WHAT IS IDEOLOGY?
WHAT IS IDEOLOGY?John Levi MartinUniversity of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America.Abstract Political ideology has been a confusing topic for social analysts, and those whoattempted to eschew judgmental reductions of others’ conceptions and develop a non-polemicalpolitical psychology found ideology behaving in ways that defeated their theories of politicalreasoning. I argue that political ideology can best be understood as actors’ theorization of theirown position, and available strategies, in a political field.Keywordsideology, political parties, political psychology.Resumo A ideologia política tem sido um tema confuso para os investigadores sociais e paraaqueles que tentam evitar julgar as limitações de outras conceções e desenvolver uma psicologiapolítica não polémica que procure encontrar um comportamento ideológico que ultrapasse asteorias do raciocínio político. Defendo que a ideologia política pode ser melhor entendida comouma teorização da posição dos próprios atores e de estratégias disponíveis no campo político.Palavras-chaveideologia, partidos políticos, psicologia política.Résumé Le thème de l'idéologie politique suscite la confusion chez les chercheurs sociaux et chezceux qui s'efforcent d'éviter de juger les limites d'autres conceptions et de développer unepsychologie politique non polémique, afin de trouver un comportement idéologique qui dépasseleurs théories du raisonnement politique. Je soutiens que l'idéologie politique peut être mieuxcomprise en tant que théorisation de la position des acteurs eux-mêmes et de stratégies disponibles,dans le champ politiqueMots-clésidéologie, partis politiques, psychologie politique.Resumen La ideología política ha sido un tema confuso para los investigadores sociales y paraaquellos que intentan evitar juzgar las limitaciones de otras concepciones y desarrollar unapsicología política no polémica que busque encontrar un comportamiento ideológico quetrascienda las teorías del raciocinio político. Defiendo que la ideología política puede ser mejorentendida como una teorización de la posición de los propios actores y de estrategias disponiblesen el campo político.Palabras-claveideología , partidos políticos, psicología política.SOCIOLOGIA, PROBLEMAS E PRÁTICAS, n.º 77, 2015, pp. 9-31. DOI:10.7458/SPP2015776220
10John Levi MartinDifferent ways of conceptualizing ideology1It is common for sociological discussions of ideology to begin by acknowledging,if not bemoaning, the plurality of different ways of using the term “ideology”(Eagleton 1991). Marx and Engels used it to denote the most abstract conceptionsthat populate an imaginary world of ideas independent of material life; laterMarxists often used it to denote a conspiratorial ideational wool pulled over theeyes of the masses; political scientists use it to denote packages of positions, oftenbelieved to be unifiable in a single preferred optimal state, and, of course, many ofus use it to denote the beliefs, attitudes and opinions of those with whom wedisagree.A conventional solution in sociology to these problems comes from our nominalist epistemology—that is, we tend to assume that general theoretical terms mustbe created by the analyst and are heuristic devices used to greater or lesser successin particular analyses. Thus we assume that each investigator is basically free tochoose how to define his or her terms, and the worst that we can say regarding aparticular case is that the definitions didn’t help much.Now there are some good reasons for accepting such a nominalist position,but it is far from obviously the best one for the social sciences, and there is much torecommend a quasi “realist” position instead. That is, we assume that the generalities that we talk about are not open to definition at the whim of the investigator, butare treated as largely pre-given. It is worth emphasizing that this sort of realism (asopposed to nominalism) is separable from the issue of realism as opposed to idealism (for more on this distinction, see Martin, 2014). For example, many sociologistsare being realists in this (anti-nominalist) sense when they argue that sociologistsshould focus on the categories (“emic”) that are used by actors. Even though someof these sociologists may be more like “idealists” in that they argue that all the categories that actors use are (potentially) disconnected from material reality, the investigator is not free to define categories for his or her particular analytic purposes, butmust be guided by the externally created ones. Thus if a certain group has a definition of “witch,” the investigator must attempt to grasp this, as opposed to definingwhat counts as a witch for her purposes of investigation.Most field theorists, following Bourdieu (e.g., 1984 [1979]), have such a realistposition regarding the nature of some of the key constructs they use to understandsocial action (though some, like Wacquant, 2002, and Bourdieu himself, will criticize certain other definitions used by the actors they study, specifically, those inwhich some sort of “bad faith” is inherent; Wacquant, 1999: 276, has a clear defenseof a rationalist interpretation of Bourdieu—that is, one that privileges a coherentand defensibly true vision of social conflicts). In particular, the endogenous definition of the “stakes” of any field, and what capital can be legitimately (if questionably) used to pursue these, leads the investigator to need to have her concepts1Some of the ideas here were first worked out in collaboration with Matt Desmond, and I amgrateful to him for continuing dialogue, friendship and inspiration.SOCIOLOGIA, PROBLEMAS E PRÁTICAS, n.º 77, 2015, pp. 9-31. DOI:10.7458/SPP2015776220
