Ideology remains a central concept in the study of politics. In spite of long-standing concerns about the term’s diverse meanings,Footnote 1 its potential disappearance or obsolescence,Footnote 2 and its complicated and sometimes paradoxical historical trajectory,Footnote 3 it continues to frequent publications in the social sciences and humanities. Indeed, dedicated research on ideology has proliferated over the last few decades, with the welcome consequence that specialist thinking about ideology is at a high-water mark of richness, diversity and theoretical sophistication.Footnote 4
At the same time, however, this proliferation of research has fragmented the study of ideology along a number of different boundaries.Footnote 5 Some obvious fissures are disciplinary. For example, a long tradition of analyzing ideology in political science has little interaction with an equally distinguished literature in intellectual history and political theory. Both of these, in turn, are fairly disconnected from the extensive consideration of ideology in discourse theory, and have only tentative links with new research in political and social psychology. But these disciplinary divisions also display a geographical pattern: they largely (though not perfectly) correspond to different ways of studying ideology on the North American and European sides of the Atlantic Ocean. This disciplinary and geographic fragmentation stymies interdisciplinarity, weakens research coordination and prevents theorists from building on progress in other fields.
The result is a form of methodological parochialism, evident in the contrast between the assertion of a group of leading political psychologists that there has been a ‘recent resurgence of interest’ in ideologyFootnote 6 and the claim of an equally prominent discourse analyst that ‘during these past twenty-five years, ideology has become much less of an issue in social research’.Footnote 7 If disciplinary communities’ objects of study were radically different, such parochialism might be unproblematic. However, we suggest that there are more commonalities in the study of ideology across disciplinary and geographic boundaries than article citations or conference programmes would suggest. Geographically and disciplinarily differentiated communities engage in debates that are often strikingly alike and suggest ripe opportunities for intellectual cross-fertilization. In this article, we point to a series of cross-cutting intellectual cleavages that link scholars from different disciplinary and geographic communities. We organize such cleavages around three questions that appear to be of great relevance to most scholars of ideology from all communities: (1) What do we mean by ideology? (2) How do we model ideology? (3) Why do people adopt the ideologies they do?
The coverage of this piece is necessarily somewhat selective: rather than claiming to represent the entire field, our focus is on highlighting cross-cutting themes in the variety of contemporary research taking place in North America with that in Europe. Further, this review is less focused on providing a historical perspective on the study of ideology and more focused on rethinking the cleavages that animate contemporary debates about ideology. We emphasize that our intention throughout is not to suggest that some single master theory of ideology is possible or desirable. Instead we believe that connecting points of tangency between academic communities will allow scholars to focus on unexplored theoretical lacunae and points of potential co-operation, and exploit the comparative strengths and weaknesses of different research approaches.
What Do We Mean By Ideology?
It has become routine to note the extreme variety of meanings imputed to the term ideology in academic research, with McLellan describing it as ‘the most elusive concept in the whole of social science’.Footnote 8 But the familiarity of this concern has tended to obscure how the conceptual terrain occupied by ideology in the social sciences and humanities has changed. Variance remains, but in recent decades disparate research streams have increasingly deployed similar understandings of ideology. We trace this convergence, and residual divergences, along three cleavages: the evaluative connotations ascribed to ideology, the degree of coherence seen as necessary in an ideology and the types of ideational components that make up ideologies.
Evaluative Connotations
Conceptualizations of ideology have often been divided into two categories: (1) a pejorative usage, in which ideology denotes something false, exploitative or otherwise bad and (2) a non-pejorative usage, in which it more neutrally denotes some sort of systematized political thinking.Footnote 9 But across disciplines and geographies, such highly pejorative conceptions of ideology as those often utilized in Marxist analysis have become increasingly unpopular. As Geertz noted, such usages of ideology produced ‘an egregiously loaded concept’ for social science analysis.Footnote 10
Consequently, in North American political science, and related fields, a gradual move towards a more empiricist approach to ideological scholarship – and away from a normatively charged definition of the concept – began in the aftermath of the Second World War.Footnote 11 In Europe, a parallel transition was more uneven and sometimes driven by different epistemic motivations. Initially, many scholars retained an interest in using the concept of ideology for critical or evaluative purposes. Yet European scholars have also increasingly argued that such critical enterprises do not require ideology itself to be defined pejoratively.Footnote 12
The overall result is that, across most scholarly communities, ideology is now generally used broadly and in a manner that does not take a normative position on the content or form of its beliefs.Footnote 13 There are exceptions, and in discourse analysis, for example, some theorists have retained more pejorative definitions, which explicitly link ideology to domination and power.Footnote 14 Even in these fields, however, there are those who have abandoned such conceptions for a broad and neutral definitionFootnote 15 or who, by also counting belief systems of resistance to domination as ideologies, ultimately include almost all politically orientated worldviews.Footnote 16
Coherence of the System
Essentially all conceptions of ideology agree that it refers to some sort of idea system, such that there is minimal controversy in affirming that if political thinking were totally disconnected and chaotic, there would be little sense in talking about ‘ideologies’.Footnote 17 But different theorists elaborate what is meant by this requirement by using various non-equivalent and often vaguely specified phrases like ‘coherence’, ‘consonance’, ‘constraint’ or ‘consistency’.Footnote 18 This debate became prominent in post-war US research, which converged on a definition of ideology as a highly consistent set of ideas with fixed and well-defined relationships between them. This view, particularly associated with Converse, conceived of ideologies as constraints on the organization of attitudes.Footnote 19 Subsequently, a well-elaborated empirical literature developed to suggest that highly coherent political ideologies were more widespread among political elites than among mass publics.Footnote 20
By contrast, European scholars broadly eschewed such moves and rarely assumed that ideologies needed to be tightly constrained or consistent. In part this reflected the influence of theorists working in intellectual history and sociology, who critiqued the quick conclusion of ‘incoherence’ applied by scholars to systems of historical or vernacular thought unlike their own,Footnote 21 a criticism echoed by some American scholars.Footnote 22 Indeed, for Billig et al. and Freeden, contradictions and dilemmas are central to the trajectory of ideological development.Footnote 23 Many European scholars now suggest that ideological analysis needs to incorporate a focus on the full range of political thinking, not simply highly elaborated and well-considered elite doctrines.Footnote 24 These scholars caution that a narrower conception of ideology can reify the contingent ideological spectrum of American elite politics, draws too firm and dichotomous a distinction between the ideologically sophisticated elite and the purportedly unideological mass public, and risks obscuring how a diverse range of ideologies can impact public political thinking even when they are not totally or self-consciously internalized.Footnote 25
To a degree, however, this cross-Atlantic contrast has been eroded, with Jost’s celebrated claim of an ‘end to the end of ideology’ illustrating the rapidly shifting axes of debate in political psychology.Footnote 26 Jost, Federico, and Napier significantly relax the need for ideologies to have logical coherence, instead emphasizing the psychological benefits of ideological attachment and the necessity of ideologies in providing subjective interpretations of the political world.Footnote 27 Other psychologists have moved further away from conceptualizing ideologies as purely ‘cognitive’ objects, emphasizing the importance of emotional coherence that can exist in the absence of logical coherence – indeed, logical coherence is often compromised to maintain stable emotional links between concepts in an ideology.Footnote 28 And, while they do not always use the terminology of ‘ideologies’, numerous scholars in North America share the desire of European scholars to examine what Freeden terms ‘actual political thinking’Footnote 29 and Finlayson calls ‘political ideas as they are found “in the wild”’.Footnote 30 The literature on social movements is one significant example.Footnote 31 Each of these trends has brought the mainstream North American study of ideology into far closer alignment with the intellectual commitments of European scholars.
