Convergence and Divergence in The Study of Ideology A Critical Review

B.J.Pol.S.
48, 563–589 Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2016

doi:10.1017/S0007123415000654
First published online 21 March 2016
Review Article: Convergence and Divergence in the

Study of Ideology: A Critical Review‡
JONATHAN LEADER MAYNARD AND MATTO MILDENBERGER*
Dedicated research on ideology has proliferated over the last few decades. Many different disciplines
and methodologies have sought to make a contribution, with the welcome consequence that specialist
thinking about ideology is at a high-water mark of richness, diversity and theoretical sophistication. Yet
this proliferation of research has fragmented the study of ideology by producing independent
communities of scholars differentiated by geographical location and by disciplinary attachment. This
review draws together research on ideology from several disciplines on different sides of the Atlantic, in
order to address three questions that appear to be of great relevance to political scientists: (1) What do
we mean by ideology? (2) How do we model ideology? (3) Why do people adopt the ideologies they
do? In doing so, it argues that many important axes of debate cut across disciplinary and geographic
boundaries, and points to a series of significant intellectual convergences that offer a framework for
productive interdisciplinary engagement and integration.
Ideology remains a central concept in the study of politics. In spite of long-standing concerns
about the term’s diverse meanings,1 its potential disappearance or obsolescence,2 and its
complicated and sometimes paradoxical historical trajectory,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.4
At the same time, however, this proliferation of research has fragmented the study of
ideology along a number of different boundaries.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
* Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford (email: jonathan.leadermaynard

