Bangladeshi voters are socially conservative but economically left-wing

Public debate on a wide range of issues is a defining feature of functioning democracies. Yet the loudest voices, regardless of how small they may be in number, can dominate public discourse and claim to represent the majority view.

This phenomenon is not unique to any particular political party; it can be observed across the political spectrum. An important question therefore arises: What do ordinary voters actually think? And once those preferences are observed, which policy positions fall within the boundaries of broad public acceptability?

These questions motivate the Jonomot opinion survey in Bangladesh.

The goal of the survey is straightforward: to understand how public opinion is structured in Bangladesh and identify which policy positions lie within the boundaries of broad public acceptability.

To find out, we asked respondents a series of questions about the economy and social issues.

We then placed their answers on two separate dimensions: an economic axis, running from more state-oriented to more market-oriented views, and a social axis, running from more socially progressive to more socially conservative views.

The result is a two-dimensional political compass.

The average respondent sits clearly on the economic left. The weighted national mean is −2.33 on our economic scale, indicating substantially more support for state provision and regulation than for a strongly market-oriented approach.

But on social questions, the picture changes. The national mean is +1.01, placing the average respondent modestly on the socially conservative side.

Put these two findings together and Bangladesh's ideological centre sits in the left-conservative quadrant.

That is perhaps the most important finding of the survey.

It tells us that economic leftism and social conservatism are not contradictory positions in Bangladesh. They coexist quite comfortably.

A voter can favour government intervention in the economy while also believing that society should uphold traditional moral norms. Someone can support public provision and economic regulation without necessarily holding socially liberal views.

This is why a single left-right scale can sometimes give us a misleading picture of public opinion.

The working sample contains 3,072 completed interviews. Of these, 2,927 respondents provide sufficient information to be placed on both the economic and social dimensions. The survey covers respondents across all 64 districts.

The analysis proceeds in two steps.

First, we construct a two-dimensional political compass that places respondents along an economic axis and a social axis.

Second, we identify the Overton window for two politically contentious issues in Bangladesh: the separation of religion and state, and the perceived causes of gender-based violence.

In our first op-ed, we will focus on the political compass. The second op-ed will focus on unpacking the issue items on the economic spectrum of the compass, while the third will focus on the social spectrum of the compass and the Overton window aspect.

Political compass construction

The political compass is constructed from two issue batteries measured on 11-point agreement scales from 0 to 10: a 10-item economic battery and a nine-item social battery.

The economic battery captures attitudes towards the relative role of the state and the market, including views on privatisation, market wage-setting, taxation, pricing and labour-market regulation. Each item was presented in one of two equivalent framings, assigned to respondents at random with equal probability.

The social battery spans attitudes towards religion in the public sphere, family norms, punishment, protest control, narcotics policy and defence spending. Each statement has dual framing, and respondents were asked either the conservative or liberal framing with equal probability.

All items are directionally harmonised so that higher values indicate more market-oriented views on the economic dimension and more socially conservative views on the social dimension.

For paired items fielded in opposite directions, responses are mirrored onto a common 0–10 metric before aggregation.

For each respondent, we averaged their answers to the economic questions and their answers to the social questions separately. We then adjusted the scores so that 0 represents the midpoint: negative scores indicate more economically left-wing or socially progressive views, while positive scores indicate more economically right-wing or socially conservative views.

The national ideological centre of gravity

The clearest finding from the survey is that the average respondent sits to the economic left and on the socially conservative side.

On our economic scale, the national average is −2.33. This indicates substantially stronger support for state provision and regulation than for a market-oriented approach to the economy.

On the social scale, the national average is +1.01, placing the average respondent modestly on the socially conservative side.

Taken together, these results place Bangladesh's ideological centre in the left-conservative quadrant.

This is the central finding of the survey. It suggests that the political preferences of Bangladeshis cannot be easily captured by a single left-right scale. People can favour a stronger role for the state in the economy while also supporting traditional social values, moral regulation and public order.

This is the central descriptive result. The ideological profile of the average respondent is not well described by a conventional one-dimensional left-right mapping borrowed from advanced industrial democracies.

At the same time, the national average does not mean that Bangladeshis all think alike. There is considerable variation in where people fall on the political compass. The centre is clear, but the public is not ideologically uniform.

Instead, economically interventionist preferences coexist with meaningful support for moral regulation, traditional hierarchy and order-oriented politics.

The distribution across the four quadrants makes this particularly clear. Some 78.9% of respondents are economically left and socially conservative. Another 15.0% are economically left and socially progressive, while 4.3% are economically right and socially conservative and 1.9% are economically right and socially progressive.

The pattern is not limited to any one group. Men and women are both overwhelmingly concentrated in the left-conservative quadrant. Younger people are somewhat less likely than older people to fall there, but they do not form a distinct ideological group. Differences across income groups are also relatively small compared with the overall national pattern.

In other words, the left-conservative position is not simply the view of one particular demographic. It appears broadly across Bangladeshi society.

Our findings provide evidence that it is often insufficient to summarise ideological preferences along a single left-right dimension.

Such frameworks do not always travel well across contexts. In societies where demands for economic redistribution coexist with moral traditionalism, religiosity and support for coercive authority, public opinion may be both structured and multidimensional.

Mapping that structure is important not only for descriptive political analysis but also for understanding the kinds of political projects that can plausibly command broad support, and for changing public opinion from the ground up rather than through a top-down approach.

Sheikh Rafi Ahmed is a graduate student in the Department of Economics at the National University of Singapore. Email: asheikhrafi@gmail.com.

Tanjim Ul Islam is a graduate student in the Department of Agricultural, Environmental, and Development Economics at The Ohio State University. Email: tanjim2909@gmail.com.

Redoun Satter is a research assistant at ARCED Foundation. Email: redounsatter1004@gmail.com.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.