The Substance of Ideologies
The North American move to expand the forms of ordinary thinking that count as ‘ideologies’ contributes to a broader question shared across communities about what is properly understood as the ‘substance’ of ideologies, that is, the sorts of ideational components that comprise ideologies. Here there is something of an unspoken contrast between approaches that depict ideologies primarily as bundles of attitudes or values (the majority but not the exclusive view among political scientists and some psychologists)Footnote 32 and those that stress the role of concepts, meanings and language (the majority but not the exclusive view in political theory, intellectual history and discourse analysis).Footnote 33 A third component of ideologies, their descriptive and purportedly factual content, might also be considered important,Footnote 34 yet – barring some work on ideological ‘narratives’Footnote 35 – this has received relatively little analysis on either continent.Footnote 36 Other components may also matter. Finlayson, for example, argues that an ideology’s rhetorical properties, such as its affective tone or deployment of recurring tropes, are ‘not merely manifestations or expressions’ of ideologies but actively shape and constitute them.Footnote 37
This all testifies to a considerably fragmented state of affairs: ideologies and political behaviour are likely to be centrally oriented around values, meanings and beliefs about matters of fact, and the absence of integrated consideration of these three facets of ideology constitutes a serious weakness in the ability of the disciplines studying ideology to construct comprehensive accounts of its role in any aspect of social life.Footnote 38 Of course, a certain relationship of primacy might exist here; people may largely pick and choose beliefs about matters of fact that suit their underlying values and predispositions, for example. But there are good reasons to think that such theories are overly crude,Footnote 39 and they cannot be convincingly evaluated without a much more thorough integration of research on the overlapping value-based, meaning-based and fact-based aspects of ideology.Footnote 40
Definitional Convergence
While differences in definitions of ideology remain, there has been a considerable convergence, across disciplines and regions, towards a non-pejorative and broad definition of ideology. And three particularly authoritative conceptual investigations, by Hamilton, Gerring and Knight, have all endorsed this shift, producing similar arguments for paring down the most restrictive criteria attached to ideology so as to leave a broadly encompassing concept that describes some manner of patterned and politically oriented belief system.Footnote 41 As a consequence, for the considerable majority of researchers and recent works on ideology, encompassing almost all the European literature and many disciplines in North America, ideology is very widespread.Footnote 42 As Norval writes: ‘It is this emphasis on the ubiquity of ideology […] that is at the heart of contemporary approaches to the question of ideology’.Footnote 43 For such approaches, the binary question of whether ideology is present within an individual or group is unproductive – given that its answer will be dictated by the idiosyncratic and contestable definition of the individual analystFootnote 44 – and tends to fragment the study of different sorts of political thinking. A more effective investigation broadens the concept of ideology in order to sideline such a binary question, and instead investigates the varying ways that different ideologies of different degrees of elaboration influence behaviour and thought.
This does not mean that definitional discussions of ideology should now be seen as settled. Lacunae remain: for example, the relationship between the terms ideology and ideological, or between ideology and both sub-ideology phenomena (such as doctrines, theories or narratives) and super-ideology phenomena (such as cultures, entire intellectual traditions or ideological families). These are questions of ideology’s ‘scale’: it seems uncontroversial to suggest that many ideational entities can be ideological without themselves counting as ‘ideologies’. As Luskin wrote, ‘“ideology” as part should not be confused with “ideology” as whole’.Footnote 45 Yet the actual point at which a set of ideas counts as a full ideology (as well as clarification of what the relevant criteria are) has received little attention. And these are important questions, since the degree to which a particular society’s members are similar at the level of their full ideologies, or only hold in common more issue-centred ideological sub-systems or merely share certain ideological components (like narratives, arguments, concepts and sets of factual assumptions) is an open question that likely varies across time and space.
Luskin’s own claim that an ideology necessarily ‘runs more or less the gamut of political affairs, or it is not an ideology’,Footnote 46 strikes us as hard to sustain, given increasing scholarly recognition that the boundaries of what counts as ‘political affairs’ are themselves subject to contestation and contextual variation.Footnote 47 But some terminology for grappling with ideological phenomena of different scales is needed to analyze historical and contemporary developments in societies’ (potentially fragmenting) ideological landscapes. In general, the American literature on ideology has tended to operationalize ideology via very large-scale ideational systems with familiar labels: often just conservatism and liberalism, sometimes supplemented by other big ideologies like libertarianism or socialism.Footnote 48 Many European scholars follow suit.Footnote 49 But some theorists have also suggested that smaller-scale systems of ideas may count either as full ideologies, or as derivative but explicitly limited phenomena like ‘partial ideologies’,Footnote 50 ‘local ideologies’Footnote 51 or ‘thin ideologies’.Footnote 52 Such concepts offer a potential means of bridging some of the gap between theorists who still see ideology (defined as full, highly developed and tightly coherent idea systems) as relatively rare and those who see it (characterized as loose, multi-form and patterned, but not necessarily tightly coherent idea systems) as more ubiquitous. But in general, conceptual discussion on these distinctions has been limited – this remains one of several ‘next-generation’ conceptual questions about ideology (that is, questions beyond simply how to define the concept) which require deeper consideration.
