1

Ideology
Jonathan Leader Maynard
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford

Introduction
Scholars have long expressed frustration with the notion of ideology. Robert Putnam once contended
that “few concepts in social analysis have inspired such a flood of commentaries, yet few have
stimulated the production of so little cumulative knowledge about society and politics.”1 Richard Rorty
rather more bluntly bemoaned ideology’s “uselessness”,2 whilst in an influential introductory text,
David McLellan deemed it “the most elusive concept in the whole of social science”.3
Yet ideology remains a hugely popular term across academia. And it is unlikely to be
abandoned any time soon, since many of the most urgent contemporary political questions seem
deeply bound up with ideological dynamics. Why are various forms of political extremism on the rise,
from the mainstream of American politics, to the fault lines of European democracies, to the
hinterlands of Pakistan? What provokes the rise of clamorous rebellions and the fall of longstanding
regimes? When do new demands for democracy cascade into revolutions, and why do tenuous
democracies backslide into authoritarianism, sometimes to the applause of their citizens? Why do
different groups in society disagree so deeply over what is to be done, coupling supreme confidence
in their own views with the certain conviction that their opponents labour under tragic confusion or
wilful malevolence? Why do human beings, exhorting righteous justifications of all kinds, engage in
devastating forms of violence like terrorism, ethnic warfare and genocide? And why are burning
threats to societies like climate change and deadly poverty denied or left unaddressed?
Many scholars believe that such questions cannot be understood without attending to the role
of distinctive political worldviews like liberalism, nationalism, conservatism, populism, or religious
fundamentalism, and to processes of ideological stability, sedimentation, fragmentation, and decay.
Consequently, the last two decades have seen a considerable proliferation of dedicated, sustained and
sophisticated approaches to the study of ideologies.
In this chapter I provide a broad overview of such study. A key challenge in doing so, however,
is the high degree of disciplinary fragmentation present in past and present work on ideology. Ideology
is not solely an object of research in political sociology, nor is ‘sociological’ work easily demarcated
from other disciplines. In my view, almost anyone who studies ideology necessarily engages
sociological questions, but they often don’t do so explicitly, and much research has been conducted
by political psychologists, political theorists, political scientists and discourse analysts. Almost all this
work is of potential relevance to political sociology, so in this chapter I cast the net broadly, adopting
a relaxed attitude towards disciplinary boundaries.
The chapter is divided into two parts. In part I, I provide a brief overview of the history of
the study of ideology, from its origins in the French revolution to recent developments in the late 20th
and early 21st century. I conclude this section with some reflections on the vexed problem of how to
conceptualise ideology in light of this history. In part II, I then consider how the study of ideology
has been applied to three especially important political phenomena: a) order and domination; b)

1 Cited in: George 1987, 1

2 Rorty 1989, 59 fn.15
3 McLellan 1995, 1
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disagreement and conflict; and c) error and extremism. These clearly do not exhaust applications of
ideological analysis, but they highlight some of the major ways it can facilitate better theorisation of
key aspects of politics.4

Part I: A Brief History of the Study of Ideology

From de Tracy to the Marxist tradition

By contrast with many political concepts, ideology has fairly clear beginnings. Though it had important
intellectual progenitors,5 the term ideology emerged out of the French enlightenment, and in particular
the work of Antoine Destutt de Tracy. De Tracy’s Éléments d’Idéologie sought to lay the foundations of
a new science of ideas – an idea-logy – based on a largely materialist theory which rooted ideas in
physiological sensations.6 De Tracy and fellow ideologues like Joseph Marie Degérando, George
Cabanis, and Constatin de Volney enjoyed a short period of success in revolutionary France.7 But they
fell afoul of Napoleon who, after a brief period of patronage, rapidly turned against them as his French
Empire came under criticism from liberals and republicans.8 The ideologues were directly suppressed
from 1803 onwards, with Napoleon declaring them “dreamers and dangerous dreamers”, “brooders”
and “empty brains”, who pursued a “shadowy metaphysics” to which “we must lay the blame for the
ills that our fair France has suffered”.9
The immediate post-Napoleonic era retained this division between a broad vision of ideology
on the one hand, and a narrower, negative meaning on the other – a famous organising narrative for
discussing the conceptual ambiguity of the term. De Tracy’s Éléments remained popular in some circles,
but forces loyal to the restored Bourbon monarchy (as well as others both inside and outside France)
railed against ‘ideology’ as denoting dangerous republican radicalism.10 In consequence, this negative
usage gained the upper hand, and by the time of the 1848 revolutions “Napoleon’s association of
‘ideology’ with abstract metaphysics and utopian, political liberalism became a widespread pejorative
usage”.11 Such an understanding of ideology remained a largely untheoretical notion of public political
rhetoric, but laid the foundation for its much more intellectually influential mobilisation by Karl Marx.
In Marx’s usage, ideology was more concretely specified as a system of thought that legitimated
the existing economic and social order and its dominant class interests.12 This conception was rooted
in Marx’s historical materialism, in which the fundamental nature of social relations was determined
by practical human activity – labour – under specific historical conditions. This applied to ideas as
much as to all other aspects of social life. As Marx argued in The German Ideology:

“The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly

interwoven with the material activity and material intercourse of men… Men

4 For a more methodologically orientated discussion, see: Leader Maynard 2017 [forthcoming]
5 E.g. Bacon, 1620/1878. See also: de Tocqueville 2003, 498-509
6 McLellan 1995, 5
7 Kennedy 1979, 355-8
8 Eagleton 1991, 66-7
9 Kennedy 1979, 359-60
10 Ibid. 362-3; Stråth 2013, 5-7
11 Kennedy 1979, 364
12 See also: ibid. 366-8.
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are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc., that is, real, active men, as
they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and
of the intercourse corresponding to these”.13

This process was not, however, obvious and transparent. Consistent with Marx’s account of alienation,
the human construction of social relations becomes concealed by illusory ideas, that reify the social
order and mask the way in which it reflects certain modes of production (and consequent social
contradictions and relations of domination).14 This generates distorted understandings in the form of
dominant moralities, religions, metaphysics and all related modes of consciousness, which conceal
their rootedness in contingent underlying material conditions, and serve the interests of the present
ruling classes.15 This is (generally – for his usage is not always entirely consistent) what Marx meant by
ideology.16
After Marx, however, the conceptualisation and study of ideology takes a forking and often
counterintuitive course. The most influential of Marx’s successors – notably Vladimir Lenin, György
Lukács and Antonio Gramsci – shifted in their usage of ideology to a broader and frequently non-
pejorative meaning.17 In Lenin’s use, for instance, ideologies were the political consciousness
distinctive of a class in the class struggle – hence in capitalism there was a zero-sum competition
between bourgeois ideology on the one hand and socialist ideology on the other.18 Such usages, though
no longer seeing ideology as intrinsically negative, still placed heavy emphasis on ideological critique.
Even if ideology was not universally bad, dominant ideologies sustained the exploitative capitalist
order, contributing to what Gramsci termed hegemony – the ruling class’s domination of culture, civil
society, and state capacity and consequent ability to illicit consent and compliance from subordinate
classes. The operation of ideologies thus needed to be analysed and laid bare. Other Marxists stuck
closer to Marx’s and particularly Engels’ intrinsically pejorative usage.19 For the rest of the 20th Century,
Marxist or Marxist-influenced critical analysis and theory would form one central tradition in the study
of ideology.20

