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Comment by evgen | Hacker News Reader

OP is radically incorrect regarding where US parties would fit on a global scale. There is actually a lot of good research out available in political science papers based on large-scale surveys conducted over decades that show the US parties to be close to the middle of the right and left respectively. If you removed health care from the equation (given how messed up this is in the US) then the two parties would actually shift a bit to the left when compared to right and left political parties in other western democracies. The past five years or so may have muddied the waters slightly with the impact of populism, but prior to this point they were not significant outliers.

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> If you removed health care from the equation

Removing a defining characteristic to force data to fit your model surely isn't good science

The US is a clear outlier compared to other western democracies in regards to public health policy. It makes little sense to try to map US healthcare debates to non-US political positions because it is almost unique. It is not about trying to fit a model, it is about removing things that add no useful information when it comes to points of comparison. And yes, it is good science.

Well, I would like to see their methodology. Obviously these are data points that are hard to assign categorical labels to, let alone quantifiable values.

I’d guess that by looking at the wide spectrum of governance with an inclusive view of Western democracies, you could come to the conclusion that economically-liberal powers share much in common.

On the other hand, when commentators make these comparisons they’re generally comparing a handful of exemplar Northern European democratic-socialist governments on a subset of hot-button issues (racial and economic justice, foreign policy, economic regulation, etc.) because that’s where the political action is.

Most of the long-running studies use the comparative manifesto project data, which tends to skew european but covers more than just hot-button issues. I think it includes Japan and Aus/NZ but not sure about the latter. See https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9248.12015 for info on the range of questions people in the field think this data can answer.

Healthcare AND paid higher education.

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