How Should We Model What People Believe Or Think?
A second question faced by any approach to the study of ideology is how to represent or model the vast complexity and variety of existing systems of ideas, in both the process of analysis and the written outputs of research. There exists a basic divide between spatial and non-spatial approaches to this mapping of ideological content. Non-spatial approaches further include both (1) symbolic models, which represent ideologies as interconnected networks of visually depictable symbols and (2) thick descriptive models, which engage in detailed prose discussions of the contents and nature of ideologies.
In comparison with the considerable convergence over the conceptualization of ideology, there remains tremendous variety in the deployment of these approaches to modelling. There is nothing necessarily problematic about this: each modelling approach offers contrasting advantages and disadvantages for different research projects or methodologies. Generally, they should not be seen as rivals. Spatial approaches are vastly easier to operationalize for quantitative methods (both via surveys at the data collection stage and statistical processing at the analysis stage) and may reflect heuristics used by actual political actors. But these benefits come at the cost of significant simplifications of belief content, which scholars often fail to acknowledge or render explicit. Symbolic approaches offer considerable expository strengths in describing complex relationships between ideological elements and highlighting change in such relationships, but are much clumsier at representing in detail the content of individual elements. Thick descriptive approaches offer by far the most accurate representation of the substantive complexity and richness of ideological content, but much less easily facilitate causal or correlative analysis, and inefficiently aggregate into large-N datasets on different ideological positions. This all suggests that efforts to mix modelling approaches should be much more widely attempted.
Spatial Approaches
Many scholars have taken a spatial approach towards modelling ideologies, with considerable debate over the appropriate number and class of dimensions necessary to do so. Scholars who see ideologies as mappable in a low number of dimensions often visualize ideological positions using Cartesian coordinate systems, in which each axis represents one dimension of a proposed ideational space.
Ideologies have been described along a single left-right dimension for over a century. Despite repeated attempts to supplant one-dimensional ideological mapping with more complex characterizations, the approach retains significant academic support. Among the most vocal advocates of a one-dimensional state space is Jost, who advances a largely instrumentalist argument. While conceding that the left-right distinction does not capture the full range of ideological possibility, he suggests that it includes most important information about political attitudes in a parsimonious way since, at least within Western political arenas, political ideologies have converged into a single dimension.Footnote 53 Because the spatial approach has been most richly elaborated within American scholarship, the two-party system in the United States also looms large among advocates of single-dimensional ideological mapping. From this perspective, US political behaviour and public opinion can generally be mapped along one dimension with only the occasional need for a second dimension.Footnote 54
Two-dimensional characterizations of the ideological state space are also common. Rokeach provided one of the early influential mappings of political values, which highlighted two dimensions, one measuring relative support for equality and the other measuring relative support for freedom.Footnote 55 He famously associated the resulting quadrants with political systems: fascism (low freedom, low equality), capitalism (high freedom, low equality), communism (high equality, low freedom) and socialism (high freedom, high equality).Footnote 56
There are many other two-dimensional mappings. Inglehart draws on decades of cross-national values research to map political values along a secular-rational axis and a survival versus self-expression axis.Footnote 57 Braithwaite points to a preference-for-security dimension and a preference-for-harmony dimension, with each dimension operationalized as a cluster of related goals.Footnote 58 Carmines and D’Amico advance the familiar view that economic and social issues constitute two separate dimensions of ideology.Footnote 59 Cultural theory, originally developed as a way to characterize attitudes towards risks, employs a group axis that depicts the salience of group membership to personal identity and a grid axis that describes the acceptance of rules or regulations in everyday life.Footnote 60 Still other researchers have increasingly used personality factors as dimensions along which political attitudes can be distributed. Dual-process theory proposes that right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation scores can also allow a two-dimensional mapping of an individual’s ‘sociological or ideological attitude’.Footnote 61
A further group of approaches bridges spatial and non-spatial perspectives, suggesting commonalities across different disciplinary perspectives. These scholars still invoke the notion of spatial dimensions but move away from an explicitly spatial representation of ideology because of the multidimensionality of their models. For instance, Haidt’s moral foundations theory holds that ideologies are rooted in moral intuitions, deep-rooted reactions to social organization that are hardwired by evolution into our minds.Footnote 62 In particular, Haidt has identified six core moral foundations: harm/care, fairness/reciprocity, ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, purity/sanctity and liberty/oppression. These values are derived from a thorough review of the primary literature in anthropology and evolutionary psychology, rather than from factorial analysis of survey data.Footnote 63 In another theory that draws from extensive cross-national work, Hofstede proposes five dimensions to classify national cultures: power distance (which describes the degree of societal inequality), uncertainty avoidance, individualism vs. collectivism, masculinity vs. femininity, and long-term vs. short-term orientation.Footnote 64 Still, as the complexity of ideological content increases, there is a natural move away from spatial reasoning to maintain a useful heuristic for representing this content.