The Interpretive Tradition

From around 1900 onwards, the term ideology gradually diffused outside Marxist scholarship, but key
sociologists like Max Weber, Émile Durkheim and Vilfredo Pareto, whilst contributing immensely to
the theorisation of ideas and their role in society, did not present themselves as theorists of ideology.21
That changed with the publication of Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology
of Knowledge. Mannheim explicitly distinguished between the narrow pejorative “particular conception”
of ideology, used to refer to specific distorted understandings, and a broader non-pejorative “total
conception” referring to encompassing systems of thought that define the political consciousness of

13 Marx 1845/1998, 42
14 Birnbaum 1960, 92-3
15 Eagleton 1991, 70-91; McLellan 1995, 9-18
16 See also: McLellan 1995, 9; Abercrombie and Turner 1978, 150-2.
17 Stråth 2013, 9
18 Lenin 1947, 39-40
19 McLellan 1995, 16 & 20-1
20 E.g.: Althusser 1971; Thompson 1984; Simonds 1989.
21 For discussion, see: McLellan 1995, 31-5 Several later figures followed this pattern – Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze,

Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens, for example. See: Malešević 2014, 337.
 4

individuals and groups.22 In deploying the latter, Mannheim advanced the concept of ideology as a
means for studying all “fundamentally divergent thought systems and…widely different modes of
experience and interpretation” which could be analysed historically as the product of the “life-situation
of the thinker”.23
In this respect, Mannheim provided a classic foundation for a second key tradition in the 20th
Century study of ideologies. In this tradition, ideologies are conceptualised non-pejoratively as
ubiquitous – perhaps even cognitively necessary – political worldviews that generate understandings
of politics and shape political action, and which are typically studied through historical or qualitative
methods.24 Many have stuck to this approach. The influential anthropologist Clifford Geertz, for
instance, levelled strong criticisms at the biased and partisan analyses encouraged by a pejorative
notion of ideology, wondering “what such an egregiously loaded concept is doing among the analytical
tools of a social science.”25 Instead, Geertz advanced a broad, interpretive approach to studying
ideologies, conceived of as cultural systems that serve as “maps of problematic social reality and
matrices for the creation of collective conscience.”26 In his early work, intellectual historian Quentin
Skinner likewise saw ideologies as broad systems of ideas that characterised groups locked in political
competition.27 Various other political scientists, sociologists, psychologists and historians have
followed suit.28

Post-War Political Science

But not all followed this path. A third tradition developed in the decades following World War II,
involving the initial deployment of a highly pejorative but non-Marxist, even anti-Marxist, conception.
For scholars such as Edward Shils, Kenneth Minogue, Bernard Crick, Hannah Arendt, Daniel Bell,
Raymond Aron, Michael Oakeshott and Giovanni Sartori, concerned with the dramatic impact of
totalitarian worldviews in World War II and the Cold War, ideologies were associated with all-
encompassing, dogmatic belief systems, typically rooted in the continental rationalist philosophical
tradition and intent on reshaping societies to fit absolutist utopian blueprints. In Bell’s words:
“ideology deals with social movements that seek to mobilize men for the realization of eschatological
creeds in secular terms, and in this fusion of political formulas and passions, ideology provides a faith
and a set of moral certitudes by which ends are used to justify immoral means.” 29 Or Minogue’s:
“ideologies can be specified in terms of a shared hostility to modernity: to liberalism in politics,
individualism in moral practice, and the market in economics”.30
This ‘Cold Warrior’ conception facilitated the lambasting of ‘ideological’ societies like Nazi
Germany and the Soviet Union, contrasted with the purportedly unideological United States.31 In a

22 Mannheim 1940, 49-53

23 Ibid. 51. Mannheim’s usage is more complex than this, however, since he also distinguishes between a special and a
general conception of ideology, and a contrast between ideology and utopia, see: ibid. 68 fn 2 & 173-7. For explanation,
see: McLellan 1995, 39; Brick 2013, 93.
24 See: Norval 2000, 316; Freeden 2005; Malešević 2014, 334
25 Geertz 1964, 51
26 Ibid. 64.
27 Skinner 1965
28 E.g. Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford 1950, 2; Lane 1962, 14-16.
29 Quoted in: McLellan 1995, 89 fn. 8
30 Quoted in: Eagleton 1991, 6
31 Ibid. 4.
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somewhat more sophisticated fashion, it also underpinned the ‘End of Ideology debate’ of the 1950s
and early 1960s.32 For many scholars, the post-war consensus in Western democracies illustrated, in
Bell’s words, the “exhaustion of political ideas” and a consolidation around a pluralist democratic
consensus against ghastly totalitarian alternatives.33 Competitions over grand ideologies had given way
to pragmatic management of social problems.34 Key components of the resulting debate continue to
hold relevance – indeed, substantial elements have been re-asserted in the post-Cold War era.35 But
for both contemporaneous and modern critics, the end of ideology thesis deployed an excessively
constricted notion of ideology, and rested on strong ideological convictions in its own right –
frequently conservative ones36 – dubiously presented as mere pragmatic clear-sightedness.37 The thesis
also seemed empirically undermined by the wide-ranging political struggles and upheavals that
subsequently dominated the 1960s and 1970s.
The ‘Cold Warrior’ conception of ideology and the end of ideology debate fed into, however,
a more persistent narrow conception of ideology: retaining the notions of a rather doctrinaire and
systematised political worldview, but softening or eliminating the pejorative association with
totalitarianism, violence and dogma. Such a conception has retained adherence within a broad swathe
of political science and sociology, especially that concerned with the empirical study of American
domestic politics and elections. Critically, this conception is demanding: most people’s political
attitudes do not display the high degrees of logical coherence or constraint deemed necessary.
Consequently, many scholars in this tradition conclude that ideology is confined to political elites and
largely absent amongst mass publics.38 And ideology is often effectively narrowed even further, by
reducing it in practice to the liberal-conservative one-dimensional scale common in US politics.
Consequently when voters or politicians express positions not effectively captured by that scale, they
are sometimes deemed to be “not ideologically consistent”.39 Most other scholars of ideology reject
such conclusions, and studies which abandon so restrictive a model of ideological belief often find
more complex distributions of ideology amongst societies at large,40 often organised into three or four
major ideological clusters of opinion.41 Much qualitative work also affirms levels of distinctive
ideological belief among ordinary citizens – if more vernacular, intuitive or, in Robert Lane’s
terminology, “latent” in form.42

Resurgence in scholarship from the late 20th Century

This framework of three major approaches to studying ideology, which I label the critical, interpretive,
and positivist traditions, captures (if roughly) the bulk of academic work on the topic until around the

