The End of the End of Ideology
John T. Jost New York University
The “end of ideology” was declared by social scientists in
the aftermath of World War II. They argued that (a) ordinary
citizens’ political attitudes lack the kind of stability,
consistency, and constraint that ideology requires; (b)
ideological constructs such as liberalism and conservatism
lack motivational potency and behavioral significance; (c)
there are no major differences in content (or substance)
between liberal and conservative points of view; and (d)
there are few important differences in psychological processes
(or styles) that underlie liberal versus conservative
orientations. The end-of-ideologists were so influential that
researchers ignored the topic of ideology for many years.
However, current political realities, recent data from the
American National Election Studies, and results from an
emerging psychological paradigm provide strong grounds
for returning to the study of ideology. Studies reveal that
there are indeed meaningful political and psychological
differences that covary with ideological self-placement.
Situational variables—including system threat and mortality
salience—and dispositional variables—including openness
and conscientiousness—affect the degree to which an
individual is drawn to liberal versus conservative leaders,
parties, and opinions. A psychological analysis is also
useful for understanding the political divide between “red
states” and “blue states.”
Keywords: ideology, public opinion, liberalism, conservatism,
political psychology
The history of the continuing conflict between left and right—and
its always tentative and changing, yet always advancing resolutions—is
in many ways the history of the development of civilized
man. (Silvan Tomkins, 1965, p. 27)
The end of ideology was declared more than a generation
ago by sociologists and political scientists
who—after the titanic struggle between the ideological
extremes of fascism and communism in the middle of
the 20th century—were more than glad to see it go. The
work of Edward Shils (1955/1968b), Raymond Aron
(1957/1968), Daniel Bell (1960), Seymour Lipset (1960),
and Philip Converse (1964) was extremely influential in the
social and behavioral sciences, including psychology. The
general thesis of these authors was that in the aftermath of
World War II and the Cold War, both the right and the left
had been equally discredited and that “a kind of exhaustion
of political ideas” had taken place in the West (Lane, 1962,
p. 15). Ideological distinctions, it was suggested, were
devoid of social and psychological significance for most
people, especially in the United States (see, e.g., Apter,
1964; Lasch, 1991; Rejai, 1971; Waxman, 1968). The
end-of-ideologists were so successful that even now, more
than 40 years later, my students often ask me whether
ideological constructs such as left and right (and, in the
American context, liberalism and conservatism) are relevant,
meaningful, and useful. This article summarizes my
main reasons for answering them in the affirmative.
The End-of-Ideology Claims and Their
Effect on Psychology
There were four related claims that led to the end-ofideology
conclusion, and in conjunction they have cast a
long shadow over political psychology. The first claim has
arguably had the greatest impact within psychology, and it
grew out of Converse’s (1964) famous argument that ordinary
citizens’ political attitudes lack the kind of logical
consistency and internal coherence that would be expected
if they were neatly organized according to ideological
schemata. A second and related claim is that most people
are unmoved by ideological appeals and that abstract credos
associated with liberalism and conservatism lack motivational
potency and behavioral significance. The third
claim is that there are really no substantive differences in
terms of philosophical or ideological content between liberal
and conservative points of view. A fourth claim, which
first emerged as a criticism of Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik,
Levinson, and Sanford’s (1950) The Authoritarian Personality,
is that there are no fundamental psychological differences
between proponents of left-wing and right-wing
ideologies.
The deadening impact of these conclusions on the
study of ideology in social, personality, and political psyThis
article is based in part on an invited address delivered in Brenda
Major’s Presidential Symposium on “Social Psychological Perspectives
on the Red–Blue Divide” at the 2006 Society for Personality and Social
Psychology (SPSP) conference in Palm Springs, CA. Portions of this
research were also presented at Duke University, Princeton University,
and the University of Minnesota, where I benefited from very useful
comments and suggestions.
David Amodio, Nancy Di Tomaso, Irina Feygina, James L. Gibson,
Curtis D. Hardin, Orsolya Hunyady, Lawrence J. Jost, Arie W. Kruglanski,
Alison Ledgerwood, Ido Liviatan, Anesu Mandisodza, Jaime L.
