And I think there is good reason to think that there is a working consensus as to what we mean by ideology in politics. Thus here I want to attempt to understand the nature of this ideology—that which actors seem to consensually develop and use in ordering their political attachments.
This is to refer to processes and institutions turning on the quest to control the state machinery or, analogously, other organizations, but let us put such analogous usages to the side. In most democracies, this means an orientation to political parties, as these are the organizations that have arisen to pursue such a quest.
I will accept this usage here, and be concerned with beliefs that are understood as relevant to party contestation. For example, can we list them? When political and social analysts define ideology, they tend to give extremely broad definitions, usually including beliefs, attitudes and values e.
This basically runs the gamut of all possible cognitive elements. Could it be that we attempt to restrict the class of things included by ideology in some other manner? Are there specifiable qualities of the elements that constitute ideology?
Minsky, The US, like the UK, had its governmental system designed before the existence of stable party organizations, while the parliamentary systems that support multi-party systems were designed after the development of mass suffrage and the existence of parties, and these were taken for granted by constitution writers. However, as this is the case in the United States, I use these terms to describe the consensual self-understanding of actors. The conventional approach assumed that these were, above all else, oppositions of packages of values.
Lau et al. Of course, if it turns out that it is indeed values that separates conservatives from liberals, one cannot complain that these are not the analytic elements we wished for, but, given the proximity of such values to the opinions they are to explain, we must be somewhat cautious of the initial appeal of the approach to ideology that treats it as fundamentally about valuation. Ideological values are then combined with political information to produce non-random opinions on specific matters.
Our imaginary citizen first draws on his ideological values—let us say equality and fairness —and then combines these with what he knows about the world—that there is a great deal of unemployment, and that the changing economic structure and persistent racism make it hard for American blacks to get jobs no matter how hard they try—and produces an opinion, in this case, to favor the policy.
Thus one would be hampered as an ideologue were one to emphasize both individual freedom and state regulation, as increasing one seems to logically imply decreasing the other. Further, even in the absence of such logical contradiction, the nature of the world may be understood to be such that other sorts of valuations are incompatible—for example, valuing equality of opportunity and equality of outcome may be understood as incompatible given the existence of good and bad luck distributed across persons, whether randomly or not.
The first problem is that ideology seems to have a direct effect on many policy preferences that cannot be explained according to a chain of reasoning whereby the abstract principles of the ideology imply more proximate principles that, when combined with political information, lead to the preference.
For example, we might imagine that A a liberal ideology leads people to favor, in principle, B racial equality, which in turn might influence C a particular policy choice such as one involving regulation of housing law.
That is, A seems linked directly to C, without mediation by B. Political psychologists have generally assumed that just as you can never be too smart or too rich, you can never be too ideologically consistent: indeed, they have tended to assume that such consistency in the sense of the work of Festinger, , Feldman, , and Abelson, et al. This in no way implies that any conviction is wanting among ideologues—however, this conviction appears to be turned on and off selectively.
And similarly, those who were used to arguing for the separation of church and state when it came to battling the conservative Christians, switched over to arguing against too stringent a separation when this became linked to intolerance of Muslims. They show that Tea Party supporters tend to appeal to values of the right of protest when asked about the Tea Party, but appeal to the importance of social order when asked about Occupy Wall Street; and Occupy Wall Street supporters tend to appeal to values of the right of protest when asked about Occupy Wall Street, but appeal to the importance of social order when asked about the Tea Party.
While it must be acknowledged that there are other polities in which the average citizen has more information than does the average citizen of the US, what is key about the American example is that it demonstrates that lack of factual data hampers opinion formation only slightly. Consider the question of which candidate to favor in an election. Thus even if voters knew what candidates promised to do, they would fall short of a decent model of political reasoning through no fault of their own.
But they would also need to know how the promised actions would affect their own interests, which would require a great deal of knowledge about the world and its causal texture, knowledge that few of us have.
Thus the fourth problem with the conventional view is that ideology gives citizens exactly the wrong cognitive element. In fact, differences in ideology seems to correlate much more strongly with differences in descriptive statements than they do with differences in purely prescriptive ones cf.
Rumelhart, ; Kurtz et al. So people can agree with one another in their value commitments, while still having diametrically opposed opinions. Because there are usually a variety of competing sources of information such as newspapers that are more or less strongly associated with different ideologies, ideologues have the capacity to choose the information source that is likely to disproportionately report facts or would-be facts that support their previous position.
