If you are interested in this article you may perhaps also be interested in the book "Towards a Science of States: their Evolution and Properties".
Erik Moberg ©:
The so-called GAL-TAN scale
It has now become fashionable among political
scientists to complement the traditional left-right scale with a new “scale”
usually called the GAL-TAN scale. The capital letters here indicate the
endpoints of the “scale” and they stand for Green-Alternative-Libertarian and
Traditional-Authoritarian-Nationalist respectively.
This fashion is however intellectual rubbish. First the
so called scale is not a scale at all. A scale is used for measuring something.
A possible and common interpretation of the traditional left-right scale is for
instance that it indicates the involvement of the state in society at large. An
extreme left position thus favors a very large public sector and a planned
economy, whereas an extreme right position favors a pure so called night
watchman state, that is extreme liberalism.
This is reasonably clear, and it is also possible to
use this kind of scale for distributing citizens or voters along it according
to their political opinions. But even so it has its limitations. It is for
instance, as I write in the book (page 332), impossible to explain a phenomenon
as common as a coalition executive within the framework of a one-dimensional
spatial model such as the left-right one.
Adding the GAL-TAN ideas does however not help since they, in fact, do not indicate any scale at all. A first
possible interpretation is that the labels “Green”, “Alternative” and
“Libertarian” have some common property which could be considered the opposite
of some common property of the labels at the other end, that
is the labels “Traditional”, “Authoritarian” and “Nationalist”. This, however,
is obviously not the case. And, going further and as a matter of fact, neither
of the two trios has, or indicates, a common property even if taken alone.
Another possible interpretation is that each of the
labels at one of the endpoints has an opposite among the labels at the other
endpoint. Take for instance the label “Green” at the one endpoint. Is any of the labels “Traditional”, “Authoritarian” and
“Nationalist” a clear opposite to this? No, hardly. “Traditional” perhaps, but
if so it should added that traditional stands for much, much more than just
not-green. Or take the label “Nationalist” at the other endpoint. Is any of the labels “Green”, “Alternative” and
“Libertarian” a clear opposite to this? The only possibility seems to be “Alternative”,
but this concept is so vague that it is almost meaningless.
This second interpretation thus also fails. But even
if the label “Green” had had some clear opposite at the other end, and the same
had also been the case for the label “Nationalist”, and also for the other
labels, the whole idea would still be nonsense. In that case we would, to be
sure, have had three scales rather than one. But these three scales would also
be merged or integrated into one, which again leads to absurdities. Perhaps one
could compare with an effort to measure time, weight and length with one and
the same scale.
The GAL-TAN ideas are thus rubbish, but to this it
should be added that even if the left-right model can be complemented with more
scales of a strict and clear nature to a multidimensional model that does not
solve some very important problems. As I write (page 331) it is not the case
that “spatial theory is the only game in town”.
Or (page 334) “Theories which do not explicitly model politics as a result
of human ambition can hardly become successful”. Voters and other political
actors have interests and incentives of their own, and such matters cannot be
described by scales at all. Other methods have to be used.
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