Social Issues, Authoritarianism, and Ideological Conceptualization: How Policy Dimensions and Psychological Factors Influence Ideological Labeling

Abstract

Ideology's crucial theoretical and empirical role in explaining political behavior makes it imperative that scholars understand how individuals conceptualize and apply ideological labels. The existing literature on this topic is quite limited, however, because it relies almost exclusively upon data from the 1970s and 1980s, and it does not examine how psychological factors influence conceptualizations of ideological labels. This article uses data from two original laboratory experiments to test the relative impact of four major policy dimensions on participants' evaluations of candidate ideology and to test authoritarianism's role in shaping ideological conceptualization. These analyses indicate that individuals most often define liberalism and conservatism primarily in terms of social policies closely associated with religious values, each of which invert traditional ideological orientations toward the appropriate size and role of government. The causal mechanism shaping this relationship is authoritarianism, because, I argue, the religious social policy dimension most clearly evokes the deep‐seated value conflicts associated with an authoritarian view of political conflict.

An Integrated Review of Recent Research on the Relationships Between Religious Belief, Political Ideology, Authoritarianism, and Prejudice

“…Conservatives tend to be high in these traits and as a result high in RWA, while in contrast liberals tend to be low in them. Authoritarians often base their political judgments on how they perceive certain policies to conflict with or threaten their values, and values are most commonly associated with a person’s religious belief system (Devine, 2012). Consequently, views on social policy that relate to religious belief are among the most stable over time.…”

“…In two separate experiments, Devine (2012) found that subjects viewed social policy very differently depending on whether they saw it as relating to religious belief. When a social policy was tied to religious dogma, the subjects were overwhelmingly more likely to rate the candidate proposing the policy as more ideologically extreme.…”

The “L” Word

“…The most obvious pathway to the formation of an ideological identity is through policy positions (Devine 2012). Many Americans have a general understanding of the left-right ideological continuum and can locate their views on such a scale.…”

Foreign Policy Ideology and Conflict Preferences: A Look at Afghanistan and Libya

“…While individuals tend to possess consistent beliefs within political domains, consistency may not always be found across such domains (Feldman ; Layman and Carsey ; Zumbrunnen and Gangl ; Feldman and Johnston ). Also, ideological labels (liberal or conservative) can have quite a varied meaning to individuals (Zumbrunnen and Gangl ; Devine ) depending on the context and domain considered. When an individual is asked to place himself or herself along the typical 7‐point ideological scale, we do not know whether this individual is defining ideology as economic, social, foreign policy, or something else entirely.…”