WHAT IS IDEOLOGY?11guided by those of actors. The sociologist who “defines” what “art” is is not studying the field but playing a role in it.Thus if politics is one of those spheres of actions that can be called a field,guided by the reciprocal orientation of actors to one another, we cannot allow ourselves simply to define things as they suit us best. It is for this reason that we cannotsimply solve all our problems by agreeing to disagree, and to disagree by definingour terms differently—at least when it comes to aspects of political life that arewithin the phenomenological experience of subjects. And I think there is good reason to think that there is a working consensus as to what we mean by ideology inpolitics. That is, actors will tend to agree as to who (other than themselves, ofcourse), “has” an ideology and when they seem to be deploying it. Thus here Iwant to attempt to understand the nature of this ideology—that which actors seemto consensually develop and use in ordering their political attachments.Here I am going to argue that the conceptions that might seem furthestapart—that of Marx and Engels on the one hand, and those of political scientists on theother—must be put together. That is, political ideology is “ideology” in the sense ofMarx and Engels not because it is false or distracting, but because it is the ideationalequivalent of actual patterns of relations, in this case, specifically political relations.Political ideology and political reasoningThe Classic ApproachHere we are interested in political ideology, which means that we must distinguishit from (on the one hand) what might be considered ideology more generally, and(on the other) from non-ideological political beliefs. While some theorists may argue that all ideology is, by its nature, political, there is also a consensually definedmore restricted use of the word “political,” especially in democracies. 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 theside). In most democracies, this means an orientation to political parties, as theseare 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 partycontestation. Thus someone may have an opinion about a state policy, but if this isdisconnected from partisan struggle, we do not consider it a “political” issue (itmay be, for example, a technical problem).Can we say something about the sorts of cognitive elements that might compose political ideology? For example, can we list them? When political and socialanalysts define ideology, they tend to give extremely broad definitions, usually including beliefs, attitudes and values (e.g., Adorno et al., 1950: 2; Campbell et al., 1964:111, 192; Jost, 2006: 653; Kerlinger, 1984: 13; Tedin, 1987: 65). This basically runs thegamut of all possible cognitive elements. Could it be that we attempt to restrict theclass of things included by ideology in some other manner? Are there specifiablequalities of the elements that constitute ideology?SOCIOLOGIA, PROBLEMAS E PRÁTICAS, n.º 77, 2015, pp. 9-31. DOI:10.7458/SPP2015776220
12John Levi MartinMost social scientists have assumed that if ideology is separable from someother political beliefs or opinions, it is because ideology is intrinsically normativeand generative (see Lane, 1973: 85; for a recent synthesis see Hinich and Munger1996). A classic example of an intrinsically normative definition of ideology comesfrom Downs (1957: 96): “We define an ideology as a verbal image of the good society and of the chief means of constructing such a society.” This idea that ideologicaldifferences are fundamentally about differences in valuations, both abstract andconcrete (that is, “values” and “attitudes”), is widespread (e.g., Billig, 1984: 446;Rokeach, 1968: 123-124; Tedin, 1987: 65; also see Jacoby, 2006; Jacoby andSniderman 2006; Peffley and Hurwitz, 1987; cf. Minsky, 2006).Here I am going to use the United States as my running example, in part forreasons of familiarity, but also because its two-party system highlights some ofthe more fundamental dynamics involved in political contestation, as this seemsto be the form that most politics spontaneously develop, when there is not a welldeveloped system deliberately designed to channel party formation in a particular direction (for an example of such spontaneous dualistic politics, see Barth,1965). The US, like the UK, had its governmental system designed before the existence of stable party organizations, while the parliamentary systems that supportmulti-party systems were designed after the development of mass suffrage andthe existence of parties, and these were taken for granted by constitution writers.Now it is not necessarily the case that a two-party system leads to a division into“liberals” and “conservatives,” though I will argue below that there is actuallygood reason to expect the development of a “unidimensional” understanding ofpartisan differences. However, as this is the case in the United States, I use theseterms to describe the consensual self-understanding of actors. Thus if ideologyleads to political choice, it does through “liberalism” and “conservatism.” Butthe question is what these terms mean—what the “ideologies” are. The conventional approach assumed that these were, above all else, oppositions of packagesof values.Thus conservatives are said disproportionately to value self-reliance, limitedgovernment, and