Napier, Lee Ross, Hulda Thorisdottir, Tom R. Tyler, and Jojanneke van
der Toorn provided extremely helpful and detailed comments on drafts of
this article. I am also grateful to Alison Ledgerwood and Michelle Pohl for
research assistance and to Pat Shrout for statistical advice. Finally, I
would like to thank Irving Alexander for introducing me to the work of
Silvan Tomkins almost 20 years ago, the late Harold D. Fishbein for
encouraging my work on this topic, and Lee Ross for suggesting that I
write something for American Psychologist.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to John
T. Jost, Department of Psychology, New York University, 6 Washington
Place, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10003. E-mail: john.jost@nyu.edu
651October 2006 ● American Psychologist
Copyright 2006 by the American Psychological Association 0003-066X/06/$12.00
Vol. 61, No. 7, 651–670 DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.61.7.651
chology can scarcely be exaggerated. In many ways, psychologists
were well primed to accept the end-of-ideology
thesis, because it coincided with crises of theoretical and
methodological confidence surrounding disciplinary staples
such as personality, attitudes, and human nature (e.g.,
Abelson, 1972; Bem, 1967; Gergen, 1973; Mischel, 1968).
McGuire (1986/1999), for instance, observed,
This end-of-ideology conclusion by survey researchers is in
agreement with the recent emphasis by basic researchers on
situational rather than dispositional determination of behavior, on
the separate storage of affect and information about topics of
meaning, on one’s dependence on self-observation of one’s external
behavior to ascertain one’s own beliefs, and on the experiencing
of affective reaction to a topic even before one recognizes
what the topic is. (p. 343)
A consequence of psychologists’ general acceptance
of the end-of-ideology thesis was that once thriving research
programs on individual differences in political orientation
(e.g., DiRenzo, 1974; Wilson, 1973) and the effects
of societal threat on authoritarianism (Sales, 1972,
1973) lay dormant for almost two decades. As a result, very
little theoretical or empirical progress on the subject of
ideology occurred during this period. Fortunately, many of
the same ideas cropped up again in largely autonomous
research programs years later (e.g., Altemeyer, 1981; Doty,
Peterson, & Winter, 1991; Sidanius, 1985, 1988; Tetlock,
1983, 1984), but it took at least another decade for the
insights from these isolated studies to achieve integration
(e.g., Altemeyer, 1998; Caprara & Zimbardo, 2004; Duckitt,
2001; Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003a,
2003b).
The thesis of this article is that the demise of ideology,
much like the rumored demise of personality and attitudes
(e.g., Kenrick & Funder, 1988; McGuire, 1986/1999; Mischel
& Shoda, 1995), was declared prematurely. I believe
that recent developments in psychological research and the
world of politics—including responses to 9/11, the Bush
presidency, the Iraq War, polarizing Supreme Court nominations,
Hurricane Katrina, and ongoing controversies
over scientific and environmental policies—provide ample
grounds for revisiting the strong claims made by end-ofideology
theorists. I find it doubtful that there ever was a
truly nonideological era in American (or modern European)
politics (see also Bobbio, 1996; Lefebvre, 1968; Mills,
1960/1968), but even casual observers of today’s headlines,
newscasts, and late night talk shows cannot escape the
feeling that ideology is everywhere.1
Consider, for example,
this smattering of New York Times headlines: “Ripples
from Law Banning Abortion Spread through South Dakota”;
“Demonstrations on Immigration Harden a Divide”;
“Populist Movements Wrest Much of Latin America from
Old Parties”; “Army Fires at Protesters as Nepal’s Political
Crisis Deepens”; “Democrats Try to Use Katrina as GOP
Used 9/11”; and “Party on Right Gains Support After
Rioting Upsets France.” These headlines, which were
drawn from a single, unexceptional week (April 16–23,
2006), illustrate that political ideology and its effects are
experienced daily, not only in the United States but around
the world.
How Is Ideology Defined?