Debating the Value of Spatial Approaches
Another underappreciated link between the North American and European academies inheres in criticisms of such spatial approaches to ideologies. Critics within psychology,Footnote 65 political science,Footnote 66 and political theory and intellectual historyFootnote 67 have raised a number of similar concerns.Footnote 68
Many theorists accept that spatial approaches offer some utility to the study of ideology, but worry that such models – particularly unidimensional models – excessively oversimplify the actual diversity of real-world belief systems. Both psychologists and political scientists have argued that several prominent US ideologies (let alone those of other societies) are poorly captured on a left-right and especially liberal-conservative scale, notably libertarianism.Footnote 69 In fact, even the psychological underpinnings of libertarianism may be distinct, with suggestions that libertarians structure their ideology along far less affective terms, holding a belief system with fewer emotional components.Footnote 70 Other North American scholars have questioned the implicit bundling of conservatism and resistance to change in psychological theories of left-right orientation.Footnote 71 In political science, Zaller argues against a one-dimensional characterization of ideological content, instead reframing ideology as a ‘constellation of related value dimensions’.Footnote 72 At the same time, Zaller argues that individual scores on these different dimensions still tend to be at least moderately correlated and thus, while dimension-specific measurements of attitudes are preferable, a one-dimensional left-right construct still captures a meaningful part of the variation in political beliefs. Even physiological critiques have been integrated into this debate; a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study suggests there are at least three separate dimensions of political attitudes, each of which is associated with neural activation in a different region of the brain: individualism in the medial prefrontal cortex and temporoparietal junction, conservatism in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and radicalism in the ventral striatum and posterior cingulate.Footnote 73
Others critique the way specific unidimensional models, such as the liberal-conservative continuum widely deployed in North American scholarship, are not solely utilized in reference to a specific political context but are often explicitly or implicitly presented as universal models of political belief.Footnote 74 This can encourage reification in the chosen dimension, so that when the subjects do not provide the sets of beliefs presumed by analysts to be the natural definition of ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’ or ‘left’ or ‘right’, this is taken to indicate that they are thinking ‘incoherently’ or ‘non-ideologically’ rather than demonstrating that this dimensional model is failing to capture their actual political thinking.Footnote 75 More generally, specific unidimensional models encourage an insensitivity to cultural variance and temporal change in the dominant ideological space. The dominant US liberal-conservative dimension can be applied only very awkwardly to European democracies, for example, where the presence of socialists and social democrats as committed advocates of ‘change’ and ‘equality’ results in liberal parties and positions generally being interpreted as occupying the middle of a left-right spectrum and being primarily orientated, as the name suggests, around liberty, though with important roles for concepts like equality, fairness and justice.Footnote 76 More generally, there is little evidence that the specific unidimensional models derived from American or European politics possess a natural fit to the ideological landscape in Africa,Footnote 77 China,Footnote 78 the Islamic worldFootnote 79 or to emergent ideologies orientated around ‘global imaginaries’.Footnote 80
In articulating such challenges to dimensional, and particularly unidimensional, models of ideology, groups on either side of the Atlantic are arguing in tandem, but rarely in dialogue, for more complex models. While stronger criticisms of spatial approaches to ideological thinking are most frequently associated with European scholars, there is a diversity of voices on both sides of the Atlantic. For example, in US psychology scholarship, the left-right distinction tends to be framed as a bipolar dimension, in that left-wing and right-wing positions are defined as opposing belief systems.Footnote 81 However, a critical position argues that left and right ideological positions are better understood as bivariate: distinctive sets of beliefs that are not inherently opposite. This idea was first seriously advanced by Kerlinger, who argued that ideologies were clusters of attitudes that respond to sets of ‘criterial referents’, understood as classes, categories or phenomenon that trigger individual attitudinal judgements.Footnote 82 Other critics cast doubt on the appropriateness of thinking about ideologies within a spatial framework at all. For example, to Conover and Feldman ideologies are most important for their symbolic role.Footnote 83 They suggest we should treat ideologies as a political symbol, and focus on the social differentiation that ideological attachment provides. In this, they echo almost identical criticisms lobbied by European scholars.
Non-spatial Approaches
A different approach to the representation of ideology eschews spatial heuristics. For analysts within political theory, intellectual history, discourse analysis, qualitative political science, political psychology or sociology, ideologies are principally set apart by their substantive ideational content. This can take the form of complex and varying conceptual configurations,Footnote 84 distinct sets of historically textured myths and signifiers,Footnote 85 notionally factual content,Footnote 86 or idiosyncratic arguments and ways of deploying rhetorical devices.Footnote 87 Hall argues that in such approaches, ‘when we analyse an ideology in terms of its “key concepts” we are really mapping the whole web of meanings, the discursive space, which these core ideas, working together, constitute as that ideology’s “regime of truth” – to borrow Foucault’s metaphor’.Footnote 88 Analysts committed to this sort of project focus on the detailed content of ideologies, arguing that far too much is lost by reducing the substantive content that describes ideologies’ actual characteristics to one or two numerical dimensions. Consequently, they prefer to model ideology using one of two alternative approaches, which we term ‘thick description’ and ‘symbolic mapping’.
The dominant non-spatial approach to modelling ideology is thick description: detailed prose discussion of the particular beliefs and arguments, discursive tendencies and rhetorical devices, or cognitive processes that define the character of particular ideologies. This is a strategy long deployed by classic political ideology textbooks on both sides of the Atlantic,Footnote 89 but it has a natural affinity for any approach that analyses in depth the content of the ideas that make up liberalism, conservatism, socialism, nationalism or other ideologies. Skinner’s studies of the ideological traditions that provide the foundations of modern political thought, for example, provide a deep analysis of the evolving ideals of Renaissance and Reformation political thought and their contextual role in the political struggles of the period.Footnote 90 Billig’s ‘rhetorical psychology’ approach involves detailed reconstruction of the language, social representations and arguments deployed by groups like the Young Conservatives, British Fascist groups or monarchists.Footnote 91 And in the influential cultural studies of Hall, political thought orientated around liberalism, struggles for racial equality or conceptions of ‘New Times’ have their distinctive conceptions, historical roots, and contextual political battles analyzed and interrelated to describe the nature of the ideology and its role in political thought and action.Footnote 92 More recently, the new Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies includes chapters on twenty ideologies, ideological families or regional ideological communities, all involving the thick description of their component arguments, assumptions, historical narratives, values, reasons, claims, contexts and styles of thinking about politics.Footnote 93 And in discussions of ideology in other fields, such as international relations or media studies, there is also a frequent reliance on thick description of, for example, the specific narratives and conceptions that have influenced states’ foreign policy,Footnote 94 the idiosyncratic ways of thinking that shape war-waging practices,Footnote 95 or the tropes and frames relied on by British tabloid and broadsheet newspapers.Footnote 96
An alternative form of non-spatial modelling of ideology is concept or symbolic mapping. Such modelling techniques seek to represent ideologies visually in diagrams built from components linked by connections in a certain structure. For instance, the cognitive-affective mapping approach developed by Thagard and associates seek to supplement early forms of concept mapping with considerations of emotion by visually representing the affective valence of ideological components in terms of direction (negative or positive emotional) and strength.Footnote 97 Compared with thick descriptive methods of modelling ideological content, such symbolic representations involve considerable simplification of semantic content and argument, and downplay variety in the different sorts of components that make up ideologies. But they efficiently represent structural relationships between ideological components, the nature and extent of ideological change through earlier and later symbolic maps of the same individuals or groups, and (when including affect) the affective tenor of different aspects of an overarching ideology. Symbolic mapping may also be thought to include diagrams that do not model networks of ideas themselves: Collins models change within broad cultural or ideological traditions by interactional diagrams indicating the relationships of major intellectuals who construct each tradition.Footnote 98
Some of the most sophisticated forms of ideological modelling sit on the boundary between thick descriptive and symbolic approaches. Freeden’s influential morphological approach, for example, relies heavily on a thick descriptive representation of numerous ideologies, but involving diagrammatic metaphors akin to a symbolic approach, identifying core, adjacent and periphery components of ideology and discussing in detail their structural configuration (or morphology).Footnote 99 And a range of other theorists, including Hall and Steger, deploy similar metaphors of core concepts, structure and ideational clusters.Footnote 100 As a consequence, while these theorists do not engage in symbolic mapping themselves, their work has the potential to both inform and incorporate such an approach.Footnote 101
Why Do People Adopt The Ideologies They Do?