32 Though roots of this debate can be found in thinkers including Weber, Mannheim, Adorno and Horkheimer. See:
Brick 2013, 93-4.
33 Bell 1960/1988
34 Brick 2013
35 Fukuyama 1992
36 This can be overstated, however – see: Brick 2013, 95-6 & 103-4.
37 Haber 1968; McLellan 1995, 46-9 See: Brick 2013, 100-2
38 A position most famously associated with Converse 1964. Converse himself, however, preferred the term ‘belief

systems’, and still affirmed the possible existence of “folk ideologies” amongst mass publics, see: ibid. 255.
39 Glazer and Grofman 1989, 33
40 See also: Conover and Feldman 1981; Jost 2006; Jost, Nosek and Gosling 2008, 127
41 Swedlow and Wyckoff 2009
42 Lane 1962, 16. For a broader review of sociological work on ideology in the post-war era, see: Birnbaum 1960.
 6

late-1980s.43 But many scholars highlight a recent growth, reinvigoration, and transformation in the
study of ideology.44 Impressions of when this ‘started’ vary, in large part because of enduring
disciplinary fragmentation, but key new trends emerged around the mid-1990s and early 2000s. Two
particular strands can be delineated.
First, a major surge of interest and theoretical sophistication in the study of ideology occurred
in political theory, social theory and discourse theory from around the mid-1990s. The publication of
Mapping Ideology, a volume of critical perspectives edited by Slavoj Žižek, in 1994,45 release of Michael
Freeden’s hugely influential Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach in 1996,46 and the
founding of the Journal of Political Ideologies under Freeden’s editorship the same year, did much to
stimulate interest in the subject. A more gradual increase of interest in ideology within linguistics and
discourse analysis was encouraged by the publication of the first and second edition of James Gee’s
Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses in 1990 and 1996, respectively. The two decades since
have produced a wide array of methodological, theoretical and empirical work: some drawing on the
history of political thought and comparative politics and often heavily influenced by Freeden,; some
via poststructuralist and/or post-Marxist approaches, especially that associated with Ernesto Laclau
and Chantal Mouffe;47 and newer contributions from psychoanalytic perspectives,48 and theories of
rhetoric.49 Central to almost all this work has been a much deeper theorisation of the complex role
played by political language, symbols and meanings. And much of the critical work has abandoned the
partisan and pejorative conception of ideology used in Marxist theories, instead drawing on Frankfurt
School critical theory, Habermasian social theory, post-Marxism, post-structuralism and
psychoanalysis. Such work continues to preach critical interrogation of ideology, but is sceptical about
any privileged epistemic position from which ‘false’ ideology can be disproved by an objective science.
For almost all work in this strand, therefore, ideology is ubiquitous and inescapable.50
Second, there has been a huge profusion of more positivist work on ideology emerging out of
political psychology and closely related disciplines.51 Scholars in these disciplines emphasise that
political thinking is a form of motivated social cognition driven by a range of psychological needs in
response to a panoply of social-psychological processes, as opposed to cold logical systematisation in
the pursuit of truth.52 A wide range of psychological and physiological factors consequently influence
individuals’ ideological inclinations.53 Genetic commonalities appear to predict some similarities in

43 These terms have their shortcomings – in particular, work in the interpretive tradition was not always interpretivist in
the epistemological sense, nor does epistemological positivism necessitate adherence to the positivist tradition as
described here.
44 Freeden, Tower Sargent and Stears 2013, v; Jost, Nosek and Gosling 2008
45 Žižek 1994a
46 Freeden 1996
47 Laclau 1997. For overviews of the post-Marxist approach see: Norval 2000; Howarth, Norval and Stavrakakis 2000;

Townshend 2003; Leader Maynard 2013, 304-9; Malešević 2014.

48 Glynos 2001
49 Shorten 2011; Finlayson 2012; Skinner 1999. Some earlier work on ideology and rhetoric existed, notably by Michael

Billig, see: Billig 1991.

50 For the best review of this literature, see: Norval 2000.
51 Jost, Nosek and Gosling 2008. This should not obscure psychological work that predates this period, for example:

Kardiner, Linton, Bois and Withers 1945; Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford 1950; Lane 1962;
Rosenberg 1988.
52 This idea was also central to Raymond Boudon’s theory of ideology – see: Boudon 1989, 144-5.
53 See also: Leader Maynard and Mildenberger 2016, 12-14.
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political attitudes, and liberals and conservatives have been found to display different tendencies in
brain structure and automatic physiological responses.54 But most research focuses on personality –
underlying psychological traits and attitudes which create propensities for certain ideological positions
– or higher order attitudinal tendencies.55 Even very mundane indicators of lifestyle such as the most
common objects to have in one’s bedroom or one’s comparative preferences for Asian food (liberals),
sports utility vehicles (conservatives) or tattoos (liberals) can display remarkable predictive power for
ideological positions.56
Such research has produced key psychological theories of ideological affiliation and its
consequences for political life. Jim Sidanius and Felicia Pratto, for example, have highlighted the role
of ‘social dominance orientation’, a measure of “individuals’ desires for group-based dominance and
inequality”,57 in predicting support for a wide range of ideological positions and activities. The “system
justification theory” of John T. Jost and colleagues proposes that conservative political attitudes are
produced by particular psychological motives to rationalise the status quo, motives intensified under
conditions of threat and insecurity.58 A somewhat contrasting approach can be found in “moral
foundations theory” associated with Jonathan Haidt and popularised in his The Righteous Mind: Why
Good People Are Divided By Religion and Politics. For Haidt, conservatism is not simply a product of rather
‘negative’ psychological anxieties about threat, insecurity, disorder and change. Instead, he presents all
political ideologies as reflecting individual’s value-orientations across six intuitionist emotional
foundations: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty/betrayal, authority/subversion,
sanctity/degradation and freedom/oppression, with conservatism reflecting a fairly balanced
emotional concern with all six foundations.
These two broad trends do not constitute the only significant recent developments in the study
of ideology. Interest in ideology is also diffusing, being increasingly invoked in explanations of other
phenomena such as terrorism, economic development, war and political upheaval. A long overdue
engagement with the ideological landscapes and traditions of societies outside the traditional ‘West’
(which in most existing social science was largely reduced to the United States and, to a lesser extent,
Western Europe) is also finally gaining momentum.59
But integrative interdisciplinary work remains rare – modern ideology studies is still largely
divided between its critical, interpretive and positivist traditions, which largely ignore each other.
Whilst a degree of disciplinary specialism is both inevitable and necessary, such theoretical enclosure
tends to produce approaches to the study of ideology with a lopsided repertoire of strengths and
weaknesses, that stubbornly persists through scholars’ unwillingness to look outside their own
tradition to the complementary strengths of others. Overcoming these chasms between approaches is
a core challenge for the future study of ideology.60

54 Kanai, Feilden, Firth and Rees 2011; Amodio, Jost, Master and Yee 2007
55 Jost, Federico and Napier 2009
56 Jost, Nosek and Gosling 2008, 131-2
57 Pratto, Sidanius and Levin 2006, 281
58 Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski and Sulloway 2003; Jost and Hunyady 2005
59 Nathan and Shi 1996; Rivera 2013; Hendrickson and Zaki 2013; Browers 2013; Jenco 2013; Bajpai and Bonura 2013;

Pan and Xu 2015 Anthropology was a key exception to the past pattern and has a more enduring tradition of examining
the role of ideology across cultures. See: Geertz 1973/1993
60 See also: Leader Maynard 2013; Leader Maynard and Mildenberger 2016
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Competing conceptions of ideology

This brief overview of the history of the study of ideology highlights how observations of ideology’s
conceptual diversity – the many connotations and conceptions attached to the term – are certainly
accurate. Yet it should also make clear that the well-established story of a battle between a pejorative
and a non-pejorative conception of ideology over-simplifies matters. Pejorative conceptions have
actually taken (at least) three major and distinct forms:

1. A ‘classic Marxist’ conception where ideology is distinguished by a) misrepresenting social

reality and b) thereby sustaining systems of domination.
2. A ‘Cold Warrior’ conception, where ideologies are seen as dogmatic and utopian belief-
systems that seek to restructure society according to blueprints of the ideal society.
3. A more ‘epistemological’ conception, where ideology denotes beliefs held because of
epistemically unsound procedures, that reflect the driving power of
interests/irrationality/cognitive limitations/socio-historical context.61

Similarly, at least two major non-pejorative conceptions can be identified:

4. A ‘doctrinal’ conception, where ideologies are highly systematised amalgamations of

explicit political ideas whose elements are tightly coherent/consistent/constrained.
5. A ‘general’ conception, where ideologies are ubiquitous systems of political ideas, which
may be more or less accurate, loosely formulated or rigidly fastidious, and formal or
informal.

