftist consensus effect on average, that can be found in Europe and the United States, but there are also exceptions.