@politics.ox.ac.uk); Department of Political Science, University of California Santa Barbara (email: mildenberger@
polsci.ucsb.edu). The authors would like to thank Michael Freeden, Tobias Schroeder, Thomas Homer-Dixon, M. Kent
Jennings, and audience members at the University of Oxford, the University of Waterloo and the 2014 International
Studies Association conference for feedback on earlier versions of this article. This article was supported in part by
funding from the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation at the University of Waterloo.
‡ The original version of this article was published as a standard article and should have been a Review Article.
A notice detailing this has been published and the error rectified in the online and print PDF and HTML copies.
1
Gerring 1997, 957; McLellan 1995, 1.
2
Bell 1962; Brick 2013; Freeden 2005; Jost 2006.
3
Eagleton 1991; McLellan 1995.
4
Freeden, Sargent, and Stears 2013, v.
5
Leader Maynard 2013.
564 MAYNARD AND MILDENBERGER
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 ideology6 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’.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’.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.9 But across disciplines and geographies, such highly pejorative conceptions of
ideology as those often utilized in Marxist analysis have become increasingly unpopular.
6
Jost, Kay, and Thorisdottir 2009, 3.
7
Fairclough 2010, 25.
8
McLellan 1995, 1.
9
See Humphrey 2005; Larrain 1979; McLellan 1995; Thompson 1984.
Review Article: Convergence and Divergence in the Study of Ideology 565
As Geertz noted, such usages of ideology produced ‘an egregiously loaded concept’ for social
science analysis.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.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.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.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.14 Even in these fields, however, there are those who have abandoned such
conceptions for a broad and neutral definition15 or who, by also counting belief systems of
resistance to domination as ideologies, ultimately include almost all politically orientated
worldviews.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’.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’.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.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.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,21 a criticism echoed by some American scholars.22 Indeed, for Billig et al. and Freeden,
10
Geertz 1964, 51.
11
E.g., Huntington 1957, 454.
12
van Dijk 1998, 11.
13
For diverse examples, see Engerman (2010), Gould-Davies (1999), Jost (2006, 653) and Tully (1983, 502–5).
14
E.g., Fairclough 2010, 27; Zizek 1994, 8.
15
van Dijk 1998, 3, 11.
16
E.g., Norval 2000.
17
Geertz 1964; George 1987, 15; Gerring 1997, 961, 974; Hamilton 1987, 22; Knight 2006, 619, 623.
18
Luskin 1987, 864–9.
19
Converse 1964.
20
Carmines and D’Amico 2015, 207–11; Jennings 1992; Knight 2006, 623; Luskin 1987.
21
Boudon 1989, 1999; Skinner 1965, 2002.
22
Ball 1996; Hochschild 2001, 315–16; Luskin 1987, 876.
contradictions and dilemmas are central to the trajectory of ideological development.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.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.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.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.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.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’29 and Finlayson calls ‘political ideas as
they are found “in the wild” ’.30 The literature on social movements is one significant example.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)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).33 A third component of ideologies, their descriptive and
purportedly factual content, might also be considered important,34 yet – barring some work
on ideological ‘narratives’35 – this has received relatively little analysis on either continent.36
23
Billig et al. 1988; Freeden 1996, 36–40.
24
Finlayson 2012, 751; Freeden 2008, 2013a, 116; Hall 1996c, 36.
25
Freeden 2008, 197; Leader Maynard, 2013, 314–16.
26
Jost 2006.
27
Jost, Federico, and Napier 2006, 309; Rosenberg 1988.
28
Thagard 2012; Thagard and Kroon 2008.
29
Freeden 2008, 197.
30
Finlayson 2012, 751.
31
Snow 2004; Tarrow 2013; Wuthnow 1989.
32
E.g., Poole and Rosenthal 1997; Zaller 1992.
33
E.g., Finlayson 2012; Freeden 1996; Howarth, Norval, and Stavrakakis 2000; Tully 1983.
34
Hochschild 2001.
35
Haidt, Graham, and Joseph 2009; Hammack 2008; Shenhav 2006.
36
For exceptions, see Boudon (1999), Hochschild (2001), Mirels and Dean (2006).
As Geertz noted, such usages of ideology produced ‘an egregiously loaded concept’ for social
science analysis.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.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.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.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.14 Even in these fields, however, there are those who have abandoned such
conceptions for a broad and neutral definition15 or who, by also counting belief systems of
resistance to domination as ideologies, ultimately include almost all politically orientated
worldviews.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’.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’.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.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.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,21 a criticism echoed by some American scholars.22 Indeed, for Billig et al. and Freeden,
10
Geertz 1964, 51.
11
E.g., Huntington 1957, 454.
12
van Dijk 1998, 11.
13