Increasingly, ideology’s conceptual terrain is changing.62 The doctrinal conception has faced heavy
challenge from those who doubt the empirical tractability or analytical productiveness of such a
demanding and elitist notion of ideological belief, though it retains widespread adherence in certain
quarters. To a much greater extent, usage of pejorative conceptions of ideology has declined
dramatically across the disciplines, even if it retains some notable defenders.63 Such defenders often
argue that a pejorative conception is necessary if ideology is to retain its “critical edge”,64 but this
argument has been found unconvincing by other theorists.65 There is no reason why a concept needs
to be defined pejoratively in order to be able to do “critical” work – and scholars can and have engaged
in all sorts of critical analyses of ideology’s role in violence, oppression and domination without
assuming that such problematic effects constitute definitional criteria.66 The only thing that is actually
lost by a non-pejorative definition is the ability to condemn something simply through labelling it as ideology.
But this is neither a necessary nor particularly compelling form of critique.67

61 E.g.: Elster 1982, 123; Boudon 1989; Railton 2005. This conception can be less pejoratively valenced – and this is one
way of reading Mannheim’s total conception, see: Mannheim 1940, 50.
62 Leader Maynard and Mildenberger 2016, 2-6.
63 See: Larrain 1979; Thompson 1984; Fairclough 2010
64 Larrain 1979, 118; McLellan 1995, 82; Heywood 2007, 11
65 Steger 2008, 4-5; Freeden 2005, 262
66 van Dijk 1998, 11
67 See also: Gerring 1997, 982.
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The two most detailed and influential conceptual analyses of ideology by John Gerring and
Michael Hamilton both conclude that the core concept of ideology should therefore be delimited
broadly, in a manner consistent with what I have termed the ‘general’ conception. 68 Consolidation
around such a conception lessens talk at cross-purposes and conceptual fragmentation, brings together
the study of diverse forms of political worldview – latent, intuitive and inarticulate as well as explicit,
systematic and elaborate – and encourages a less prejudicial and more open-ended analysis.69 So whilst
distinct conceptions of ideology may remain legitimate for certain research purposes, keeping the
‘master concept’ close to the general conception involves few if any costs, and facilitates more
integrative and wide-ranging research. Many specific definitions of this form can be found,70 my own
is:

a distinctive overarching system of normative and/or purportedly factual ideas, typically

shared by members of groups or societies, which shapes their understandings of their political
world and guides their political behaviour.71

The drift towards more general conceptions shouldn’t obscure considerable variations in the ‘flavour’
of general conception deployed, however. Various usages, whilst affirming ideology’s normalcy and
ubiquity, carry critical echoes. Poststructuralists typically portray ideologies as bound up with relations
of domination – whether sustaining or challenging them – and as involving an ultimately futile effort
to find a myth or narrative that will impose final ‘closure’ on political contests. System justification
theorists and social dominance theorists are also concerned with articulating ideology’s role in the
maintenance of domination, and explain it as partly produced by underlying psychological needs rather
than conscious deliberation. And Haidt’s thick theory of ideology presents it as fundamentally rooted
in emotional intuitions, rendering an ideology’s concrete beliefs essentially post-hoc rationalisations.
Nevertheless, none of these research agendas or empirical claims renders ideology pejorative by
definition.
Scholars also differ in how ‘rich’ they represent ideologies as being. Quantitative scholars, in
particular, retain a preference for the extremely simplified unidimensional model of ideology – whether
from left to right or liberal to conservative.72 This is in contrast to the much richer pictures of
ideologies found in most qualitative research. Whilst the difference is partly rooted in pragmatically
contrasting methods, it can nevertheless raise some uncertainty as to whether scholars are consistently
referring to the same phenomenon when talking of ideology. Whilst for the interpretive tradition the
focus is on detailed idiosyncratic political worldviews and complex systems of political ideas, some
work in the positivist tradition may be better conceptualised as theorising the role of ideological labels in

68 Hamilton 1987; Gerring 1997. Though there is some ambiguity as to how far Gerring’s requirement that ideologies be,
to some degree, ‘stable’ pushes towards the doctrinal conception.
69 Leader Maynard 2016 [forthcoming]
70 Geertz 1964, 64; Seliger 1976, 11; Hall 1986, 35; Hamilton 1987, 38; Freeden 1998, 749; van Dijk 1998, 3; Ugarriza

and Craig 2012, 450

71 This treats ideology as a synonym for ‘political ideology’. Alternatively, one can see this definition of political ideology

as a subset of a broader definition, in which ideology is a distinctive overarching system of normative and/or purportedly factual
ideas, typically shared by members of groups or societies, which shapes their understandings and behaviour in some specified domain of social
life. This allows one to talk about, for example, corporate, artistic or academic ideologies outside of politics.
72 E.g. Jost, Nosek and Gosling 2008; Jost, Federico and Napier 2009
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political discourse (or even solely in US politics) rather than about ideologies themselves or the
phenomenon of political ideology more generally.73
Indeed, many different sorts of ideological phenomena can be studied under a notionally
shared general conception. References to ‘ideologies’ have denoted any or all of the following: a) the
unique systems of ideas held by particular individuals such as J.S. Mill, Adolf Hitler, Osama bin Laden
or Donald Trump (I suggest calling these personal ideologies), b) the common beliefs, or similarities in
ways of thinking, across members of broader groups or collectives drawn at some level of abstraction
(collective ideologies), c) the official or declared ideology of a particular group, organisation or institution
(which I call operational ideologies),74 d) general orientations towards politics like ‘left’ and ‘right’ (ideological
poles); and e) labels of political identity which have public meaning in their own right independent of
the actual belief systems they notionally denote (ideological labels). These are all related, but
fundamentally distinct phenomena, and greater clarity over the distinctions involved is needed.75

Part II: Applications of the Study of Ideology

Ideology, Order and Domination

Ideology’s role in sustaining a political order and legitimating the policies and institutions of that order
has been perhaps the most consistent theme in scholarship. Theoretical claims about ‘dominant
ideologies’ were the core of many Marxist analyses, and were given further sophistication by
Gramscian and Althusserian contributions.76 Outside of Marxism, similar themes have been central to
functionalist sociology, notably in Talcott Parsons’ work,77 and without assuming a singular dominant
ideology Michael Mann has likewise emphasised the role of ideological power (alongside economic,
military and political power) in generating effective social orders.78 Some of this work, though a
regrettably limited amount, considers the dynamics of authoritarian societies.79 Most has focused on
advanced capitalist democracies, and the apparent puzzle of the broad acquiescence and even active
support given to political orders by those groups who seem most disempowered and disadvantaged
by them. Even in the absence of Marxist expectations for a proletarian revolution, many scholars
continue to find the support for highly inegalitarian policies and parties provided by those who appear
to suffer most from their outcomes an important object of research.
Mainstream 20th Century Marxist theories of the ideological maintenance of political orders
came under heavy attack in Nicholas Abercrombie’s, Stephen Hill’s and Bryan Turner’s 1980 critique
of The Dominant Ideology Thesis. Abercrombie, Hill and Turner suggested that the central Marxist
assumption of a dominant ideology that legitimated the political system to subordinate classes was
both theoretically flawed and empirically false.80 Dominant ideologies, where they appeared to exist at

