Real ideological coherence, stability of political beliefs: Results show polar, coherent, stable, and potent ideological orientations only among the most knowledgeable 20-30% of citizens

Uses and abuses of ideology in political psychology. Nathan P. Kalmoe. Political Psychology, forthcoming. Jan 2020. https://www.dropbox.com/s/owa710fc1fy081n/Kalmoe%20-%20PP%20-%20Uses%20%26%20Abuses%20of%20Ideology.pdf?dl=0

Abstract: Ideology is a central construct in political psychology. Even so, the field’s strong claims about an ideological public rarely engage evidence of enormous individual differences: a minority with real ideological coherence, and weak to non-existent political belief organization for everyone else. Here, I bridge disciplinary gaps by showing the limits of mass political ideology with several popular measures and components—self-identification, core political values (egalitarian and traditionalism’s resistance to change), and policy indices—in representative U.S. surveys across four decades (Ns~13k-37k), plus panel data testing stability. Results show polar, coherent, stable, and potent ideological orientations only among the most knowledgeable 20-30% of citizens. That heterogeneity means full-sample tests overstate ideology for most people but understate it for knowledgeable citizens. Whether through top-down opinion leadership or bottom-up ideological reasoning, organized political belief systems require political attention and understanding to form. Finally, I show that convenience samples make trouble for ideology generalizations. I conclude by proposing analytic best practices to help avoid over-claiming ideology in the public. Taken together, what first looks like strong and broad ideology is actually ideological innocence for most and meaningful ideology for a few.

Keywords: ideology, polarization, knowledge, values, attitudes, methods