Further, there is general evidence from psychology that when we come across information that contradicts our strongly held positions, we are less likely to pursue it e. Let us return to the example used above, namely Americans determining whether to support a policy for unemployed blacks.
Yet many conservatives do not favor the policy. It is certainly true that they do, but as shown by Martin and Desmond , so do liberals—in fact, there are only very small differences between liberals and conservatives here. Where they do differ greatly is in their belief as to how worthy the recipients are how likely the poor are to be trying to solve their own problems. We would imagine that at least one of the two positions has to be wrong.
Could we determine this through social science? Only adults? Not on disability? Under retirement age? Taking the question literally, we scratch our heads, and wonder how could anyone answer it with confidence? The further we pursue the matter, the more implausible the classical understanding seems, and the more difficult it is to salvage it. Rather than reject hypotheses that fail tests, voters reject candidates who have, in the past, failed their interests.
The assumption is that members of a party in power are retained until their performances falls below some threshold in a multiparty system, at which point voters will move to replace them, either with their opponents in a two-party system, or with the party that makes the most credible claim to have always argued against the problems that the voters retrospectively identify.
However, such a heuristic can only be used to choose whom to vote for and it does not, in itself, generate an ideology that could inform other choices ; further, it really only deals with switching , while we know that most of the time, most citizens stick with their party through thick and thin. It might be, if sides in terms of political parties correspond to recognized sides of a social cleavage.
In this case, we may not require actors to think through each and every position. Of course, everyone will recognize that a party that claims to be for the workers may not really be for the workers, or even if it is, that the party faces the same problems of incomplete knowledge that individuals face. Thus the heuristic of choosing sides sometimes brackets what is most important to us—the question of why voters choose the side they do. Sniderman et al.
Ideology is also a means of cognitive organization; it is used to make sense of oftentimes complex public policy. Individuals organize policy beliefs around organizing principles, such as a preference for reducing the size of the federal government. Considering this heterogeneity, it is important to use the term with precision, in order to better understand how voters rely upon ideology in their decision calculus.
Second, ideology is a central characteristic in the general structure of political beliefs. It acts as a lens through which the political and social world is interpreted. Third, ideology is functional in nature. Finally, ideology has unique consequences in contemporary politics, as evidenced by increased political polarization, partisan-ideological sorting, and ideologically divisive rhetoric.
You do not currently have access to this article. Please login to access the full content. Finally, as the new century dawned, virulent Islamic fundamentalism offered a massive challenge to the smug ideological assumptions of the West of a decade earlier. Ideology was not dead. It had never been absent even in the supremely pragmatic politics of Britain. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations , and David Ricardo, in Principles of Political Economy , have had great influence on the development of free-market economics in Britain during the last two hundred years.
Liberal ideas about the minimal state and free trade as the best means towards economic growth and the generation of wealth owe much to their works. Indeed, it is impossible to follow an economic debate today without hearing people, often unconsciously, using the ideas of these long-dead liberal economists.
John Locke, writing almost a century before Smith, expressed key liberal elements of the importance of property and individual conscience in economic and political discourse in his Two Treatises of Government John Stuart Mill, in On Liberty , drew together widespread liberal beliefs of his day to create a powerful statement on behalf of individual freedom. Late nineteenth-century New Liberals reinterpreted liberalism to encourage a greater role for the state in society so as to enhance individual potential in ways that the minimal state would not do.
These thinkers and their ideas have had a considerable influence on the development of the post-war consensus , and will no doubt continue to influence twenty-first century politics and economics. The modern British political debate over the welfare state, the NHS, education, employment and taxation levels makes reference to ideological values.
Modern Neo-Liberals who make a strong case for a return to nineteenth-century classical liberalism face an uphill battle against the dominance of social-democratic ideology in the debate. So strong is the ideological consensus, so deeply entrenched in the social and political values of modern Britain, that it is almost impossible for us to imagine life in a society without these values and the institutions created to bring them into existence.
This may be true in the case of the restrictive view of ideology. There is, apart from the political extremes, very little reference to liberalism, socialism, conservatism, and so on, in the debates that occur in British politics.
Even at election time, so it is argued, there is little that might be called ideological, only a pragmatic reference to, for example, what level of taxes to pay for public services. However, that is not the case with relaxed ideologies. Even if the arguments of Beer and Jenkins are not completely accepted there are grounds for claiming that British politics has been very ideological in the relaxed sense of the term, even if not in the restricted sense.
From the wartime coalition government until the early s all the major parties, both in and out of government, largely agreed on the basics of government policy. These included the following:. There was often little difference between Labour and Conservative governments.