For diverse examples, see Engerman (2010), Gould-Davies (1999), Jost (2006, 653) and Tully (1983, 502–5).
14
E.g., Fairclough 2010, 27; Zizek 1994, 8.
15
van Dijk 1998, 3, 11.
16
E.g., Norval 2000.
17
Geertz 1964; George 1987, 15; Gerring 1997, 961, 974; Hamilton 1987, 22; Knight 2006, 619, 623.
18
Luskin 1987, 864–9.
19
Converse 1964.
20
Carmines and D’Amico 2015, 207–11; Jennings 1992; Knight 2006, 623; Luskin 1987.
21
Boudon 1989, 1999; Skinner 1965, 2002.
22
Ball 1996; Hochschild 2001, 315–16; Luskin 1987, 876.
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’,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.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.48 Many European scholars follow suit.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’,50
‘local ideologies’51 or ‘thin ideologies’.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
46
Luskin 1987, 862.
47
Frazer 2008.
48
Haidt, Graham, and Joseph 2009; Jacoby 2009; Jost 2006, 653; Sargent 2009.
49
Eccleshall et al. 1984; Freeden 1996; Schwarzmantel 1998, 8–9.
50
Cassels 2002, xi–xii.
51
Boudon 1999.
52
Freeden 1998; Stanley 2008.
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.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.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.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).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.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.58 Carmines and D’Amico advance the familiar view that economic and social issues
53
Jost, Kay, and Thorisdottir 2009; Jost, Nosek, and Gosling 2008.
54
Stimson 2004; Poole and Rosenthal 2011.
55
Rokeach 1973.
56
Follow-up investigation of Rokeach’s factors provides a mixed picture, with his equality dimension holding
up well but his freedom dimension failing on a number of fronts (e.g., Braithwaite 1997).
57
Inglehart and Welzel 2010.
58
Braithwaite 1997.
constitute two separate dimensions of ideology.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.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’.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.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.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.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,65 political
science,66 and political theory and intellectual history67 have raised a number of similar
concerns.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.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
59
Carmines and D’Amico 2015.
60
Douglas 1970.
61
Sibley and Duckitt 2008.
62
Haidt 2012.
63
To emphasize his continued engagement with lower-dimension spatial approaches, Haidt groups his six
foundations into two overarching sets: individualizing norms and binding norms (Haidt, Graham, and Joseph
2009).
64
Hofstede 2011.
65
Cohrs 2012; Haidt, Graham, and Joseph 2009; Rosenberg 1988.
66
Conover and Feldman 1981; Hochschild 2001, 315; Swedlow 2008.
67
Freeden 2010, 479–81; Freeden 2013b, 11.
68
See also Leader Maynard 2013, 314–15.
69
Cohrs 2012, 57–8; Haidt, Graham, and Joseph 2009; Hochschild 2001, 315.
with fewer emotional components.70 Other North American scholars have questioned the
implicit bundling of conservatism and resistance to change in psychological theories of left-
right orientation.71 In political science, Zaller argues against a one-dimensional characterization
of ideological content, instead reframing ideology as a ‘constellation of related value
dimensions’.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.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.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.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.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,77 China,78 the Islamic world79 or to emergent
ideologies orientated around ‘global imaginaries’.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
70
Iyer et al. 2012.
71
E.g., Greenberg and Jonas 2003. But see the response of Jost et al. (2003a, 2003b).
72
Zaller 1992, 26.
73
Zamboni et al. 2009.
74
E.g., Jost, Federico and Napier 2006, 310.
75
Converse 1964; Jacoby 2009, 587; see also Hochschild 2001, 316; Rosenberg 1988.
76
Adams 1998; Freeden 1996, 139–314; Freeden 2009; Hall 1996c; Tetlock 1984.
77
Hendrickson and Zaki 2013.
78
Jenco 2013; Pan and Xu 2015.
79
Ayoob 2009; Browers 2013.
80
Steger 2008, 2013. Jost, Federico, and Napier (2006, 310–1) offer an explicit defence of the cross-cultural
applicability of a liberal-conservative unidimensional model. But aside from being very limited in geographical
scope, this defence conflates the plausible claim that some sort of unidimensional model is deployed across
cultures with a specific justification of a common liberal-conservative dimension. Indeed, Jost, Federico, and
Napier’s evidence from Germany and the Netherlands shows the ‘left’ associated with socialism/communism,
not liberalism.
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.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.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.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,84
distinct sets of historically textured myths and signifiers,85 notionally factual content,86
or idiosyncratic arguments and ways of deploying rhetorical devices.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’.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,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.90 Billig’s ‘rhetorical
81
Federico 2007.
82
Kerlinger 1967.
83
Conover and Feldman 1981.
84
Freeden 1996.
85
Howarth, Norval, and Stavrakakis 2000.
86
Boudon 1989.
87
Finlayson 2012.
88
Hall 1996c, 38.
89
Eccleshall et al. 1984; Heywood 2007; Sargent 2009.
90
Skinner 1965, 1978.
psychology’ approach involves detailed reconstruction of the language, social representations

