Political similarities and differences are often described in terms of left and right. However,
while scholars have long focused on their substantive policy content, ideological labels also
serve largely as symbolic identifiers of political groups. We investigate how the contextual
variation in what left and right mean relates to the way that citizens perceive party
ideological positions in European countries. We discuss the impact of categorization, a basic
cognitive process where people organize reality by classifying objects into groups based on …