Different accounts of the drivers of individual ideological attachment can seem, at first glance, to reflect established scholarly divisions between individual and social forms of explanation – even accepting, as many ideology scholars now appear to, that the individual and social are ultimately co-constitutive.Footnote 102 But in truth, the factors that have been proposed as causes of ideological attachment span a broad continuum of more or less individual or social forces, including genetic, physiological, psychological, political, discursive and institutional factors. In addition, most theorists acknowledge that key determinants of ideology bridge multiple levels of analysis through complex cross-scale interactions. A key weakness in the contemporary study of ideology is that the formal study of these interactions remains rare: the few integrative models of ideology that have been constructed tend to integrate different levels of analysis with varying degrees of attention.Footnote 103
From the Individual to the Group in North America
Genetic and physiological accounts portray ideological attachment as primarily an outcome of individual attributes. One emerging body of literature draws from twin studies to claim that there is a genetic basis for political attitudes.Footnote 104 That political attitudes and ideology should have a genetic component is hardly surprising, since an individual’s genetics at least partly influences most psychological traits.Footnote 105 Further, a disposition towards order and rules may have a biological basis,Footnote 106 and some scholars suggest that two ideological phenotypes may exist: one with a social orientation that prioritizes in-group solidarity and moral rigidity, and another that is more communitarian and morally flexible.Footnote 107 However, the findings from this literature remain controversial.Footnote 108
A related literature has investigated the physiological basis of political attitudes. For instance, liberals appear to have more gray matter in the anterior cingulated cortex, while conservatives have more gray matter in the right amygdala.Footnote 109 Within the United States, amygdala activity is stronger in Republicans, while insula activations are stronger in Democrats.Footnote 110 These studies also provide diverse evidence of cross-cultural physiological correlates of ideological beliefs. Thus conservatives appear to have a higher persistence of habitual response behaviour, which is associated with a lower anterior cingulate activity,Footnote 111 while differential neural responses in brain activity correlate with social and political behaviour.Footnote 112 Effects have also been identified at the level of the whole body. For instance, individuals with lower sensitivity to threatening images and noises, measured by skin conductance and automatic blinking responses, were more likely to support a cluster of policies typically framed as liberal.Footnote 113 All such differences may be genetic in origin, or they could reflect a combination of genetic and environmental determinants.
Psychological research on ideology tends to be largely individualist in its orientation, by focusing on the way that underlying psychological traits and personality types create an ‘elective affinity’ for certain ideological positions.Footnote 114 But psychological research has accorded an increasing role to group-level factors in shaping collective belief systems. Dominant explanations of ideological attachment within political psychology can be loosely grouped by their focus on cognition/affect, morality or personality. These psychological accounts are paralleled by an argument common to both psychologists and political scientists: that ideologies are at least partially rooted in individual-level material interests and life experiences.
In the cognition camp, conservatism has been influentially framed as a form of motivated social cognition that serves a range of epistemic, existential and relational psychological functions such as uncertainty avoidance and threat management.Footnote 115 While these functions are often framed as psychologically desirable, other consequences of conservatism may well be harmful to psychological health and well-being, including increased incidences of depression and trauma.Footnote 116 Under the morality approach, Haidt argues that there are substantial differences between the moral concerns that underlie different ideological beliefs, with conservatives tapping a broader range of human moral impulses and liberals engaging only a subset of these.Footnote 117 Here, affective reactions precede rational considerations and deliberative moral reasoning is largely a post hoc explanation for affective, moral intuitions.Footnote 118 Finally, a growing focus on personality has linked the ‘big five’ traits, particularly openness to experience, with ideological positioningFootnote 119 and other types of political behaviour, such as political and civic engagement.Footnote 120
Yet these same psychological literatures are more sensitive to group-level concerns than is often portrayed, particularly through their focus on social contexts and political institutions. A growing body of work focuses on political socialization, including the transmission of ideologies through families; these effects appear most pronounced during late adolescence and early adulthood.Footnote 121 From this perspective, individuals acquire some aspects of their ideological identity through social learning from parents and close family members.Footnote 122 System justification theory argues that ideological attachment is contingent on an individual’s status within prevailing political and economic institutions,Footnote 123 though broadly, individuals tend to adopt ideological positions that rationalize prevailing social arrangements.Footnote 124 Such theories overlap with established research in political science on the use of political communication, framing effects and elite cues to trigger ideological shifts in public opinion in ways that serve the political interests of partisan groups. In a similar fashion, Braithwaite provides a sophisticated account that links political attitudes with political institutions, suggesting that political constraints and a combative political arena force individuals to trade off their preferences and, in effect, choose one side of the more traditional left-right scale.Footnote 125 In this sense, ideologies can be understood as tools to reduce multidimensional belief systems into low-dimensional identities that allow the coordination of behaviour.