so on, while liberals are thought disproportionately to valueequal opportunity, tolerance, and so on (Klueger and Smith, 1986; Goren, 2004,2005; Jost et al., 2008). It is such differences in values that we generally think aboutwhen we consider a political “clash of cultures” (see DiMaggio et al., 1996).Now this approach to reducing political ideology to a collection of “typicallyconservative” or “typically liberal” values runs into the problems that most valueor norm-based explanations have, namely that our key explanatory elements arevery proximate to that which is to be explained—sometimes crashing into tautology. Explaining citizens’ preference for, say, a war effort or for welfare benefits bypointing to their supposedly distinct values (militarism or equality)—that is, theirpolitical ideology—is somewhat akin to explaining that the reason opium inducessleep is its “soporific quality” (cf. Lau et al., 1991). Of course, if it turns out that it isindeed values that separates conservatives from liberals, one cannot complain thatthese are not the analytic elements we wished for, but, given the proximity of suchvalues to the opinions they are to explain, we must be somewhat cautious of theSOCIOLOGIA, PROBLEMAS E PRÁTICAS, n.º 77, 2015, pp. 9-31. DOI:10.7458/SPP2015776220
WHAT IS IDEOLOGY?13initial appeal of the approach to ideology that treats it as fundamentally aboutvaluation.The second common understanding of ideology is that it is, as Downs (1957:96) stressed, generative: it facilitates our taking a stand on a particular issue (Higgs,1987: 37-38; also Lau et al., 1991; Zaller, 1992: 26). In particular, most analysts ofpublic opinion have embraced what Goren (2004) calls the “political sophistication” model. Ideological values are then combined with political information to produce non-random opinions on specific matters.For example, consider persons in the United States attempting to decidewhether they will support a policy, say, one that gives benefits to out of work persons in American inner cities (who are likely to be of Afro-American descent). Ourimaginary 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 isa 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 theytry—and produces an opinion, in this case, to favor the policy. In sum, according tothis conception, values beliefs opinion; attitudes are a fusion of otherwise separable prescriptive and descriptive cognitive elements.This suggests that ideologues should be those who have clear value commitments, and mutually supporting value commitments. Thus one would be hampered as an ideologue were one to emphasize both individual freedom and stateregulation, as increasing one seems to logically imply decreasing the other. Further, even in the absence of such logical contradiction, the nature of the world maybe 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 acrosspersons, whether randomly or not. Finally, this conception suggests thatideologues without sufficient information about the world would be unable toform opinions, as they would only have the “ought” part of their cognitive orientation, and not the “is” part.Problems with the Classic ApproachHowever, there have been a few recurrent anomalies for this approach. The firstproblem is that ideology seems to have a direct effect on many policy preferencesthat cannot be explained according to a chain of reasoning whereby the abstractprinciples of the ideology imply more proximate principles that, when combinedwith political information, lead to the preference. For example, we might imaginethat (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 involvingregulation of housing law. However, well informed ideologues choose the “correct” side of some issue even when they do not hold the beliefs that should mediatebetween ideology and choice (Federico and Sidanius 2002; Sniderman et al. 1991:65- 67, 81-84). 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 orSOCIOLOGIA, PROBLEMAS E PRÁTICAS, n.º 77, 2015, pp. 9-31. DOI:10.7458/SPP2015776220
14John Levi Martintoo rich, you can never be too ideologically consistent: indeed, they have tended toassume that such consistency (in the sense of the work of Festinger, 1957, Feldman,1966, and Abelson, et al., 1968, is a prerequisite for good political participation. Forthis reason, the “hyper-consistency” of well-informed ideologues has not beentreated as problematic, even though it forces us to reevaluate our assumptionsabout how ideologues reason.The second problem is that it turned out that this sort of hyper-consistencywasn’t quite matched by a similarly high degree of consistency regarding the fundamental values. This in no way implies that any conviction is wanting among ideologues—however, this conviction appears to be turned on and off selectively.Those who argue against the separation of church and state when it is a matter oftheir religion (usually Christians in the US), making recourse to very abstract values, had no problem arguing for this same separation when it came to others‘ religion.