How universal is the left-right political spectrum?

Question

In the US, if someone is opposed to gay marriage, it's a good bet (but not guaranteed) that they are in favor of laissez-faire capitalism, skeptical of immigration, morally opposed to abortion, against raising taxes to pay for social security, etc. (and vice versa) Many of these issues are unrelated and it seems like it could be an accident of history that they are so highly correlated with each other. Regardless, I'm sure that if you were to take a list of 100 political issues, survey people's views on them, and then apply [dimensionality reduction](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimensionality_reduction) or [factor analysis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factor_analysis) to find the axis that best explains variation in political viewpoints, the left-right spectrum would be the result. So that raises the question: How universal is the left-right political spectrum? Do all other countries (that allow open political debate) have a similar concept? Are there countries whose political climates are not best explained by a left-right spectrum, but rather by some other division?

Answer 1

this statement suffers from LOGIC paralysis.

Almost certainly, if you say supporters of X are almost certainly in favor of Y , then you are looking for a "common cause" and not for cause and effect between the X and Y.

The Left-Right designation is deficient too since Conservatism (if you are Conservative by intellectual conviction) is the absence of ideology, I think it was the great Conservative thinker Russell Kirk who said that Conservatives and LIbertarians have only ONE thing in common, fear of highly-centralized power. Yet on your view of things they would both be on the Right. As if one could really find commonality in William F Buckley, Ayn Rand, and Hitler !!

Bottom Line: That there is a Left-Right divide is purely a figment of the Left :)