Canadian Voters Use Ideological Labels as Mental Shortcuts, Study Finds

A new article in *Public Opinion Quarterly* reports that Canadian voters rely on “left” and “right” labels to infer candidates’ policy positions, even when their own policy preferences do not align perfectly with those labels. Researchers Sarah Lachance and Clareta Treger tested two competing theories—maximal (labels reflect exact policy matches) and minimal (labels serve as approximate cues). Their findings support the minimal theory.

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Canada’s historically brokerage-oriented party system has become more ideologically differentiated in recent years, creating a setting where voters encounter parties with mixed policy platforms. The centrist Liberal Party, whose candidates were used in the experiment, exemplifies this flexibility, making ideological labels a plausible heuristic for voters.

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Lachance and Treger conducted an online survey experiment with 1,087 adult Canadians, retaining 983 complete responses. Participants first placed themselves on a 0–10 left-right scale and indicated preferences on government deficits, climate action, immigration, and COVID-19 vaccine mandates. In a conjoint task, respondents chose between pairs of hypothetical Liberal candidates whose profiles varied by gender, ethnicity, and ideological label. Half saw explicit policy positions; the other half saw only the label.

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• Policy-label mismatch: 43 % of self-identified right-leaning voters supported predominantly left-leaning policies; more than half of these voters favored increasing the deficit for social spending.

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• Label influence: Providing concrete policy details did not diminish reliance on labels. Voters with right-leaning preferences were 11 percentage points more likely to choose a right-labeled candidate when no policy information was shown; left-leaning voters showed the opposite pattern.

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• Consistency: Left-leaning voters displayed greater alignment between self-placement and policy preferences than right-leaning voters.

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The authors argue that when voters select candidates based on perceived ideological proximity rather than precise policy alignment, legislatures may not fully reflect public policy preferences. However, the same tendency can facilitate compromise, as voters across the spectrum endorse both left- and right-leaning policies.

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Lachance and Treger note that the study’s design isolates ideological cues from party identity, leveraging Canada’s less tightly bundled ideology-party-policy landscape. They emphasize that the minimal theory better explains voter behavior in contexts where centrist parties present flexible platforms. The researchers also acknowledge that the study’s focus on socioeconomic issues limits its scope, suggesting future work should incorporate cultural and moral dimensions.

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The authors themselves highlight two primary constraints: (1) the exclusive use of four economic-oriented policy items, which may not capture how voters interpret labels on cultural issues; and (2) the applicability of results primarily to multiparty systems with viable centrist parties, reducing generalizability to more ideologically sorted environments such as the United States.

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No contradictory empirical findings appear in the sources. The principal gap is the absence of data on how ideological labels function when voters are presented with policy information on non-economic topics, leaving open questions about the broader robustness of the minimal theory.

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• “We had both substantive and methodological motivations for exploring this topic,” — Clareta Treger, Lady Davis postdoctoral fellow, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

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• “We were surprised by the finding that, among a large share of voters, especially those on the right, policy positions are not consistent with ideological self-placement,” — Clareta Treger

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• “The main takeaway is that ideological labels such as ‘left’ and ‘right’ do not always mean the same thing to voters as they do to parties, politicians, or political analysts,” — Clareta Treger

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• “For many Canadians, especially those who identify as right-leaning, ideological self-placement is not fully aligned with policy preferences, meaning that voters may support a mix of policies that could be classified as left- and right-leaning.” — Clareta Treger

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• “Specifically, right-wing identifiers support many policies that are more left-leaning on the policy issues we examined. This may mean that right-wing voters use the right label more symbolically than in policy terms, and more so than left-wing identifiers.” — Clareta Treger

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The researchers propose expanding future experiments to include cultural and moral issues, as well as testing the minimal theory in other electoral systems where party ideologies are more rigidly defined.

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