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 arguingagainst too stringent a separation when this became linked to intolerance of Muslims. Most wonderfully, Jarret Crawford and Eneda Xhambazi (2013) studied howAmericans evaluated two different recent populist movements, the “Tea Party,”which became associated with right wing causes, and the “Occupy Wall Street”movement, which became associated with the left wing. They show that Tea Partysupporters tend to appeal to values of the right of protest when asked about the TeaParty, but appeal to the importance of social order when asked about Occupy WallStreet; and Occupy Wall Street supporters tend to appeal to values of the right ofprotest when asked about Occupy Wall Street, but appeal to the importance of social order when asked about the Tea Party.The third problem has to do with the factual basis for opinion formation. Ifthe “values” part didn’t seem to work as it should, neither did the “knowledge”part. Since Converse’s, 1964 classic work, political psychologists have been forcedto acknowledge that few Americans have enough factual information to allowthem to make the sorts of decisions that were assumed by the model of political reasoning. While it must be acknowledged that there are other polities in which theaverage citizen has more information than does the average citizen of the US, whatis key about the American example is that it demonstrates that lack of factual datahampers opinion formation only slightly. And this is because the “information”held by an average citizen is, when one considers what would be needed to make arigorous deduction as to a political choice, necessarily extremely partial. Considerthe question of which candidate to favor in an election. Presumably, one wouldneed to know what the candidate would actually do when elected, which of courseis beyond anyone’s actual knowledge. Thus even if voters knew what candidatespromised to do, they would fall short of a decent model of political reasoningthrough no fault of their own. But they would also need to know how the promisedactions would affect their own interests, which would require a great deal ofknowledge about the world and its causal texture, knowledge that few of us have.And to top it all off, while the evidence that ideology gives us values getsweaker the closer we look, it becomes more and more plausible that ideology givesSOCIOLOGIA, PROBLEMAS E PRÁTICAS, n.º 77, 2015, pp. 9-31. DOI:10.7458/SPP2015776220
WHAT IS IDEOLOGY?15us knowledge—which might seem contradictory. Thus the fourth problem with theconventional view is that ideology gives citizens exactly the wrong cognitive element. In fact, differences in ideology seems to correlate much more strongly withdifferences in descriptive statements than they do with differences in purely prescriptive ones (cf. Rumelhart, 1989; Kurtz et al., 1999). And this is because, asRokeach, 1968 always held, t
WHAT IS IDEOLOGY? John Levi Martin University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, United States of America. Abstract Political ideology has been a confusing topic for social analysts, and those who attempted to eschew judgmental redu
446 Chapter 13:Reflecting on Worldview, Ideology, and Citizenship Influences of Worldview and Ideology on Citizenship As you saw in Part 1 of this book, your worldview may lead you toward an ideology that influences the ways you think and act.As you will explore in this chapter, worldview and ideology shape your evolving role as a citizen.
French Ideology of English as a World Language and American Second Language Speakers compares French ideology of American English and French ideology of the American accent in French to investigate if the two correlate. The study seeks to answer the question: Is ideology linked to the speech community represented or is it
Title: Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Ideology of Hate Author: Kristoffer Rissanen Supervisor: Chloé Avril Abstract: Hatred and ideology play an important role in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four.This essay aims to show that hatred not only is a core tenet of the Party’s ideology, but that it also guides the protagonist Winston Smith, motivating
Ideology 133 E ducators who promote the Social Reconstruction ideology view curriculum from a social perspective. First, they assume that our society is unhealthy—indeed, that its very survival is threatened—because the traditional mechanisms developed by society to contend with social problems are incapable of doing their job. Second, Social
function of this language. Another ideology inextricably connected with standardization is the myth of "non-accent" (Lippi-Green, 1997). This ideology is rooted in the belief that language learners' L1 accent, when transferred into the L2, deems their L2 speech incomprehensible. An ideology of "non-accent" then promotes prejudice
This ideology of inferiority mentioned above was a result of CF not being seen as prestigious as SF and has been the dominant ideology concerning CF in Louisiana. In France, however, another ideology of inferiority, that of . le bon usage [good use], influences all perceptions of all non-standard varieties. 6. For the French, the North
influence of ideological values on the policies and practices of America’s criminal justice systems. Recently, however, a trend toward critical analysis of the behavior of police, courts, and corrections has emerged that focuses exclusively on ideology as the analytical tool of choice. For example, Barlow (2000), and Bohm and Haley (2001) include extensive discussion of the influence of .
criminal justice systems in terms of homicide cases solved by the police, persons arrested for and per-sons convicted of homicide. Bringing the perpetrators of homicide to justice and preventing impunity for those responsible for lethal violence is a core responsibility of the State. Indeed, there is international recognition1 that the State is required to provide judicial protection with .
