How conservative are you?

It claims that adults fail to notice as the political opinions of their youth gradually weaken as they join the workforce and start families.

Study author James Rockey,an economics lecturer at the University of Leicester,said as well-educated people tend to socialise with others who have conservative views,their perception of where the ideological middle ground lies is skewed.

However,earning a high salary can jolt employees into a better awareness of where they sit in the political spectrum,he added.

“Politics is social. There are two main factors the first is that people compare themselves not to the population as a whole but to the people they know; the second is that political preferences change over time,” he was quoted as saying by the Telegraph.

According to his theory,a well-educated person who spent their student days protesting for left-wing social causes in the 1980s may still perceive their political allegiances as being left-wing,even if their ideological views have shifted further to the right in recent years.

His research is based on the World Values Survey (WVS) of 136,000 respondents held in 48 different countries,during five periods between 1981 and 2008.

In the survey,respondents were first asked to rate themselves on a scale of 1-10,with 1 signifying “left-wing” and 10 signifying “right-wing”,to assess how they perceive their own political beliefs.

These self-perceptions were then compared with indicators of the respondents’ actual ideological position.

This was established by asking them whether they believed wealth should be divided more equally.

Dr Rockey’s paper also found differences between self-perception and ideological beliefs based on a number of other factors,including gender,race and geographical location.