73 E.g. Glazer and Grofman 1989 can be read as a sophisticated account of the use of liberal and conservative labels by
US politicians, but is less compelling as a general account of ideological relationships between representatives and voters.
See also: White 2011
74 These are not the same as ‘collective ideologies’ since groups can have official ideologies, recognised by their members

as such, but which are not actually shared by their members as individuals. See: Gilbert 1987.
75 For further discussion, see: Leader Maynard 2016 [forthcoming]; Leader Maynard 2016.
76 Gramsci 1971; Althusser 1971
77 See: Abercrombie and Turner 1978, 152-3; Abercrombie, Hill and Turner 1980, 2.
78 Mann 1986
79 Mayer 2001
80 Abercrombie and Turner 1978; Abercrombie, Hill and Turner 1980; Abercrombie, Hill and Turner 1990
 11

all, were rarely endorsed by subordinate groups in society, and in advanced capitalist societies it was
doubtful that any singular dominant ideology could be coherently identified at all.81 Subordinate
groups’ general quiescence in the face of massive social disadvantage should instead be explained by
an alternative explanatory theme in Marx’s thinking: the “dull compulsion of economic relations” and
the heavy disincentives this placed on high risk revolutionary activity by subordinate groups given
their conditions of economic need, precariousness, and time-consuming workload.82
Not all were persuaded by this critique. But more recent work has in any case tended to avoid
the shortcomings of earlier Marxist theories targeted by Abercrombie, Hill and Turner. Rather than
emphasising wholesale internalisation by a singular dominant ideology on the part of subordinated
groups, such work hones in on more specific legitimation strategies and processes used to generate
popular acquiescence or support.83
In particular, critically minded theorists emphasise that the undeniable fact of ideological
pluralism amongst the members of a society is not incompatible with ideology nevertheless maintaining
the political order. Indeed, pluralism can actively facilitate such maintenance. A.P. Simonds suggests
that pluralist conceptions of democracy facilitate elite control by making “a passive, uninformed, and
acquiescent citizenry seem not just irrelevant to the health of democracy but an actual enhancement
of it”, encouraging a consumerist understanding of politics in which the proper behaviour of citizens
is simply voting for choices from a menu supplied by elites, rather than actually participating in debate,
activism, and decision-making.84 Peter Bloom and Sam Dallyn argue that pluralism makes it easier for
political actors to exclude vast swathes of ideological standpoints as ‘extreme’ and ‘illegitimate’, under
the reassurance that this cannot be an illiberal or antidemocratic move since it leaves a purportedly
adequate space for pluralist debate.85 More generally, an extensive critical literature has probed the
panoply of discursive techniques used to generate passivity in the face of domination. Particular
syntactic devices can be used to mask agency and power,86 for example, and basic terms and categories
of political culture may subtly encourage acceptance of dominant orders.87 Terry Eagleton summarises
six overarching strategies: “a dominant power may legitimate itself by promoting beliefs and values
congenial to it; naturalizing and universalizing such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and
apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival forms of thought,
perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; and obscuring social reality in ways convenient to
itself.”88
This critical literature is complemented by much of the new work in psychology. System
justification theory and social dominance theory offer powerful insights into why those most
disadvantaged by a social order may nevertheless support it. System justification theory emphasises
the existence of “hedonic benefits to minimizing the unpredictable, unjust, and oppressive aspects of

81 See also: Axelrod 1967

82 Abercrombie and Turner 1978, 160
83 See also: Tom Bottomore in Abercrombie, Hill and Turner 1980, x
84 Simonds 1989, 184-5 & 189. This ties in with Frankfurt School and Habermassian critiques of contemporary societies,

see: McLellan 1995, 56-70.

85 Bloom and Dallyn 2011
86 Wodak and Meyer 2009
87 Brown 1993
88 Eagleton 1991, 5-6. See also: Thompson 1984; Žižek 1994b; Howarth, Norval and Stavrakakis 2000; Fairclough 2010,

section A; McNay 2013.

 12

social reality”,89 so that even when that social reality is disadvantageous or ruinous to an individual’s
interests “people want to and have to believe in a just world so they can go about their daily lives with
a sense of trust, hope, and confidence in their future.”90 Ideological claims can thus elicit support from
subordinate groups by offering psychologically appealing beliefs even in the absence of meaningful
improvements in material or political conditions. The self-esteem and imagined social dominance
offered by intense forms of nationalism and populism, for example, allow individuals to feel that their
in-group is successful, superior, and glorious even when they are individually disadvantaged. 91
Moreover, the inclination to justify and rationalise one’s political order intensifies under conditions of
high threat, explaining the efficacy of ‘securitizing’ strategies that proclaim dangerous threats as a
mechanism of political legitimation.92 And the tendency to cling to the status quo when under threat
further clarifies why the worst-off may feel impelled to rationalise the existing order – they tend, after
all, to be those placed in the most insecure and threatened situations.93 This also re-emphasises the
prosaic relevance of the dull compulsion of economic relations in support for ideologies that justify
the status quo. Whilst disadvantaged groups may have the most to gain from successful revolutions
or major reforms, they are also the most vulnerable to loss of their entire livelihoods if radical plans
go awry.
Social dominance theory analyses domination as resting on an overlapping set of mechanisms
rooted in legitimising myths/ideologies, institutional discrimination, individual discrimination, and
collaborative intergroup discrimination.94 But again, psychological tendencies play a key role.
Individuals high in the “social dominance orientation” personality trait are particularly inclined to
engage in discrimination and dominating practices, and to justify such practices ideologically – even if
they or their group are not beneficiaries.95 Indeed, social dominance orientation is an important
predictor of a wide range of ideological standpoints and attitudes, including nationalism, conservatism,
support for the death penalty, or the belief that rape victims are partly to blame for being raped.96
Both social dominance theory and system justification theory also emphasise important asymmetries
in patterns of in-group favouritism. Dominant groups tend to be intensely biased towards their own
group, but subordinate groups are much less so. This asymmetry powerfully reinforces existing
structures of domination, and the degree of asymmetry is also substantially affected by the degree to
which dominant ideologies or legitimising myths are successfully disseminated. Indeed, many
subordinate groups even display outgroup favouritism – i.e. they appear to buy-in to prevalent cultural
assumptions that members of the dominant group (whether men, whites, the middle class, etc.) are
more intelligent, more trustworthy, more hard-working, or less prone to criminality than they are.97
Though domination is a long-standing concern in the study of ideology, further and more
integrated research is needed. An under-theorised question remains the interrelationship between
sincere internalization of ideological attitudes on the one hand, and the more instrumental or opportunistic espousal

