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The goal of this paper is to examine the relationship between the unidimensional left-right measure of ideology and more nuanced measures of major political ideologies as well as to ascertain the validity of the left-right measure of ideology as a conceptual tool for analysing ideological preferences within the Croatian context. This was accomplished by deploying an online questionnaire on a convenient, non-representative sample of students from the University of Zagreb, Croatia. The students were recruited via various social media student groups. The paper starts by theoretically exploring the six major ideologies from which it develops a pool of items for measuring said ideologies. The data acquired via the aforementioned questionnaires was then analysed with the goal of assessing the best items to measure each ideology. The paper goes on to assess the relationship between the respondents’ support of major ideologies and their self-positioning on the left-right ideology scale. The acquired results demonstrate that the respondents possess a general understanding of the ideological left-to-right scale and are coherent in their preferences with the values of their ideology of choice. They further demonstrate that the correlations between the participants’ self-positioning on the left-right continuum and level of support for particular ideologies follow the expected direction. Therefore, while taking the limits of the deployed sample type into account, the paper reaffirms the validity of the left-right measure of ideology as a conceptual tool for analysing ideological preferences within the Croatian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comparative politics in Croatia has had two phases of development: initial development and institutionalization. Since its establishment in 1962, the Faculty of Political Sciences in Zagreb has been the main scientific and higher education institution for political science in Croatia, and the development and institutionalization of comparative politics in Croatian political science were primarily carried out there. In the first four decades of the Faculty’s existence, there were sporadic researches and publications of scientific papers on foreign policies, and we consider that period as the phase of the initial development of comparative politics. The establishment of the Department of Comparative Politics at the Faculty in 2004 marked the beginning of the systematic work on further development of comparative politics through scientific research and teaching of this subdiscipline in the study program of political science. This enabled the institutionalization of the subdiscipline, and we analyse it using Gabriela Ilonszki’s theoretical concept with five institutionalization properties: identity, autonomy, reproduction, legitimacy and stability. Based on this analysis, we make conclusions about the state of comparative politics at the Faculty of Political Science in Zagreb in 2022, 60 years after the establishment of the Faculty and 18 years after the establishment of the Department. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]