and arguments deployed by groups like the Young Conservatives, British Fascist groups or
monarchists.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.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.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,94 the idiosyncratic ways of thinking that shape war-waging practices,95 or the tropes and
frames relied on by British tabloid and broadsheet newspapers.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.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.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).99 And a range of other theorists, including Hall and Steger, deploy similar
metaphors of core concepts, structure and ideational clusters.100 As a consequence, while these
91
Billig 1991.
92
Hall 1996a, 1996b, 1996c.
93
Freeden, Sargent, and Stears 2013.
94
Cassels 2002; Drolet 2010; Hunt 2009.
95
Dillon and Reid 2009; Owen 1997.
96
Fowler 1991.
97
Homer-Dixon et al. 2013; Thagard 2012.
98
Collins 1998.
99
Freeden 1996, 2013a.
100
Hall 1996c; Steger 2013.
theorists do not engage in symbolic mapping themselves, their work has the potential to both
inform and incorporate such an approach.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.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.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.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.105 Further, a disposition towards order and rules may have a biological basis,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.107 However, the findings from this literature remain controversial.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.109 Within the United States, amygdala activity is
stronger in Republicans, while insula activations are stronger in Democrats.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,111 while differential neural responses in brain
activity correlate with social and political behaviour.112 Effects have also been identified at the
101
E.g., Buckle 2013, 234. It is also worth noting that some approaches (e.g., Elster 1982; Fairclough 2001)
are not centrally concerned with modelling the content of individual ideologies at all.
102
Billig 1991, 5–13; Hammack 2008, 238; Jost, Federico, and Napier 2006, 315–23.
103
E.g., Hammack 2008; Jost, Federico, and Napier 2006; van Dijk 1998.
104
Alford, Funk, and Hibbing 2005, Bell, Schermer, and Vernon 2009 and genome-wide analyses (Hatemi
et al. 2011).
105
Bouchard 2004.
106
Smith et al. 2011.
107
Alford, Funk, and Hibbing 2005.
108
E.g., Beckwith and Morris 2008; Charney 2008; Shultziner 2013.
109
Kanai et al. 2011.
110
Schrieber et al. 2005.
111
Amodio et al. 2007.
112
Chiao et al. 2009; Rule et al. 2010.
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.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.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.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.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.117 Here, affective reactions precede rational considerations and deliberative moral
reasoning is largely a post hoc explanation for affective, moral intuitions.118 Finally, a growing
focus on personality has linked the ‘big five’ traits, particularly openness to experience, with
ideological positioning119 and other types of political behaviour, such as political and civic
engagement.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.121 From this perspective, individuals acquire some aspects of their ideological
identity through social learning from parents and close family members.122 System justification
theory argues that ideological attachment is contingent on an individual’s status within
prevailing political and economic institutions,123 though broadly, individuals tend to adopt
ideological positions that rationalize prevailing social arrangements.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
113
Oxley et al. 2008.
114
Jost, Federico, and Napier 2006.
115
Jost, Kay, and Thorisdottir 2009; Jost et al. 2003b.
116
Bonanno and Jost 2006.
117
Graham, Haidt, and Nosek 2009.
118
Haidt 2007.
119
E.g., McCrae 1996.
120
Gerber et al. 2010; Mondak 2010; Sibley and Duckitt 2008.
121
Stoker and Bass 2013.
122
Rico and Jennings 2015.
123
Jost and Hunyady 2005.
124
Jost, Banaji, and Nosek 2004.
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.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.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.127 For instance, winning the lottery can
drive individuals to become more right wing and less egalitarian.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.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.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.131
Changes in individual, group or societal ideologies are therefore prompted by (and reflected in)
changes to these constitutive discursive components.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
125
Braithwaite 1998.
126
Settle et al. 2010.
127
Ansolabehere, Rodden, and Snyder 2006; Doherty, Green, and Gerber 2006; Hersh 2013.
128
Powdthavee and Oswald 2014.
129
Shelby 2003; Simonds 1989.
130
Fairclough 2001, 2; Freeden 1996, 57; Gramsci 1971; Nafstad et al. 2007, 317–18; Skinner 2002, 8–26,
44–6; Wittgenstein 2001.
131
Skinner 2002; Tully 1983.
132
van Dijk 2013, 175.
ideologies are thus engaged in a competition for ‘control of public political language’,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.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.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.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.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.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.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.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,141 and illustrates how perceptions of social roles can interact with individual needs
to make certain ideas appear attractive.142 More generally, Billig and van Dijk have both sought
133
Freeden 2010, 480.
134
Skinner 2002; Tully 1983.
135
Boudon 1989, 1999.
136
Billig 1991; Fairclough 2010; Finlayson 2012; Skinner 1999; Wodak and Meyer 2009.
137
Howarth, Norval, and Stavrakakis 2000; Zizek 1994.
138
Howarth, Norval, and Stavrakakis 2000, 4; Wodak and Meyer 2009, 15–16, 27–31; Zizek 1994, 13, 17–18.
139
Fairclough 2010; Freeden 1996; Hall 1996c; Norval 2000; Skinner 1965; Tully 1983; Wodak and Meyer
2009.
140
Boudon 1989; Elster 1982.
141
Boudon 1989, 83–5.
142
Boudon 1989, 117.
to integrate considerations of psychology and discourse in formulating their approaches to