Their pragmatism was based on the acceptance of similar policy goals in order to win elections. Yet this is clearly an example of ideology. It assumes a significant role for the state in the economy and society. However, even during the high point of this consensus, from, say, to the early s, there were those in both major parties who were opposed to the consensus policies of their respective leaderships.
The left of the Labour Party wanted greater state intervention and control in society and the economy, while the right of the Conservative Party wanted a massive withdrawal of the state from any areas of social and economic activity and a significant reduction in the levels of taxation.
They had little actual effect on the policies of their parties, as consensus politics appeared to be what the majority of the electorate wanted. Political debate and electoral competition revolved around who could manage the system best, who could deliver the greatest level of economic growth, public services and social improvement for least cost and effort.
This social-democratic consensus was successful in establishing an ideological grip on British politics for a number of reasons. The mass unemployment, poverty and failure of the s discredited the minimal state policies of the governments of the day. If such methods could defeat the Nazis why, it was widely demanded, should state planning not defeat poverty and unemployment afterwards?
At last, the long economic boom of the s and s appeared to show that Keynesian economics worked and governments did not have to make difficult choices about state spending and private income levels. Economic growth would enable Britain to have both excellent public services and high individual standards of living.
The s challenged the post-war consensus. There were a number of reasons for this. The post-war economic boom came to an end with growing economic difficulties, especially rising inflation and unemployment. Economic decline became more obvious as mining, shipbuilding, steelmaking, textiles and heavy engineering went into apparently terminal decline.
With that decline came the shrinking of trade-union membership. By the s the postwar generation that grew up with the welfare state and social democracy were a majority of the electorate.
At the same time economic prosperity was growing in the new service sector and white-collar areas of the economy. With that came a new individualism, a new impatience at the inefficient and collectivist provision of state-run services and industries.
In both the Labour and the Conservative parties the anti-consensus elements recognised their opportunities for power. The Labour Party moved to the left, thereby losing both members and a close connection with the Labour Government — In it split over ideological issues, with many of its right wing going on to form the Social Democratic Party before ending up after its demise a few years later in the Liberal Democrat Party.
The Conservatives moved to the right, slowly at first, but gathering pace under the leadership of Mrs Thatcher after These ideological changes were of significance in the following decade. The Labour Party was condemned by voters as extreme, and it subsequently lost four elections in a row. The Conservative Party, in power —97 , was able to pursue policies that challenged many aspects of the post-war consensus.
The Thatcher and Major governments attempted to create a new right-ofcentre ideological consensus for British politics, heavily influenced by neoliberalism, and to bring about a fundamental shift away from the social-democratic consensus. The features included the following:. There was no significant reversal of Conservative policies after Labour came to power in Welfare spending was kept under tight control, helped by high levels of economic growth and low unemployment. Attacks were made on benefit fraudsters and the automatic nature of some benefits.
There was considerable support for free-market capitalism, no return to corporatism and no great changes to the tough trade-union legislation of the s. Even policies such as the minimum wage and family income-tax credits were designed to encourage people into work rather than rely on state benefits. Pragmatic policies, yes, but with ideological underpinnings familiar to the post-war consensus and its successor. People have ideological beliefs, even if these beliefs are not very coherent.
Ideological beliefs are beyond rational or scientific testing, whatever the claims of their proponents. Such beliefs perform a social role for those who hold them. Some critics argue that ideologies are simply instruments of power, wielded by the dominant groups in society. Opponents of such views can point to abundant evidence that liberal capitalism is deeply influenced by ideology. Ideological beliefs were of profound influence in twentieth-century history. New forms of ideology, such as militant Islamism, seem likely to be important in the twenty-first century.
From to there was a clear consensus between the major parties which constituted such an ideology. A consensus exists today, though it is far more influenced by neo-liberalism than was the case in the period before Hattersley, Choose Freedom Michael Joseph, Barry, N. Dunleavy et al. Dutton, D. Eagleton, T. Ideology: An Introduction Verso, Eatwell, R.
Eatwell and A. Wright eds. Goodwin, B. What is called liberalism today is quite different. Liberals believe government has an important place both as a regulator in the public interest and to assist those with lower incomes. On the other hand, they still oppose government intervention in matters of personal autonomy. Only libertarians still espouse classical liberalism, but Americans holding this political ideology are scattered across various political parties, including the Republicans, the Democrats, and various third parties such as the Libertarian, Reform, and Green parties.
Conservatives feel there is too much government interference, particularly at the federal level, in the economy.
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