Even complex genetic–environmental links have been integrated into group-level thinking on occasion. For instance, a recent study finds that, among individuals who possess a particular dopamine receptor gene variant, increased numbers of friendships in late adolescence predict the subsequent adoption of liberal values; no such association is observed in individuals without the gene variant.Footnote 126 Such research illustrates how even predominantly individualist accounts offer more opportunities for engagement with group-level accounts than common characterizations portray.
Finally, a range of scholars, particularly political scientists, has studied how individual material interests and individual life experiences can shape ideological preferences or the propensity to attach to particular ideologies. This work suggests at least some linkage between individual wealth and conservatism, as well as the potential for traumatic or transformative individual experiences to shape ideological attachment.Footnote 127 For instance, winning the lottery can drive individuals to become more right wing and less egalitarian.Footnote 128 In a radically different theoretical framework, Marxist-influenced approaches to the study of ideology similarly emphasize the importance of economic power in reproducing ideological narratives that serve elite material interests.Footnote 129
From the Group to the Individual in Europe
The European academy has typically adopted a more social or group-oriented approach, with an overwhelming focus on discourse and language as determinants of ideological attachment and change. European theorists are largely united in emphasizing how perception of the social (and material) world is possible only via conceptual frameworks made available through discourse. Since discourses vary from one social context to another, discursive resources enable and constrain the forms of thinking in which subjects are able to engage.Footnote 130 Consequently, all political thought is governed by the nature of available political discourses: the particular concepts, rhetorical devices and discursive conventions into which individuals are socialized.Footnote 131 Changes in individual, group or societal ideologies are therefore prompted by (and reflected in) changes to these constitutive discursive components.Footnote 132
As in the American literature, there is variety in the sorts of phenomena theorists focus on within the broad category of discourse. In the morphological approach of Freeden, the emphasis is on concepts as complex units of meaning that constitute ideological systems. Central to Freeden’s approach is an examination of the ways in which the same formal concepts (like equality, liberty or order) are invested with a wide range of meanings within various ideologies, and placed in different positions and configurations in ideology’s overall morphology. Different ideologies are thus engaged in a competition for ‘control of public political language’,Footnote 133 with political thinking centrally determined by the particular semantic moves made by the dominant producers of ideology. ‘Skinnerian’ intellectual historians (after Quentin Skinner) similarly focus on the contextually contingent meanings of key concepts in shaping ideology, and place particular emphasis on the existing ideological landscape as shaping possible thought and future ideological development.Footnote 134 This latter focus is shared by the sociological approach of Boudon, who analyses how existing assumptions underpin heuristic thought processes in producing ideological beliefs, and stresses how networks of epistemic authorities produce such assumptions.Footnote 135 For critical discourse analysts like Fairclough or Wodak and Meyer, rhetorical theorists like Billig and Finlayson, and for Skinner’s approach to intellectual history, stress is placed on the particular syntactic and rhetorical devices (such as frames, metaphors and idioms) and processes (such as nominalization, allusion, paradiastole or topic-setting) used in discourse to inculcate particular ideological impressions in an audience, and the particular institutions (especially media and political organizations) that do so.Footnote 136 Theorists influenced by post-structuralism, meanwhile, have tended to focus on larger semantic structures like myths, imaginaries, narratives and identities, emphasizing how these are constructed and then reified in ways that disguise their contingent and contextual origins.Footnote 137 And both critical discourse analysts and post-structuralists have called for an increasing focus on non-verbal components of discourse – including symbolic, visual, performative and somatic displays.Footnote 138
Yet as the individualist focus of much American scholarship has increasingly been complemented by an acknowledgement of group and social factors, so these more obviously social accounts in the European literature incorporate, to varying degrees, individual factors. A theme running through the work of many European theorists is the critical role of contextual political manoeuvring in shaping ideological changes, with key ideological moves, alterations and articulations made by political actors in response to contextual political struggles.Footnote 139 Individuals use ideologies, deploy ideological claims and engage in acts of ideological creativity as part of an attempt to win political battles. Correspondingly, tactical and strategic choices made by individuals are critical in shaping ideological change.
Some European theorists have also sought to analyze the fundamental psychological drivers underpinning ideology. Both Elster and Boudon place individuals’ needs for cognitive efficiency at the centre of their analysis of ideology, emphasizing how individuals’ pursuit of epistemically satisfying (rather than optimal) beliefs leads them to deploy unreliable heuristics in adopting new beliefs.Footnote 140 These heuristics often involve inferences from their existing ideological beliefs. For example, Boudon analyses how individuals’ cognitive interests lead them to rely on epistemic authorities who appear, in the social context in question, to be trustworthy,Footnote 141 and illustrates how perceptions of social roles can interact with individual needs to make certain ideas appear attractive.Footnote 142 More generally, Billig and van Dijk have both sought to integrate considerations of psychology and discourse in formulating their approaches to ideological analysis.Footnote 143 Finally, in a different vein, psychoanalytic theories of individuals’ psychological needs and processes are central to the approach of several post-structuralist theorists, including Zizek, Stavrakakis and Glynos.Footnote 144
Discussion: The Future Study Of Ideology
Research on ideology has never been as diverse or abundant as it is at present. The recent surge of work in political and social psychology in North America has supplemented an equally notable revival in political theory and sociology in Europe, which was itself preceded by enduring work in political science and intellectual history. But, as a consequence, research on ideology has never been so fragmented. Despite the existence of common interests, convergence on a number of core assumptions, and complementary strengths and weaknesses, interdisciplinary volumes or references to work across disciplinary boundaries (and the Atlantic Ocean) are rare.Footnote 145 On all three core questions examined in this article, theorists are missing critical possibilities for mutual support, and are inefficiently labouring over tasks from scratch that have been considered extensively by others.
To continue making significant advances, the field of ideological analysis must become more integrated. This is not a call for a single definitive ‘theory of ideology’. Some differences between disciplines over aims, methods and consequent expertise necessarily endure: political psychologists will always be better placed to investigate some questions than intellectual historians, political theorists or sociologists, and vice versa. Nor is this a call for all research on ideology to share a single, academic objective. Different approaches to the study of ideology will necessarily draw different types of conclusions from different facets of ideological behaviour. But diverse scholarly communities can benefit from a mutual appreciation of each others’ academic projects and a much more integrated dialogue. We conclude this review by considering the potential gains from such integration across all three of the questions that animated this review: (1) What do we mean by ideology? (2) How do we model ideology? (3) Why do people adopt the ideologies they do? Generally, we argue that there is the strongest existing convergence with respect to the first question, and the weakest with respect to the last question.
