The United States is known for the deep polarization between its two major political parties — the right-wing Republicans and left-wing Democrats. Now an analysis of hundreds of thousands of policy documents reveals striking differences in partisan policymakers’ use of the scientific literature, with Democratic-led congressional committees and left-wing think tanks more likely to cite research papers than their right-wing counterparts.
Speaking relatively, I think it is. Democrats are to the left of Republicans. Whilst there used to be a degree of overlap with (relatively) conservative Democrats and (relatively) liberal Republicans – I think the polarisation of recent decades has largely erased this feature.
That does not however mean that Democrats are “left-wing” in any absolute sense – they’d probably be to the right of my country’s (New Zealand’s) main “right-wing” party – ‘National’. However, such trans-national, and trans-temporal comparisons are difficult – as different nations and different times yield different coalitions of viewpoints within political parties.
As an example, National was, in the 1970s and early 1980s quite protectionist and interventionist – it was the left-wing Labour government that instituted free-market reforms. This lead to a number of strange bedfellows, and a number of offshoot parties (“New Labour”, which was actually ‘old’, pre-market reforms Labour, “NZ First”, which was the spiritual descendant of interventionist/popularist National, and Association of Consumers and Taxpayers, which was originally those who thought the Labour reforms didn’t go far enough).