Left and Right by John T. Jost

Author:John T. Jost
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Ideology Is Dead, Long Live Ideology

For decades, political scientists have doubted that ideology is a meaningful force in people’s lives. The kind of evidence brought together in this chapter and in the preceding chapters—including hundreds of studies in political psychology—is clearly at odds with the skeptical position. Ideology is not “out of reach,” as Kinder and Kalmoe (2017) claimed, for college students, office employees, Mechanical Turk workers, prospective voters, and survivors of terrorist attacks. On the contrary, it seems to be part of their public and private lives, in good times and bad.

A psychological approach to the study of ideology complements historical, philosophical, and sociological analyses of left and right as reflecting cultural developments and intellectual movements (Bobbio, 1996; Cochrane, 2015; Freeden, 2003; Laponce, 1981; Noël & Thérien, 2008; Vincent, 2010). It also builds on—and goes beyond—the work of political scientists who for decades have stressed logical coherence, temporal stability, and political sophistication as defining characteristics of ideology.

Kathleen Knight (2006) posed two major questions concerning ideology, namely: “Is it a benign influence on democratic politics? And how far does it really penetrate into the public at large?” By returning to the key insight that ideology reflects social, cognitive, and motivational concerns and basic orientations pertaining to the management of uncertainty, threat, and social relations—as well as implicit and explicit attitudes toward existing and alternative social systems—psychologically minded researchers have contributed insights that should be of use in answering Knight’s questions and many others as well.

The obvious shortcoming of psychological research is that it is seldom, if ever, based upon nationally—let alone globally—representative samples. But this limitation should be weighed against a major problem with research on ideology in political science, which depends heavily upon cross-sectional correlational analyses from public opinion surveys that rely on tiny numbers of hand-picked items selected to be noncontroversial. Because of financial constraints, large public opinion surveys almost never include complete, well-validated instruments for measuring ideology, let alone the psychological processes we are seeking to analyze here (but see Azevedo et al., 2017, 2019, for a notable exception).

When we examine small samples of individuals in real depth, we see that the left-right (or liberal-conservative) dimension of ideology aptly characterizes much of what people think about when it comes to society, economics, and politics, as Lane (1962, 1969) also discovered through his interviews. But the influence of ideology does not end there. It is connected to the ways we live, eat, drink, travel, educate ourselves, have sex, watch TV, decorate our walls, and clean our bodies and our homes, and on how we spend our free time and cope with personal disasters and collective crises (Bonanno & Jost, 2006; Carney et al., 2008; DellaPosta et al., 2015; Eastwick et al., 2009; Jost, 2017c; Klofstad et al., 2012; Mutz & Rao, 2018; Rogers, 2020; Xu et al., 2013; Xu & Peterson, 2017). As a psychological orientation, ideology and its trappings are everywhere.

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