Ideology

A political ideology is an action-oriented model of people and society. The phrase “action-oriented” refers to the prescriptions contained in an ideology regarding how political, economic, and social issues should be resolved. A political ideology also contains generalizations called “models.” A model is a simplification intended to make complex phenomena understandable. Political ideologies share the characteristic of systematic simplification with science and engineering.

The term ideology is frequently used negatively. People who believe in an ideology are often characterized as rigid, fanatical, and unthinking, and ideologies are said by some to produce bad public policy because ideologies fit true believers' preconceptions instead of reality. Definitions of ideology are often biased to discredit the concept or its use. Some authors on all parts of the political spectrum come close to defining ideologies as the belief systems of fanatics.

Others believe ideology to be insignificant. In one version of this view, ideology is not an independent cause of political behavior; ideology is merely an intermediate factor of little importance in explaining political behavior.

Not everyone considers ideologies destructive or unimportant elements of politics. Some regard ideologies as allowing their adherents to understand the relationships among events, to facilitate the making of consistent judgments over time, and to process information more efficiently than an ad hoc approach would allow.

Politics in the United States and in most Western democracies is dominated by two closely related ideologies: liberalism and conservatism. Liberals and conservatives advocate specific policies, but when the democratic process yields a contrary result, they accept it until the next election. Liberalism and conservatism can be contrasted with comprehensive ideologies such as communism and militant Islam, which produce undemocratic, totalitarian regimes.

One difference between liberals and conservatives concerns how they structure three ideological building blocks: equality, freedom, and order. Liberals tend to value equality over freedom and freedom over order. Conservatives reverse this ranking by valuing order over freedom and freedom over equality. Liberals and conservatives value all three, but their relative preferences differ. There are also differences between liberals and conservatives regarding the market economy, with conservatives more inclined to allow the market free rein and liberals more likely to constrain it using government.

The question of whether ideology at least sometimes has an independent impact on public policy has been the subject of many quantitative studies using congressional roll call vote analysis. Often the form such studies take is to explain votes in an area of public policy, such as coal mining, using measures of the ideological positions of U.S. senators and indicators of self-interest, such as a state's reliance on coal. Such analyses often show that the inclusion of ideology provides a more complete explanation of voting behavior than does self-interest alone.