Although much of the end-of-ideology debate hinges on
one’s definition of ideology, there are important empirical
issues for psychologists and others to investigate. The term
originated in the late 18th century, when it was used mainly
to refer to the science of ideas, a discipline that is now
known as the sociology of knowledge. The concept was
later adopted by Marx and Engels (1846/1970) in The
German Ideology and used in two different senses, both of
which are still common: (a) a relatively neutral sense in
which ideology refers to any abstract or symbolic meaning
system used to explain (or justify) social, economic, or
political realities; and (b) a pejorative sense in which ideology
denotes a web of ideas that are distorted, contrary to
reality, and subject to “false consciousness.” In light of the
second meaning, it is ironic that many end-of-ideologists
interpreted empirical evidence of the flawed and fragmented
nature of people’s political attitudes as indicating
that ideology does not exist (e.g., see Converse, 1964;
McGuire, 1986/1999; Tedin, 1987). It is worth pointing out
that in some intellectual traditions (including Marxism and
the Frankfurt School), certain forms of irrationality (e.g., in
the service of justifying the status quo) would suggest the
influence of ideology rather than its absence (e.g., Elster,
1982; Jost, 1995). My focus is on the characteristics and
consequences of political ideology (rather than, say, religious
or scientific ideologies), because it was politics that
1
A Google search on “ideology” as a keyword produced over 57
million hits. There were over 24 million hits in response to “liberalism”
and over 18 million hits in response to “conservatism” (see http://www
.google.com; last visited June 10, 2006).
John T. Jost
652 October 2006 ● American Psychologist
provided the primary subject matter for end-of-ideology
pronouncements.
Defining Ideology Away?
Most political scientists have distanced themselves from
the concept of false consciousness and the critical origins
of the study of ideology more generally. Following Converse
(1964), they have treated ideology as a relatively
stable and coherent (or constrained) belief system within
the mind of an individual. Defining ideology as an internally
consistent belief system made it easier to study in a
value-neutral way, but—as I show—it also made it less
likely that ordinary people would pass the stringent tests for
demonstrating ideological capacity. Converse is by no
means alone in emphasizing stability and organization as
key features of ideological belief systems:
The term ideology is used . . . to stand for an organization of
opinions, attitudes, and values—a way of thinking about man and
society. We may speak of an individual’s total ideology or of his
ideology with respect to different areas of social life: politics,
economics, religion, minority groups, and so forth. (Adorno et al.,
1950, p. 2)
“Ideology” refers to more than doctrine. It links particular actions
and mundane practices with a wider set of meanings and, by doing
so, lends a more honorable and dignified complexion to social
conduct. . . . From another vantage point, ideology may be viewed
as a cloak for shabby motives and appearances. (Apter, 1964, p.
16)
An ideology is an organization of beliefs and attitudes—religious,
political, or philosophical in nature—that is more or less institutionalized
or shared with others, deriving from external authority.
(Rokeach, 1968, pp. 123–124)
“[I]deology” refers to patterns or gestalts of attitudes. (Billig,
1984, p. 446)
Ideologies are broad and general, pervade wide areas of belief and
behavior, and give core meaning to many issues of human concern.
They unify thought and action. (Kerlinger, 1984, p. 13)
The term “political ideology” is normally defined as an interrelated
set of attitudes and values about the proper goals of society
and how they should be achieved. An ideology has two distinct
and at least analytically separate components—affect and cognition.
(Tedin, 1987, p. 65)
All of these definitions—even those written by nonpsychologists—are
psychological in nature. They conceptualize
ideology as a belief system of the individual that is
typically shared with an identifiable group and that organizes,
motivates, and gives meaning to political behavior
broadly construed. That is, every definition of an ideological
belief system carries with it certain assumptions concerning
its degree of cognitive organization, affective and
motivational qualities, and capacity for instigating action.
These assumptions may well be reasonable, but they make
clear that the debate about whether ordinary people possess
ideology is in part a question about whether they satisfy the
various criteria proposed by the experts.
This is demonstrated most readily by considering a
definition that is an extreme but revealing example. Shils
(1968a) defined ideology in an especially narrow way,
listing nine criteria for distinguishing ideology from related
concepts such as outlook, creeds, and intellectual movements.
