Multidimensional scaling of political parties A methodological study

Abstract.— With 7 Norwegian parties as stimuli, comparisons were made of various content and distance approaches to scaling. As expected, the former gave two factors, socialistic and nonsocialistic, and the latter gave one bipolar dimension, interpreted as socialistic-non-socialistic. Individual differences in structure were not found. Among several principles of similarity, Ekman's original (1961) gave the best fit. It is maintained, however, that the fundamental vector model of the content approach is inadequate, both for theoretical reasons and because subjects are unable to operate in accordance with it.