Edit: When I say “Center Right” I also mean relative to Ferengi society.
A small addition to my post, Gender and Sexual Orientation in FERENGI society from a few months back.
I caught this frame in the background of LD S4 E6 Parth’s Ferengi Heart Place, depicting an unclothed Ferengi woman.
This provides an interesting insight into the Ferengi social/political landscape of the Nagus Rom era. It suggests a center right that is fine with women traveling in public to some extent (maybe with limits, like it can only be with husband or father or out of necessity), but not them being clothed. This doesn’t seem to be that common, as most Ferengi women we see in this episode (including on the television in Boimler’s apartment) are clothed, but it seems to be a position that exists.
Honestly, I’d be interested in a novel (perhaps written from the perspective of an autobiography) or something about how Nagus Rom and Leeta survived leading Ferenginar the first few years and adjusted to such a different role from his engineering days. We could learn a lot about the Ferengi political system.
I’m not sure if centre-right is a characterisation you can make of ferengi politics in this way.
I usually associate the left/right distinction as an indicator of mainly economic policy. We know that things like unions, worker rights, etc (leftist economic ideals) have never been big on fereginar. I don’t think there’s been that big a shift even with union man Rom at the helm.
I think that attitudes towards social issues like women’s rights are completely orthogonal to economic ones. It’s easy looking at current human political tribalism to group everyone on a left/right binary, but consider that during DS9 Rom, the economic leftist, did not at all like his mother wearing clothes and being open. If anything, the economically right leaning quark was less bothered by it.
I tried to hint at it at the beginning, but I admit mapping Ferengi politics onto human politics is a bit like comparing apples to oranges. I was honestly just trying to use commonly-understood terms, which may be a weak fit.
In terms of social-economic orthogonality, I think that can work for a more general analysis, but doesn’t seem the case in Ferengi society - for instance, social left and economic left reform in the late Zek (Ishka behind scenes)/early Rom seemed like a packaged deal. Also, the social restrictions on women extend to their economic right to make profit - many of the issues in Ferengi society are a blur of economic and social issues that are intimately connected.
Also, unrelated to my above thoughts, rewatching “Family Business”, I disagree with your assessment of Rom. For one, I think both Quark and Rom were equally bothered, just had different ways of expressing it; Quark let his discomfort out through visible anger, while Rom tried to hide it for a while, letting it seep through into his expression. Also, Rom, while seeming like a product of his society, seemed much more open to listening to Ishka, suggesting that while he had socially and economically conservative values, he didn’t hold them as strongly as screaming Quark.
Overall, I agree with your sentiment that political categorization is complex, and I feel no one model perfectly characterizes all ideologies, that there are merely abstractions that might work well in a specific context. Heck, there’s a sci-fi story idea I’m “working” on (by which I mean I haven’t touched it in ages) where I created a 3D political spectrum for my main factions; I forget what my third axis was, though. In the end, as much as some humans like to nerd out about it, an ideology can’t be perfectly reduced to a point on a graph or a line.
Still, there is some undeniable urge to do a deeper dive on Star Trek political mapping, down to sub-charts for characters in the individual societies where we have enough information, although you’d have to figure out how to handle different eras.