Ideology, according to Shils (1968a), requires
(a) explicitness of formulation; (b) intended systemic integration
around a particular moral or cognitive belief; (c) acknowledged
affinity with other past and contemporaneous patterns; (d) closure
to novel elements or variations; (e) imperativeness of manifestation
in conduct; (f) accompanying affect; (g) consensus demanded
of those who accept them; (h) authoritativeness of promulgation;
and (i) association with a corporate body intended to realize the
pattern of beliefs. (p. 66)2
With criteria as numerous and strict as these, it is little
wonder that so many authors have concluded that the
general population is not up to the challenge of being
“ideological.” In many ways, ideology was, quite literally,
defined away by the end-of-ideologists. Whether people
stopped being ideological in any meaningful or interesting
way, however, is quite a different matter. Lane (1962)
noted that people may possess “latent” if not “forensic”
ideologies (p. 16), and Kerlinger (1967) insisted that “the
man-in-the-street does have attitudes” (p. 119, note 6).
Dember (1974) argued that ideology is in fact “the most
potent form of ideation” and that it makes “ordinary motives
look pale and insignificant” (p. 166). The sociologist
C. Wright Mills (1960/1968) had little patience for the
end-of-ideologists, whom he dubbed “dead-enders.” He
wrote, with evident exasperation, “It is a kindergarten fact
that any political reflection that is of possible political
significance is ideological: in its terms policies, institutions,
men of power are criticized or approved” (p. 130).3
In this article, I adopt Tedin’s (1987) relatively modest
definition of political ideology as an interrelated set of
moral and political attitudes that possesses cognitive, affective,
and motivational components. That is, ideology
helps to explain why people do what they do; it organizes
their values and beliefs and leads to political behavior. This
definition, although broad, has the advantage of paralleling
ordinary and professional usage in both psychology (Dember,
1974; McGuire, 1986/1999; Tetlock, 1983; Tomkins,
1963, 1965) and political science (Bell, 1960; Conover &
Feldman, 1981; Lane, 1962; McClosky & Zaller, 1984),
2
Shils (1968a) also suggested that all ideologies “passionately oppose
the productions of the cultural institutions of the central institutional
system” (p. 68), but this definition seems unnecessarily restrictive in yet
another way. It arbitrarily exempts belief systems that are mainstream,
centrist, and that “affirm the existing order” (p. 67) from being considered
ideological. Shils therefore excluded the possibility of “system-justifying”
ideologies altogether (see Jost & Hunyady, 2005). His treatment of
ideology also obscures the fact that end-of-ideology claims are themselves
at least partly ideological (Bobbio, 1996; Lefebvre, 1968; Mills, 1960/
1968).
3
Mills (1960/1968) introduced here an evaluative dimension to
ideological thinking that is overlooked in many of the definitions that
stress only cognitive organization (internal coherence). In this article I
show that evaluation is indeed central to how ordinary people use ideological
constructs. By focusing on the evaluation of “policies, institutions,
[and] men of power,” Mills’s account anticipates the distinction between
system-justifying and system-challenging ideologies (e.g., see Jost, Banaji,
& Nosek, 2004).
653October 2006 ● American Psychologist
and it gives ordinary citizens a reasonable chance of empirically
satisfying the criteria for being ideological. Kerlinger
(1984) put the point well:
Whether conservatism and liberalism are typical conceptual tools
for the man-in-the-street is not the central point. For the scientist,
too, liberalism and conservatism are abstractions like any other
abstract concepts he works with: introversion, intelligence, radicalism,
achievement, political development and the like. To be
sure, most people don’t recognize their abstract nature and certainly
don’t use them as social scientists do. Nevertheless, they
are quite familiar with their behavioral and environmental manifestations.
(p. 217)
Without assuming that people consciously or fully appreciate
the meaning and significance of ideology, we may—
following Kerlinger, Lane, Mills, and others—take seriously
the empirical possibility that it is indeed a factor in
their everyday lives.
