In established democracies, parties provide ideological cues either with their policy stances or with their social group affiliations. In new democracies, these signals are still ambiguous. What determines the meaning attached to ideological labels in such circumstances? Existing explanations emphasise country-specific ethno-linguistic cleavages. I propose a different explanation, which rests on the ideological legacy of the authoritarian past. Dictatorships are linked either to the left or to the right. This association between ideology and the authoritarian past persists after the democratic transition, distorting people’s perceptions of the meaning of ideological labels. This distortion translates into a bias against the ideology of the dictator. As the party system consolidates, however, the role of history is overcome by the accumulation of democratic experience. Focusing on the case of Greece, I propose a modelling framework to test the presence of this bias, its observational implications and its evolution along the process of party system consolidation.
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