89 Jost and Hunyady 2005, 261

90 Lerner, cited in: ibid.
91 See: Nagel 1998; Sidanius and Pratto 1999; Suny 2004; Pratto, Sidanius and Levin 2006, 281
92 See also: Buzan, Wæver and Wilde 1998; Foucault 2004
93 Jost and Hunyady 2005, 262
94 Pratto, Sidanius and Levin 2006, 273-281
95 Ibid. 281-7.
96 E.g. Ibid. 283.
97 Jost, Banaji and Nosek 2004, 897-900; Pratto, Sidanius and Levin 2006, 279
 13

and enactment of ideologies on the other. 98 Sincere internalization clearly matters – if people can be induced
to genuinely see a political order as legitimate, whether as avowed belief or a rather vague assumption,
they are likely to acquiesce in it, and may even risk their lives to defend it. Ideology plays a critical role
in constituting the sincere beliefs, values, notions of community, subject identities, or ascriptions of
proper authority that encourage support for the state and its institutions and practices.99
But it is also clear that many people espouse and enact dominant ideologies without having
any deep belief in them. As ideologies are embedded in social norms, discourses, institutions and
collective behaviour, going along with them is likely to be rewarding, whilst not doing so is risky or
costly. Consequently, even individuals without personal conviction in existing ideologies are
incentivised to follow and reproduce them. Often such incentives are strengthened by the fact that
many individuals, even though they do not personally believe in the ideologies, do believe that most
others believe.100 This produces powerful collective action problems to overturn established ideological
systems, so that ideologies structure behaviour to a disproportionate extent relative to the levels of
sincere belief. Belief in the official ideology of the Soviet Union, for example, was extremely limited
by the early 1980s amongst both its political elites and mass public. Yet the vast majority continued to
reproduce and work within existing ideological structures until the rise of Gorbachev’s new thinking
– itself successful only after a bitter and prolonged struggle against forces determined to maintain the
existing order.101 So sincere belief is not the only thing that can make ideological structures hang
together. But at the same time, ‘hollow’ ideological orders with few sincere believers carry high risks
of sudden collapse and transformation, as the Soviet example indicates.102

Ideology, Disagreement and Conflict

But whilst ideology can elicit support for an established political order, it has also long been seen as
central to political disagreement and conflict within such orders. The substance of political
competition is, in large part, rooted in ideological disagreements between individuals and groups –
over which systems of values, factual claims, moral principles and visions of the desired future should
guide policymaking.103 Considerable theoretical contrasts exist, however, regarding how to
conceptualise and explain such ideological disagreements.
Conceptually, political competition might be mapped as a largely dichotomous clash between
left and right, socialism and capitalism, or liberals and conservatives. Advocates of such
unidimensional models of ideology argue that, whilst a simplification, they do capture a genuine
bipolar structure to political disagreement amongst elites and citizens.104 Alternatively, political
competition can be seen as structured across a two dimensional terrain – perhaps orientated around
distinct left-right axes for economic and social issues,105 separate measures of attitudes to freedom and
equality,106 or contrasting levels of key psychological variables like social dominance orientation and

98 I elaborate on this issue in: Leader Maynard 2016.

99 Althusser 1971; Warren 1990; Hammack 2008
100 See: Kuran 1989; Hardin 2002, 16.
101 See: English 2002; Haas 2005, ch.6 .
102 Kuran 1989
103 This is, to some degree, true internationally as well as domestically, see: Haas 2005. This isn’t to obscure the centrality

of struggles for power and self-interest, however.

104 Conover and Feldman 1981; Jost, Nosek and Gosling 2008; Jost, Federico and Napier 2009
105 Carmines and D'Amico 2015
106 Rokeach 1973. See also: Braithwaite 1997.
 14

right-wing authoritarianism.107 Alternatively, ideology might be seen as a more multipolar struggle

between liberalism, conservatism, socialism, environmentalism, social democracy, libertarianism,
communitarianism and others.108 And in recent decades, these more familiar ‘big ideologies’ may have
given way to more diverse, concatenated, localised, and/or issue-based ideological stances,109 or to
ideologies with more global horizons that no longer take the nation-state as the key object of political
imagination.110
Beyond mapping disagreement, the explanatory questions of why different individuals and
groups are attracted to different ideologies, and why the resulting disagreements are so enduring, has
relevance across the social sciences and for political theory and philosophy. In general, two sorts of
answers have dominated debates: a more ‘bottom-up’ answer focused on the interests of individuals
and groups that push them towards certain ideological positions, and a more ‘top-down’ answer
focused on the production of ideas in society and their dissemination through discourse and social
interaction (which, of course, links back to some of the processes identified in the previous section).
Both theories can be found in Marx: the former emphasising how material interests rooted in class
position determine ideological affiliation, the latter emphasising the control of dominant ideas by the
ruling classes in light of their ownership of the means of material and mental production.111
With theoretical and disciplinary diversification in the study of ideology, the notion of
‘interests’ behind bottom-up explanations has expanded to include various psychological motives,
whilst accounts of the social forces behind top-down explanations have been enriched by a greater
focus on political language and discourse. Many scholars rightly affirm that explanation of ideological
disagreement requires integrated consideration of both individual and social levels of analysis – a
notion captured by political psychologists’ claim that ideology is motivated social cognition.112 Yet
integrative theorisation of this kind is in fact at a very early stage. The study of ideology remains
bifurcated between half of the literature which broadly focuses on psychology and cognition, and half
which focuses on discourse and language. Since such factors are interdependent from the start, greater
integrative analysis is needed.
In an influential summary of psychological research, Jost, Federico and Napier organise the
motivational underpinnings of ideology into three categories: epistemic motives (needs for certain degrees
of comprehensible and confident belief), existential motives (needs to avoid anxiety about death and
threat – to which might be added anxieties over impotence, self-esteem, and lack of life purpose), and
relational motives (attachment to, trust in, and anxiety about key relationships to parents, peers, and other
emotionally invested individuals).113 Whilst their theoretical framework is very different,
psychoanalytic approaches also emphasise some similar themes, especially repressed
existential/ontological fear, the need for external authority, and the power of sexual anxiety, disgust
and taboo.114 Political disagreement partly reflects the fact that the strength and direction of such
motives varies across individuals. Different personalities load the underlying motives behind

107 Sibley and Duckitt 2008

108 Eccleshall, Geoghegan, Jay and Wilford 1984; Freeden 1996; Sargent 2009
109 Boudon 1999; O'Shaughnessy 2004, 26
110 Steger 2008; Farneti 2012
111 Abercrombie and Turner 1978, 150-1. See also: Gramsci 1971.
112 Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski and Sulloway 2003. See also: Boudon 1989; Jost, Federico and Napier 2009.
113 See also: Weber and Federico 2007
114 See: McLellan 1995, 33-5; Žižek 1996, Glynos 2001
 15

perception and thought with different intensities, giving individuals “elective affinities” towards
different ideological positions.
Thus, as Jost, Nosek and Gosling summarise: “liberals, at least in North America and Western
Europe, are generally more open-minded in their pursuit of creativity, novelty, and diversity, whereas
conservatives’ lives are more orderly, conventional and neat.”115 Conservatives tend to score much
higher on measures of ‘Conscientiousness’ than liberals, whilst liberals score much higher on
‘Openness to Experience’ than conservatives. Conservatives also show higher levels of uncertainty
avoidance and threat-sensitivity than liberals – Jost, Nosek and Gosling conclude that these latter two
packages of traits account for 28%-38% of statistical variance in liberal-conservative orientation.116 In
Haidt’s research, emphasis is placed on variation in intuitive and emotionally powerful value
commitments in explaining political disagreement. Haidt finds that conservatives’ ideological stances
tend to be rooted in a fairly even set of intuitive emotional concerns with care, liberty, fairness, loyalty,
authority and sanctity, whereas liberals display more exclusive emotional responses to triggers about
care, liberty and fairness, whilst libertarians are overwhelmingly concerned with freedom (though with
some weaker intuitions over fairness).117 Whilst Haidt contends that these underlying intuitions are
not the only thing that matters – broader ideological life narratives do too – he suggests that the
contrasting emotional responses individuals feel to his six moral foundations are core determinants of
ideological disagreement.118
Psychological research does not assume that relatively fixed personal traits are the only things
that matter – many psychological factors are context sensitive. Priming individuals with threatening
images, experiences or frames, for example, appears to encourage increased support for conservative
ideological stances. Experiments with college students have found that “reminders of 9/11 and
mortality salience caused even liberal college students to show increased support for President George
W. Bush and his conservative policies and decreased support for liberal alternatives.”119 By contrast,
being placed in occupational positions such as academia or law that require sustained encounters with
conflicting arguments and conditions of debate appear to encourage individuals to shift towards more
liberal ideological stances.120
The role of psychology should not be overstated, however. Similar sorts of personalities can
be found all over the world, yet the content of major ideologies amongst different groups and societies
show high levels of variation and cultural specificity.121 A focus on underlying psychological
motivations struggles to explain such variation, though this is often masked by the use of very broad
ideological labels (such as liberal and conservative or left and right) that obscure substantial differences
in the actual content of belief amongst those described by such labels. This highlights the need to pay
attention to two major insights from work more focused on the social production of ideas,
interpersonal interaction, and discourse.

