This paper appears to use the term conservative to mean right wing.  That&#x27;s incorrect.  You can be left wing and be a conservative; in fact, it&#x27;s rather common in American today.<p>Looking the three perception statements on page 11, agreement means you agree to some rather radical change. A true conservative would disagree with all three questions due to that.  Compared to the true conservative, a conservative right winger would be more likely to agree with the last, and a conservative left winger would be more likely to agree with the first two; however, they might not support any of them because they might be too radical.  For example, I know many left wingers that support health care reform but don&#x27;t support socialized medicine, so they&#x27;d likely disagree with &quot;Implement a universal healthcare program to guarantee coverage to all Americans, regardless of income&quot;.<p>That leads to issues with the results.  If a conservative left winger says no to the first two, s&#x2F;he appears more right wing than s&#x2F;he is.<p>On the other hand, if they are using conservative correctly, then it appears they are using liberal incorrectly.  Liberal isn&#x27;t the opposite of conservative.  Radical is the opposite of conservative.  There are radical right wingers that support same sex marriage who come to that idea from libertarianism.<p>The charts on specific questions are great, because they remove the terminology issue I&#x27;m raising, but when they identify the politician as liberal or conservative, it comes right back.<p>I&#x27;m sure the authors know this stuff better than I do, so I suspect I&#x27;m misunderstanding their work.<p>I know one of the authors posted here; I&#x27;d appreciate if he&#x27;d or someone else could clarify what I&#x27;ve got wrong.