To date, the most significant integration across different approaches to ideology has been with respect to conceptualization. As we have shown, scholars with diverse theoretical commitments have gradually adopted converging definitions of ideology. Importantly, this convergence has occurred even as scholars maintain fundamentally different research objectives. It has not been a case of critical theorists, for instance, abandoning their constructivist epistemology or quantitative scholars discarding their positivism. Instead, this convergence appears to have organically emerged in response to parallel research advances, and has done so without undermining the distinctiveness of each community’s research paradigm.
This is a positive development, and a necessary condition for facilitating dialogue between isolated scholastic communities. Theorists should continue to encourage a general convergence towards a shared understanding of ideology as a non-pejorative and broad concept that refers to a diverse range of idea systems that influence political and social thought and behaviour. As Gerring suggests, individual definitions may legitimately vary somewhat to suit individual research projects or methodologies.Footnote 146 But keeping, as far as possible, those definitions proximate to one another in a shared conceptual space encourages analyses of different sorts of idea systems and worldviews to be formulated in tandem and dialogue, rather than in isolation. A broad and non-pejorative conception of ideology does not preclude critical analysis of ideologies, nor does it prevent us from deploying more specific ‘subtype concepts’ (rigid ideology, thin ideology, elite ideology and so forth) when more specificity is needed. Indeed, conceptual development should be encouraged in this context. We also think it is critical for scholars to press ahead with the existing but incomplete trend of studying vernacular mass–public forms of political thinking, and conceptualizing them as ‘ideological’ even when they are messy, inchoate, latent, eclectic or hybridized belief systems that diverge from the expected patterning of elite ideologies or traditional understandings of left-right or liberal-conservative ideological packages.Footnote 147 The contrasting practice of deeming public political thinking incoherent or unideological in light of unnecessarily narrow notions of what ideology ‘should’ look like undermines the empirical openness of research on public political thinking. It also significantly impairs the capacity of research on ideology to keep up with both cross-cultural variation and temporal change in the ideological landscapes of contemporary states. Where conceptual differences remain between ideological analysts, it is important that they are clarified and navigated by considering the full scope of research on ideology, rather than presumptively or by offering justifications that speak only to an analyst’s most proximate methodological cousins.
With respect to how scholars model ideology, we find persistent differences. Diversity in the modelling of ideologies is to be welcomed, but the existing literature seems considerably below the optimal level of integration, multi-model usage and exploration of novel modelling methods. Yet diverse literatures reveal much stronger parallels than other reviews have often assumed, which suggests that greater integration is feasible – and would make contemporary research richer and more precise in its capacity to conceptually grapple with different ideological positions.
For example, thick description must ultimately be relied upon by both spatial and symbolic non-spatial approaches at some level: coding rules cannot be formulated without some descriptive account of ideational content, and symbolic maps without descriptive clarification are open to infinite interpretations regarding the meaning of components and connections. Yet detailed discussion of ideologies’ substantive meanings and patterns of argument in research that deploys spatial and symbolic non-spatial models of ideologies remains remarkably rare. Instead, scholars tend to condense the explanation of the actual ideological content that their dimensions or symbols represent into a few summative lines referencing just one or two attitudes. There is no good reason for such a crude flight from true ideological content, even accepting a focus on the causes of ideological attachment rather than the substance of ideological beliefs. Quantitative methods built around survey questions and dimensional models could easily be supplemented with thicker descriptive discussions, ideally rooted in open-ended empirical research on the actual thinking behind survey or interview responses.
Conversely, the general failure of thick descriptive approaches to incorporate verifiable data on large-N samples of ideological attitudes represented in spatial models is curious, and frustratingly untethers much thick descriptive work, which is often admirably grounded in textual analysis of high intellectual discourse or media coverage, from measures of the attitudes of ordinary voters and citizens. This is particularly ironic given the increasing interest of theorists using thick descriptive modelling in studying the actual political thinking of ordinary people.Footnote 148 As this highlights, this call for modelling integration applies to the forms of data on which models are based as much as the expository models themselves. Non-spatial approaches also have a weaker capacity to make relational comparisons between ideologies so as to ensure that individual ideologies are not studied in isolation. Spatialization and symbolization could thus enhance the power of thick descriptive approaches to provide precise differentiated accounts of the ideological topography in given political contexts.Footnote 149
Integration in the literature focused on our third cleavage – examining the reasons why people adopt the ideological positions they do – is weakest of all. The North American and European literatures have substantially converged in identifying the need to synthesize individual and group causes of ideological attachment and change. Yet there remains a fundamental asymmetry between the two academies in attempting this synthesis. A discourse vs. psychology faultline is particularly visible, with theorists stressing discourse largely neglecting psychology, and vice versa. Thus Jost, Federico and Napier valuably affirm the importance of both the ‘social construction of the discursive superstructure’ and the ‘psychological construction of the motivational substructure’.Footnote 150 Yet their resulting analysis seems lopsided; it largely reasserts the importance of the latter in shaping ideological attachment. It includes only a very narrow account of social factors taken from classic political science, in which elite ideologies are fed to ordinary citizens through political and media institutions. ‘Ideological bundles that are constructed through elite discourse’, Jost, Federico and Napier explain, ‘“anchor” both poles of the left-right (or, in the USA and elsewhere, liberal-conservative) spectrum. […] the content associated with different ideological positions is absorbed by members of the mass public who “take cues” from those elites’.Footnote 151 This top-down account neglects most of the discursive dynamics analyzed in European political theory, intellectual history, discourse analysis and sociology, as well as North American theorists who focus on language and discourse, such as Edelman, Wuthnow, Balkin, Snow or Tarrow.Footnote 152 Partly as a consequence it fails – despite Jost, Federico and Napier’s welcome affirmation of the ideological nature of ordinary citizens – to recognize and analyze ideological agitation and creativity outside the elite sphere, or the relevance of non-elite ideological configurations that do not fit into a standard liberal-conservative framework.