Core and Peripheral Features of Liberalism
and Conservatism
Most treatments of political ideology have focused on the
left–right (or, especially in the United States, the liberalism–conservatism)
distinction (Jost et al., 2003a, 2003b;
Knight, 1990). Political uses of the spatial metaphor of
“left” and “right” may be traced to 18th century seating
arrangements in the French parliament (e.g., Bobbio,
1996), and it is a metaphor that applies far better to modern
(i.e., postscientific enlightenment) history than to earlier
periods. Although the left–right distinction is by no means
airtight, it has been the single most useful and parsimonious
way to classify political attitudes for more than 200
years. It has found resonance in almost every cultural
context in which it has been introduced. Nevertheless,
because some of the issues and opinions that have been
referred to as liberal/left-wing and conservative/right-wing
have changed over the years and from place to place, it is
worth distinguishing between core (stable) and peripheral
(potentially malleable) aspects of ideological belief
systems.
My colleagues and I identified two relatively stable,
core dimensions that seem to capture the most meaningful
and enduring differences between liberal and conservative
ideologies: (a) attitudes toward inequality and (b) attitudes
toward social change versus tradition (Jost et al., 2003a,
2003b). This bipartite definition is highly consistent with
most contemporary treatments of the liberalism–conservatism
distinction in political science (and elsewhere), including
the following:
Politicians and the policies they espouse . . . are usually described
as liberal if they seek to advance such ideas as equality, aid to the
disadvantaged, tolerance of dissenters, and social reform; and as
conservative if they place particular emphasis on order, stability,
the needs of business, differential economic rewards, and defense
of the status quo. (McClosky & Zaller, 1984, p. 189, italics added)
Conservatives consider people to be inherently unequal and due
unequal rewards; liberals are equalitarian. Conservatives venerate
tradition and—most of all—order and authority; liberals
believe planned change brings the possibility of improvement.
(Erikson, Luttbeg, & Tedin, 1988, p. 75, italics added)
When considering whether ideology exists and whether it
possesses cognitive organization, motivational significance,
political content, and psychological specificity, I focus on core
features of liberalism and conservatism, rather than on peripheral
issues (such as attitudes concerning the size of government,
military spending, or immigration policies) that vary in
their ideological relevance across time and place. Before revisiting
the end-of-ideology claims in detail, it is useful to
highlight some of the ways in which a psychological analysis
diverges from paradigmatic approaches in sociology and political
science. By making interdisciplinary differences in emphasis
more explicit I hope to show that a cognitive–motivational
analysis of political ideology can usefully supplement
(not supplant) the valuable demographic, historical, and institutional
analyses offered by experts in neighboring fields.
A Cognitive–Motivational Analysis of
Political Ideology
Psychologists begin with Adorno et al.’s (1950) assumption
that “ideologies have for different individuals, different
degrees of appeal, a matter that depends upon the
individual’s needs and the degree to which these needs are
being satisfied or frustrated” (p. 2). This formulation suggests
the likely relevance of a wide range of dispositional
(personality) and situational (environmental) variables that
are capable of affecting one’s psychological needs and
therefore one’s political orientation. My analysis implies
that human beings will always crave some form of ideology,
that is, some way of imbuing social life with meaning
and inspiration (Dember, 1974; Jost, Fitzsimons, & Kay,
2004; Tomkins, 1965). At the same time, the approach I am
suggesting is dynamic and motivational and can therefore
explain “liberal shifts” and “conservative shifts” within
individuals and populations as a function of changes in
cognitive–motivational needs, such as needs to manage
uncertainty and threat (see also Bonanno & Jost, in press;
Cohen, Ogilvie, Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski,
2005; Jost et al., 2003a, 2003b; Landau et al., 2004; Willer,
2004; Wilson, 1973).
Psychologists are able to explore features of ideology
that are either overlooked or seen as out of bounds by
sociologists and political scientists. This is because scholarship
in political sociology during the end-of-ideology era
has been largely descriptive in nature, focusing primarily
on the question of whether political elites and their followers
do or do not possess ideology and, if so, how much
ideological consistency (or stability or constraint) is
present. The emphasis, in other words, is on how to define
ideology and how to describe the contents of specific
ideologies. Beyond demographic (especially race/ethnicity
and socioeconomic status) and institutional (e.g., media,
advertising, partisan competition) factors, there has been
little sustained attempt to try to explain why specific individuals
(or groups or societies) gravitate toward liberal or
conservative ideas. It is often assumed that people hold the
beliefs they do because of their parents, their party, or their
654 October 2006 ● American Psychologist
position in society and that it is rare for citizens to examine
or alter those beliefs in response to external events, even
dramatic events such as 9/11.