115 Jost, Nosek and Gosling 2008, 131

116 Ibid. 133.
117 Haidt 2012, 345-361
118 Haidt 2001; Haidt, Graham and Joseph 2009
119 Jost, Nosek and Gosling 2008, 133
120 Ibid.
121 See, for example: Nathan and Shi 1996; Pan and Xu 2015
 16

The first is that individuals’ foundational intellectual resources with which to perceive and think
about politics are largely acquired from their culture(s)122 through socialisation and discourse.123 They
are, in J.M. Balkin’s terms, “cultural software”,124 and socially and discursively constructed rather than
simply produced through passive reflection on a self-evident reality.125 Consequently this cultural
software differs considerably across groups. What may be unthinkable within one intellectual system
– the non-existence of God, for example – might be accepted as axiomatic common sense in another.
Not only may these foundational frameworks, acquired from the concepts, terminology and symbols
of the local and societal discourses, produce various forms of conscious belief, they may also shape
the underlying intuitions and inclinations studied by psychology.126 Either way, differences and
disagreements between individuals, groups and societies partly result from the contrasting intellectual
resources provided by the contrasting social contexts in which they are embedded.127
Second, whilst a salient portion of any individual’s thinking is shaped through direct personal
experiences of political phenomena, the vast bulk of their immediate perception of politics is discursively
mediated through communication. In other words, most political belief is “epistemically dependent”
on others – whether peers, prominent public figures, educational or professional institutions, media
reporting, or whatever – since individuals cannot, given physical, temporal and expertise constraints,
constantly verify everything they are told by such sources.128 Consequently, the particular discursive
networks individuals are located in, and the discursive mechanisms through which political claims,
information, and events are presented and rendered meaningful within those networks, critically shape
individuals’ ideological beliefs. Such mechanisms include ‘framing’ processes,129 the (temporary)
decontestation of the meaning of key terms of political language,130 the use of affect-laden but highly
ambiguous words and symbols (what Laclau calls ‘empty’ or ‘floating’ signifiers),131 the deployment of
particular rhetorical devices like paradiastole, enthymeme, synecdoche, or catachresis,132 or the general
meaning-making involved in strategic political discourse.133 As Freeden points out: “ideologies
compete over the control of political language…indeed, their competition over plans for public policy
is primarily conducted through their competition over the control of political language.”134 Moreover,
the technologies of dissemination also matter in reshaping discursive networks and the power of
certain forms of speech. New developments – radio, television, online social media – can thus
dramatically restructure patterns of ideological production, dissemination, and consumption.

122 Overlapping ‘societies’ matter, including global, national, class, organisational, local and familial.
123 Including non-verbal representation and practices (symbols, images, dance, ritual etc.).
124 Balkin 1998
125 See, in general: Berger and Luckmann 1967; Searle 1995; van Dijk 1998; Wendt 1999; Skinner 2002 Hammack 2008;

Freeden 2013. Considerable disagreement remains over how completely thought is constituted through ideas/discourse,
and how epistemologically radical the implications of this are. I personally subscribe to a fairly moderate position, close
to Wendt 1999, chs.2-4 and Hacking 1999.
126 Psychologists need not be blind to this, see: Pratto, Sidanius and Levin 2006, 288-94; Hammack 2008.
127 See also: Skinner 2002
128 Hardwig 1985; Baurmann 2007
129 Kahneman and Tversky 1984; Druckman 2001, 226-31; Benford and Snow 2000; Snow 2004
130 Freeden 1996
131 Laclau 2007. See also: Norval 2000
132 Finlayson 2012
133 See, in general: Edelman 1977; van Dijk 1995; Howarth, Norval and Stavrakakis 2000.
134 Freeden 2003, 55
 17

Two key implications follow from both individually orientated work on motivated reasoning
and socially orientated work on meaning-making and discourse. First, an individuals’ pre-existing
ideological beliefs and interests powerfully shape future ideological stances. Whilst individual conversion
moments and mass collective transitions are possible,135 there is a certain path-dependence to
ideological belief: people’s ideologies tend to largely reproduce themselves, even if there is always
gradual change over time. This is a joint result of a) motivational factors – consistency and
rationalization biases leads individuals to internalise ideas that fit well with their existing ideas and
interests136 – b) perceptual factors – existing ideas shape the perception, comprehension and
interpretation of new ideas and information137 – and c) interactional factors – individuals tend towards
homophily, preferring social networks of like-minded individuals, and these are likely to reinforce their
existing views.138 Second, the network structure in which individuals find themselves, and the uneven
distribution of power across that network, is vital in shaping their ideological beliefs.139 Individuals are
strongly motivated to positively appraise the ideologies of those they are emotionally close to and feel
bonds of identity with, and networks also determine what political discourses and information
individuals are exposed to, and what speakers they are likely to find credible.140
Indeed, contained within these various insights and research streams can be located an
embryonic theory of ideological change.141 As noted, ideologies tend towards a certain stability, but
this is compatible with accretive change, and some relatively rapid developments like the rise of
Fascism, collapse of communism, and recent resurgence of Islamist fundamentalism,
ethnonationalism and populism. If psychological and social factors interactively generate people’s
ideological attachments, they also govern processes of ideological change. But they do not do so
exhaustively. In particular, exogenous shocks which generate ‘anomalies’ for established ideologies, or
undermine those ideologies’ capacity to meet material and psychological needs, seem to play a major
role, as do shifts in the power structures underpinning ideological production and dissemination. But
whilst powerful insights on such dynamics are scattered across the literature on ideology, this is again
an area where more integrative theorising and research is needed.

