By Logan

213 pages
Started 7/02/2019; Finished 07/07/2019

A lot of ink gets spilled on ideology. Articles show that Congress has divided itself into patterns of ideological gridlock so tightly that it can’t achieve most popular policies. Pundits proclaim that radical liberals or conservative extremists are dangerous and out to destroy what makes the country great. Internet threads invite their members to look down on all of the masses of ignorants brainwashed by whichever ideology they find most distasteful. But what if the masses didn’t have an ideology at all?

This book has a simple argument, which it efficiently and tightly devotes its relatively short length to arguing: The overwhelming majority of people in America (and most democracies) have no strong ideological allegiance. While this may seem counterintuitive, I found their evidence compelling, and perhaps even overwhelming.

Using a number of clever analyses of data about American citizens, Kinder and Kalmoe uncover the reality that somewhere between 80% and 95% of the public lack the features of ideology in their thinking. Ideology is a cognitive organization of beliefs so that instead of viewing the world piecemeal, individual issues become part of a larger, more significant whole. As a result, views of ideologues on issues are linked together by this mental organization, are relatively stable over time unless their ideology changes. In other words, ideologues are consistent and stable in their beliefs.

The book’s first chapter shows that this describes a very small number of people. The rest of the book shows why that would be while simultaneously defending the claim against alternative explanations of the data. Over the course of the book, the authors note that ideology is a complex mental task that requires strong motivation and access to a lot of information. In fact, ideologues of all varieties, whether liberal, conservative, libertarian, or socialist, are almost always considerably more informed about politics and current affairs than their non-ideological counterparts. KInder and Kalmoe note that this explains why so many assume that everyone is ideological: the individuals who devote themselves to politics and the news are the individuals we see and hear about, and so their ideological stances take on a higher profile than is warranted by how common ideology actually is.

In the process of analyzing a huge amount of data, Kinder and Kalmoe discover another explanation for the appearance of ideology: partisanship. While noting that ideological preference is a weak predictor of who a person will vote for in a Presidential election, party identification is a very strong predictor. In other words, for as long as we have been keeping data on the subject (since about the 1960s) we have seen that liberal Republicans will vote for conservative Republicans before they will vote for a liberal Democrat that shares more in common with them on policy proposals. The same is true of conservative Democrats.

When you take into account the vast majority of people who have no ideology to speak of, political parties take on an even more dominant role in their political thinking. Without having strong personal insights into politics and current affairs themselves, most people rely on the real organizations that they have aligned themselves with, often donate money to, and which have real presence in their communities via local party chapters and campaigns. In other words, parties are real and personal, while ideologies are abstract sets of words. Parties determine how people vote far more than ideological identification. It also determines their affections: Republicans dislike Democrat public figures (and vice-versa) far more intensely and consistently than people who can be categorized as conservatives dislike liberals (and vice-versa).

In fact, the data in the book suggest that when people in America say that they are conservative or liberal they actually are using that word to reflect their partisanship on the basis that the high-profile members of that party use ideological words when talking about public affairs, even if they themselves don’t have a strong grasp on what those figures mean in those moments.

This sets up the duo’s conclusion, that because ideology is fundamentally a fruitless measure of public electoral behavior, the entire political science community should shift to other analytical categories. They suggest group identification as the most important factor in electoral behavior, arguing that, like political party, identifications with a religion, race, ethnicity, or profession are the sort of concrete, solid proxies which individuals without ideology are likely to use as proxies for their decision making.

This book was illuminating for me. I think I often have associated the word, “idealogue,” with categories of simplistic views of the world, ignorance, and animosity. This was on a gut instinct which said any kind of one-dimensional view of the world had to be ignoring huge swaths of nuance. I believe this is still often true, but I must also concede that the project of an ideology requires a larger inner, intellectual infrastructure than our public discussions often want to give it credit for.

This does fit with an observation I had quietly ignored for the past several years: most of the best informed people I knew appear to be the most ideological in their understandings of that same knowledge. This fact especially imprinted on me when I was young because most of the well-informed adults I knew when I was  young were very conservative. With a lifelong curiosity about politics and government and the news, I also tended to be conservative as a result. Ideology was never my highest commitment, however, and while I suspect that the ways my views on policy adapt to my religious beliefs might imitate aspects of ideological thinking, it is not, strictly speaking, an ideology.

This is a heavy social science book. If you are very curious about the claim it contains, check it out. Kinder and Kalmoe are very thorough in documenting their approach to interpreting data to arrive at their conclusions. If you’re comfortable accepting the book’s claim on the grounds that it is verified by experts using sound data-analysis approaches, feel free to pass.