To some laypersons and even to some political scientists,
it may seem heretical to suggest that political opinions
arise from psychological needs and motives, for it could
mean that such opinions are irrational, capricious, or even
pathological. George Will (2003), for instance, responded
to an article titled “Political Conservatism as Motivated
Social Cognition” (Jost et al., 2003a) as follows:
“Motivated social cognition” refers to the “motivational underpinnings”
of ideas, the “situational as well as dispositional variables”
that foster particular beliefs. Notice: situations and dispositions—not
reasons. Professors have reasons for their beliefs.
Other people, particularly conservatives, have social and psychological
explanations for their beliefs. “Motivated cognition” involves
ways of seeing and reasoning about the world that are
unreasonable because they arise from emotional, psychological
needs.
There is a common misunderstanding, I think, of the discipline
of psychology itself that lurks in the assumption that
analyzing the motivational processes underlying specific
belief formation (or preservation) is tantamount to exposing
it as invalid. Social psychologists tend to assume that
every belief—whether objectively valid or invalid—is at
least partially motivated by subjective considerations such
as epistemic needs for knowledge and meaning, existential
needs for safety and reassurance, and relational needs for
affiliation and social identification (e.g., Greenberg, Simon,
Pyszczynski, Solomon, & Chatel, 1992; Hardin & Higgins,
1996; Jost et al., 2003a; Kruglanski, 2004; Landau et al.,
2004). In personal, political, religious, scientific, and many
other domains, what we believe is an intricate mix of what
we (and our friends) want to believe and what we are able
to believe given the evidence that is accessible and available
to us (see also Kunda, 1990).
Not all political attitudes are self-interested, either.
Much evidence suggests that people are motivated to engage
in “system justification”—defined as the tendency to
defend, bolster, and rationalize the societal status quo—
even when social change would be preferable from the
standpoint of self-interest (Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004;
Jost & Hunyady, 2005). This motivation introduces a conservative
“bias” that is counterintuitive to many political
sociologists, including Lipset (1960), who have long assumed
that “conservatism is especially vulnerable in a
political democracy since, as Abraham Lincoln said, there
are always more poor people than well-to-do ones, and
promises to redistribute wealth are difficult to rebut” (p.
128). Although Lipset was right that the poor have always
outnumbered the rich, the fact is that self-identified conservatives
have outnumbered liberals in the United States
for most of the 20th century (Knight, 1990, pp. 66–68) and
in every National Election Study (see http://www
.umich.edu/ϳnes/) between 1972 and 2004, even during
periods of successful Democratic leadership (see G.
Bishop, 2005, p. 118). The ratio of conservatives to liberals
is now greater than 2 to 1 (Newport, 2003). Furthermore,
efforts to redistribute wealth have been few and far between,
and they have been remarkably easy to defeat, often
because poor people are no more likely than the wealthy to
support redistributive economic policies that would obviously
benefit them (e.g., Frank, 2004; Gilens, 1999; Graetz
& Shapiro, 2005). In some cases, the disadvantaged are
even more likely than the advantaged to harbor attitudes
that are congenial to the societal status quo (e.g., Jost,
Pelham, Sheldon, & Sullivan, 2003).4
The possibility that
ideological preferences may derive from the psychological
needs of individuals (as well as their demographic characteristics)
is one that has not been seriously considered by
sociologists and political scientists, in part because they
have not taken seriously the notion that individuals have
genuine ideological preferences at all.
Revisiting the End-of-Ideology Claims
End-of-ideology theorists have advanced four major claims
that are in need of reevaluation. They have argued that
ideologies such as liberalism and conservatism lack (a)
cognitive structure, (b) motivational potency, (c) substantive
philosophical differences, and (d) characteristic psychological
profiles. I consider each of these claims separately
and suggest that, whether or not they were defensible
in the 1950s—the context in which they were developed—
they are not defensible in the current political climate. To
develop this argument, I draw on data from the American
National Election Studies (ANES) as well as from other
experimental and survey studies recently conducted by
psychologists. The bulk of the evidence reveals that ideology
is very much a part of most people’s lives.