The pattern is matched elsewhere in the North American academy. Assertions that political attitudes are a joint function of personality, genetics and contextual factors, with dispositions interacting with environmental stimuli, seem increasingly common.Footnote 153 And some preliminary cross-scale findings are already apparent in the current literature, such as the complex relationship reported between genetics, social networks and ideology,Footnote 154 or the complementarity of psychological attention to threat and fear management with conclusions from biological research on ideological attachment, since the amygdala is believed to be involved in fear conditioning.Footnote 155 Again, though, social, political and institutional factors remain more marginal to these research efforts and need to be brought into cross-scale accounts of ideological positioning. Claims about these factors need to be delivered in more precise terms that are sensitive to specific causal and theoretical pathways in order to fully advance our joint understanding of ideological change.
But asymmetry is equally visible in the more discourse-centric European academy. Van Dijk offers an authentically ‘multidisciplinary’ effort to study ideology, yet it remains heavily focused on the discourse analytic methods with which van Dijk has most been associated.Footnote 156 Cognition and social institutions are incorporated into van Dijk’s approach at the theoretical level, with considerable gains in causal and conceptual precision, but empirical research on the specific psychological causes of ideology is largely absent. Freeden’s recent effort to introduce analysis of the role of emotion into his account of ideology also involves only limited engagement with recent psychological work on emotion and politics.Footnote 157 And despite the widespread interest of discourse-centric scholars in the strategic actions of individuals engaging in political struggles,Footnote 158 they have generally not incorporated evidence from political and social psychology regarding the motivations and traits that drive such behaviour. In general, most examination of the actual political thinking of both elite and ordinary actors in the European academy has eschewed psychological research on the mental processes that make up such thinking, resulting in a fundamental vagueness on the question of why different individuals in similar cultures adopt different ideological beliefs and attitudes.Footnote 159
The literature thus seems to again suffer from inadequate integration. The broad asymmetrically focused-upon realms of discourse and psychology have obvious and deep complementarity at many points: core ideological processes like framing, social categorization and the broader linguistic construction of perceptions are vitally both discursive and psychological.Footnote 160 And the growing interest in North American psychology in narrative and other complex semantic structures,Footnote 161 and in European scholarship in emotion,Footnote 162 suggest some obvious areas for connection. Yet the fragmentation of research along disciplinary and geographical lines has thus far stymied efforts to build genuinely holistic accounts of ideology. Instead, theorists work almost from scratch to theorize phenomena like discourse or emotion, neglecting the much more extensive work that already exists in other disciplines on these topics.
In short, the literature on ideology still lacks theories of ideologies that incorporate: (1) the individual genetic, physiological and psychological drivers that vary at the individual level and incline individuals towards or against certain ideas and (2) the political struggles, institutional relationships, social networks, discursive devices and semantic configurations that vary at the level of social context and present individuals with particular ideas and certain fields of ideological possibilities.
While explanations of ideological attachment and change will always reflect the expertise and foci of the analyst, we suggest that an integrative basic model could be formulated as a starting point for future research. Such a model could integrate existing knowledge of the individual and social causal mechanisms that shape ideologies more comprehensively. Individual determinants, as the literature surveyed here suggests, include psychological predispositions that motivate an individual to adopt certain ideological views, such as the epistemic, existential and relational motives described by Jost, Federico and Napier, the drive towards epistemic satisfaction described by Boudon, the need to avoid cognitive dissonance famously identified by Festinger, the interpersonal attachment styles formed in early life highlighted by Weber and Federico, and perhaps the unconscious needs and anxieties postulated by some psychoanalytic approaches.Footnote 163 Genetic or physiological factors may underpin these psychological drivers or may have independent effects on ideological attachment of their own. But individual determinants of ideology go beyond such foundational psychological and biological drives. Individuals’ basic cognitive resources – their concepts, frameworks, heuristics, forms of reasoning and skills – are also critical.Footnote 164 And so too are their existing ideologies (often providers of basic cognitive resources), including their conceptions of self and group identities and interests, and the basic material self-interests that underpin these.
But such individual determinants operate under the influence of a wide range of social determinants. Individuals’ personal cognitive resources are acquired primarily through social interaction and the learning of discursive resources – as these are internalized they enable, constrain, and structure perception and reflection.Footnote 165 Social interaction also exposes individuals to the vast majority of descriptive and normative content that defines their ideologies;Footnote 166 in the communication of such content, individuals are exposed to a range of discursive/rhetorical devices, such as frames and narratives, as well as participatory practices and rituals that can encourage certain ideological conceptions.Footnote 167 And just as critically, all individuals are socially positioned in a certain strategic context: an ideological environment defined by the live political issues; the existing distribution of ideologies, institutions and social networks; and the political and technological opportunities for certain forms of ideological production and interaction.Footnote 168
Crucially, these factors simultaneously shape each other in complex multilevel feedbacks. Individual determinants may indeed, as Jost, Federico and Napier suggest, create an elective affinity in individuals for particular ideological positions available in social discourse. But that social discourse offers them a finite (though broad) range of possible notions and ideological positions to internalize. And the particular groups and contexts individuals find themselves in tilt the table by presenting some positions as more ‘mainstream’, ‘common sense’ or otherwise attractive than others. The way in which individuals are positioned in certain social networks and movements thus becomes crucial. And particular individuals, groups and institutions engaging in strategic political actions manipulate discourses and disseminate particular claims in ways that play on others’ underlying cognitive motives so as to encourage the internalization of certain ideological notions.
This is, obviously, only a starting point for thinking about the multi-level interacting mechanisms behind ideological change, and we assume that further categories of causes at the individual and social levels could be delineated. But the breadth of this brief taxonomy illustrates how far we are from fully understanding the interconnections between these various factors. Such understanding is a potential product of the broad field of ideological analysis and should be a core ambition of that field. But it will require theorists to cross disciplinary and continental boundaries in their efforts to attain it.
Even partial efforts to integrate ideology research in this way are ambitious. But a truly integrative effort to theorize ideology would still leave considerable room for variation in epistemological, methodological, conceptual, theoretical and motivational commitments between different communities of ideology scholars. And the pay-off could be enormous: accelerating the contemporary resurgence in the study of ideology across the humanities and social sciences, and radically enhancing scholars’ capacities to properly theorize the role of ideas in political action and social change.
