Scottish Social Attitudes Survey 2023 - Attitudes to Government, the Economy, and the Health Service

Annex A – Left-Right and Liberal-Authoritarian Scales

Since 1999, the Scottish Social Attitudes Survey has included two attitude scales which aim to measure where respondents stand on certain underlying value dimensions – left–right and libertarian–authoritarian.

A useful way of summarising the information from a number of questions of this sort is to construct an additive index. This approach rests on the assumption that there is an underlying – ‘latent’ – attitudinal dimension which characterises the answers to all the questions within each scale. If so, scores on the index are likely to be a more reliable indication of the underlying attitude than the answers to any one individual question.

Both scales consist of a number of statements to which the respondent is invited to “agree strongly”, “agree”, “neither agree nor disagree”, “disagree” or “disagree strongly”. The items are outlined below.

Left-right scale

• Government should redistribute income from the better off to those who are less well off;
• Big business benefits owners at the expense of workers;
• Ordinary working people do not get their fair share of the nation’s wealth;
• There is one law for the rich and one for the poor;
• Management will always try to get the better of employees if it gets the chance.

Libertarian–authoritarian scale

• Young people today don’t have enough respect for traditional British values;
• People who break the law should be given stiffer sentences;
• For some crimes, the death penalty is the most appropriate sentence;
• Schools should teach children to obey authority;
• The law should always be obeyed, even if a particular law is wrong;
• Censorship of films and magazines is necessary to uphold moral standards.

The indices for the scales are formed by scoring the left-most and most libertarian as 1 and, the right-most, most authoritarian as 5. The “neither agree nor disagree” option is scored as 3. The scores to all the questions in each scale are added and then divided by the number of items in the scale, giving indices ranging from 1 (left-most, most libertarian) to 5 (right-most, most authoritarian). The scores on the indices have been placed on the dataset.