ideological analysis.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.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.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.
143
Billig 1991; van Dijk 1998.
144
Glynos 2001; Stavrakakis 2000; Zizek 1994.
145
For partial exceptions that suggest some openness to the potential for interdisciplinarity, see Jost and Major
2001, Freeden 2007, Homer-Dixon et al. 2013, and Freeden, Sargent, and Stears 2013.
As Gerring suggests, individual definitions may legitimately vary somewhat to suit individual
research projects or methodologies.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.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
146
Gerring 1997, 965–6, 982–3.
147
Snow 2004, 400.
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.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.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’.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’.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.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.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,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.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
148
Finlayson 2012, 754; Freeden 2008, 2013b.
149
See, e.g., Buckle 2013.
150
Jost, Federico, and Napier 2013, 233–6.
151
Jost, Federico, and Napier 2013, 234.
152
Balkin 1998; Edelman 1977; Snow 2004; Tarrow 2013; Wuthnow 1989.
153
E.g., Mondak et al. 2010.
154
Settle et al. 2010.
155
Phillips and LeDoux 1992.
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.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.157 And despite the
widespread interest of discourse-centric scholars in the strategic actions of individuals engaging
in political struggles,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.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.160 And the growing interest in North American psychology in narrative and
other complex semantic structures,161 and in European scholarship in emotion,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
156
Van Dijk 1998.
157
Freeden 2013c.
158
Leonardo 2003, 207; Norval 2000, 321, 329–30.
159
Freeden 2008, 2013b. See also Balkin 1998, 1–4, 13-17.
160
Hammack 2008, 228.
161
Haidt, Graham, and Joseph 2009; Hammack 2008.
162
Freeden 2013c.
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.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.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.165 Social interaction also exposes individuals
to the vast majority of descriptive and normative content that defines their ideologies;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.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.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
163
Boudon 1999; Festinger 1957; Glynos 2001; Jost, Federico, and Napier 2013; Weber and Federico 2007;
Žižek 1996.
164
Rosenberg 1988; van Dijk 1998.
165
Billig 1991; Fairclough 2010; Freeden 1996, 2013a; Skinner 2002; van Dijk 1998, 2013; Wuthnow 1989.
166
Boudon 1989; Collins 1998; Hammack 2008; Hochschild 2001.
167
Finlayson 2012; Wodak and Meyer 2009.
168
Freeden 1996; Howarth, Norval, and Stavrakakis 2000; Skinner 1974.
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.
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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’,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.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.48 Many European scholars follow suit.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’,50
‘local ideologies’51 or ‘thin ideologies’.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
46
Luskin 1987, 862.
47
Frazer 2008.
48
Haidt, Graham, and Joseph 2009; Jacoby 2009; Jost 2006, 653; Sargent 2009.
49
Eccleshall et al. 1984; Freeden 1996; Schwarzmantel 1998, 8–9.
50
Cassels 2002, xi–xii.
51
Boudon 1999.
52
Freeden 1998; Stanley 2008.

Convergence and Divergence in The Study of Ideology A Critical Review

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Convergence and Divergence in The Study of Ideology A Critical Review

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B.J.Pol.S.

48, 563–589 Copyright © Cambridge University Press, 2016

Review Article: Convergence and Divergence in the

* Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford (email: jonathan.leadermaynard

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY IDEOLOGY?

Coherence of the System

The Substance of Ideologies

Coherence of the System

HOW SHOULD WE MODEL WHAT PEOPLE BELIEVE OR THINK?

Debating the Value of Spatial Approaches

psychology’ approach involves detailed reconstruction of the language, social representations

WHY DO PEOPLE ADOPT THE IDEOLOGIES THEY DO?

From the Individual to the Group in North America

From the Group to the Individual in Europe

to integrate considerations of psychology and discourse in formulating their approaches to

DISCUSSION: THE FUTURE STUDY OF IDEOLOGY

epistemological, methodological, conceptual, theoretical and motivational commitments

HOW SHOULD WE MODEL WHAT PEOPLE BELIEVE OR THINK?

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