Ideology, Error and Extremism

One does not need to define ideology pejoratively to think that it still often plays an important role in
explaining how political actors make major cognitive and policy errors, including the internalisation
of deeply dangerous extreme beliefs.142 The fact that individuals’ beliefs are inescapably shaped by
their pre-existing ideological frameworks, cultural socialisation, and the social networks on which they
rely for of ideas and information is a key reason why their thinking can go awry.143 But almost all
individuals consistently underestimate such processes, and overestimate the degree to which their own
beliefs simply reflect the best evidence, clearest logic, soundest moral values, and most direct

135 For which Kuhn’s analysis of scientific paradigm shifts is of considerable relevance, see: Kuhn 2012.
136 See also: Festinger 1957; Jervis 1976, chs.10-11; Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski and Sulloway 2003, 340-1
137 Jervis 1976, chs.4-7.
138 McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook 2001
139 Quine and Ullian 1978, ch.5
140 See also: Singh Grewal 2008
141 For a valuable perspective from earlier scholarship, see: Lane 1962, 413-435.
142 What constitutes an ‘error’ is neither obvious nor without epistemological challenges, but the themes I discuss in this

section can apply to multiple sorts of mistaken belief and multiple interpretations of what makes a belief mistaken.
143 Jervis 1976; Quine and Ullian 1978
 18

perception of reality.144 Indeed, those with the most incompetent understanding of a particular topic
typically display the greatest over-confidence in their own mastery of it.145 Consequently, individuals
may make bad or disastrous decisions based on utterly false or misguided beliefs, that nevertheless
look plausible to them in light of their ideological perspective.
Several key works on ideology explicate these dynamics of ideological belief formation and the
potential for error. Though their approaches differ considerably, both Jon Elster and Raymond
Boudon have made major contributions from a broadly rationalist perspective. Elster seeks to
demonstrate that unrefined Marxist theories constitute poor explanations for ideological belief – ideas
do not necessarily serve either the interests of those who hold them or the interests of the ruling
classes. Even where they do serve such interests, this does not itself explain the ideas, since
consequences cannot explain causes without an account of a relevant feedback mechanism or
consequence-seeking motive. Providing the microfoundations of a Marxist theory of ideology, Elster
argues, thus requires attention to faulty cognitive or affective processes – he particularly emphasises
adaptive preferences, framing, wishful thinking and inferential error – which explain why individuals would
adopt ideological beliefs for non-epistemic reasons. The psychological tendency of individuals to
engage in such processes explains the persistence of ideological error.
Boudon, by contrast, argues that whilst ideologies (in his conceptualisation) denote false or
misformed beliefs, they nevertheless remain “a natural ingredient of social life” that “start not in spite
of, but because of human rationality”.146 Boudon emphasises that erroneous belief can be explained
without recourse to wildly irrational thinking if one pays attention to the situations individuals find
themselves, the dispositions/beliefs they already hold, and their reliance on heuristics, communication
from others, and the constraints of available language. For instance, Boudon, building on Weber,
emphasises how belief in magic could be rationally explicable when various sorts of scientific
knowledge, and particularly the relative complex understanding of statistics needed for scientific
experimentation, are lacking.147 Consistent with the notion of epistemic dependence mentioned above,
Boudon also highlights the rationality of much erroneous belief when it follows the pronouncements
of recognised authorities:

“It seems rational, if one is not a physicist, to regard ideas in physics as black
boxes which can be right or wrong not because one has reproduced the
process allowing this evaluation to be made, but because people skilled in this
area take them to be right or wrong…ideas are often (and, I would say,
normally) regarded by social actors as black boxes, and… it is sometimes
rational for them, because of both their social locations and the dispositions
which go with this location, not to try and see what there is inside them, but
rather to rely on authoritative arguments and judgements.”148

144 Jervis 1976, 181-7

145 An aspect of the Dunning-Kruger effect, see: Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger and Kruger 2003.
146 Boudon 1989, 11
147 Ibid. 75-76.
148 Ibid. 83-4.
 19

Other sociologists deploy similar insights to explain fundamentalist and extremist beliefs. Michael
Baurmann, for example, highlights how groups that have high degrees of mistrust in the rest of society,
understandably rely on the internal authorities of the group for information. Under such conditions,
the self-reinforcing effects of particularist trust and epistemic seclusion can lead them to beliefs which
appear absurd from an external standpoint. And as Baurmann points out, these processes are not so
different from the way most individuals largely rely on the dominant social authorities for many of
their views – even if most such groups are larger than narrow fundamentalist sects. Consequently,
Baurmann concludes that: “Individuals who adopt the “fundamentalist truths” of their group may not
behave more irrationally than individuals in an open society who accept the “enlightened” worldview
of their culture.”149 Though taking a more critical view, Russel Hardin similarly explains how extremism
can be produced not by aberrations within an individual’s psychology but by their position within a
socially isolated group, the low costs of relying on authorities internal to and recognized by that group,
and the high costs for seeking out alternatives.150
Such processes may offer insights into the radicalization of extremist terrorist groups – and
empirical work on this phenomenon has expanded considerably in the early 21st Century.151 But it can
also be powerfully applied to other forms of extremism such as authoritarian terror,152 brutal ethnic
violence,153 and genocide.154 Leading research on these exceptionally destructive practices frequently
emphasises how they can come to look justified within a certain ideological worldview dominant
within a particular society or group, and how ideologies can thus be used to facilitate critical elements
of the political mobilisation and organisation involved in mass violence.155
But democratic Western societies are not immune to such processes. Several scholars suggest
that war-waging by western states has all too often reflected desperately erroneous convictions rooted
in ideological over-confidence, as well as the political use of ideology to legitimate violence.156 The
apparent increasing polarization of democratic societies also raises concerns that the ideological
dynamics of extremism are increasingly in play in ordinary mainstream politics. Indeed, new internet
technologies hugely reinforce the dynamics highlighted by Boudon, Baurmann and Hardin, since
platforms like Google, Twitter and Facebook actively cater what users see to their existing preferences
and beliefs – creating what Eli Pariser has termed ‘the filter bubble’.157 Far from producing a more
integrated and educated citizenship, modern cultural and technological developments may be
fragmenting democracies into an amalgam of self-reinforcing echo chambers, which can produce
‘extremists’ in far greater numbers than in the past. Whilst countervailing integrative forces certainly
exist, such ideological fragmentation creates raises profound risks of policy error, alienation and social
conflict. In this, as so many other areas, ideological developments create important challenges for
contemporary political theory and practice.

149 Baurmann 2007, 164

150 Hardin 2002 See also: Janis 1982
151 McCauley and Moskalenko 2008; King and Taylor 2011; Tsintsadze-Maass and Maass 2014. For more general work

on terrorist ideologies, see: Haynes 2005; Payne 2009.

152 Arch Getty and Naumov 1999; Ryan 2012
153 Suny 2004; Mann 2005; Malešević 2006; Kaufman 2006
154 See: Alvarez 2008; Leader Maynard 2015b; Straus 2015
155 On relationship between ideology and the organisational structures behind extreme violence, see: Bloxham 2008
156 Dillon and Reid 2009; Schmidt and Williams 2008; Drolet 2010; Leader Maynard 2015a
157 Pariser 2011
 20

Conclusion
In this chapter I have sought to introduce the rich intellectual contributions that the study of ideology
has made, over its two-hundred-year history, to our understandings of politics and society. At the
same time, I have hinted that the study of ideology is not quite meeting its potential. Look at any of
the individual disciplines or traditions involved in the study of ideology, and various elements of the
richness drop out, reflecting the fact that the most impressive insights are currently scattered across a
fragmented research landscape, rather than productively integrated. Each of the three main traditions
I have surveyed – critical, interpretive and positivist – contains key analytical insights, and vital
empirical research streams. And across the disciplines behind those traditions, interest appears to be
increasing and work on ideology proliferating. But for our understanding of ideology’s role in politics
and society to continue to make major advances, more conversation across disciplines, and more
integrative theorising, is urgently needed. Recent years suggest that ideology is going to be as central
to key developments in the 21st Century as it was in the 20th. Scholars need to make advances in theory,
and exploit new horizons in research, if they are to keep up.

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