Do People Possess Coherent Ideological
Belief Systems?
Building on his earlier collaborative work in The American
Voter (Campbell, Converse, Miller, & Stokes, 1960), Converse
(1964) argued to great effect that the vast majority of
the American population would be hard-pressed to articulate
coherent ideological principles. Although his point was
quite different (and more specific) than the broader historical
theses concerning the decline of ideology in the West
advanced by Aron (1957/1968), Bell (1960), Lipset (1960),
and Shils (1955/1968b), it was readily assimilated into the
end-of-ideology framework.
Drawing on public opinion data from the 1950s, Converse
(1964) argued that only a small and highly sophisticated
layer of the populace is able or willing to resolve
obvious inconsistencies among political beliefs or to orga-
4
Lee Ross (personal communication, February 21, 2006) pointed out
that middle- and upper-class liberal academics and others also routinely
violate assumptions of economic self-interest by voting for candidates
who “favor high taxes that they will have to pay, government spending on
social welfare programs that they will not need, and affirmative action
programs that will lessen their kids’ life chances.” This phenomenon, too,
is consistent with a theory of political ideology as motivated social
cognition (Jost et al., 2003a), insofar as people who are socially and
economically secure have very little need to minimize personal uncertainty
and threat by embracing conservatism. As one student aptly put it,
“Liberalism is a luxury.”
655October 2006 ● American Psychologist
nize beliefs consistently according to philosophical definitions
of left and right. This statement has had an extraordinary
degree of impact, not only in political psychology
(e.g., Billig, 1984; G. Bishop, 2005; Conover & Feldman,
1981; Kinder & Sears, 1985; McGuire, 1986/1999) but in
popular culture as well. According to The New Yorker
magazine,
Forty years later, Converse’s conclusions are still the bones at
which the science of voting behavior picks. . . . Converse claimed
that only around ten per cent of the public has what can be called,
even generously, a political belief system . . . [He] concluded that
“very substantial portions of the public” hold opinions that are
essentially meaningless—off-the-top-of-the-head responses to
questions they have never thought about, derived from no underlying
set of principles. These people might as well base their
political choices on the weather. And, in fact, many of them do.
(Menand, 2004, pp. 92–94)
There is indeed widespread acceptance of what Converse
(2000) felt was the “pithiest truth” about the information
level of the electorate, namely that “the mean level is very
low but the variance is very high” (p. 331). Furthermore,
Converse (1964) was correct in observing that a significant
minority of citizens (sometimes as much as one third)
either cannot or will not locate themselves on a single
bipolar liberalism–conservatism dimension. According to
ANES results from presidential election years between
1972 and 2004, between 22% and 36% of survey respondents
indicated that they either “haven’t thought much
about it” or “don’t know” how to place themselves on a
liberalism–conservatism scale. Although Converse’s
(1964, 2000) work deserves serious attention, I do not think
it justifies the common conclusion that most citizens fail to
use ideological terms coherently most of the time.
Current political realities. To begin with,
Converse’s (1964) thesis may apply better to the 1950s
than to subsequent historical periods, although I have suggested
that his conceptual and operational definitions probably
led to an underestimation of the prevalence of ideology
even in the 1950s. In any case, Converse believed that
no more than 15% of the population (in 1956) satisfied the
criteria for being ideological, but others have obtained
higher estimates (e.g., Knight, 1990). In his analysis of the
highly polarizing 1972 Nixon–McGovern presidential race,
Stimson (1975) argued that “at least half of the eligible
electorate (and more of the actual electorate) display[ed]
evidence of belief structuring that is consistent with the
standards originally laid down by Converse” (p. 414). Judd
and Milburn (1980) similarly concluded that data from the
1970s “pose a substantial threat to Converse’s original
hypothesis that the attitude responses of the public at large
are unstable, nearly random responses” (p. 82).
In retrospect, it appears that Converse’s conclusions
concerning the lack of ideology among ordinary citizens
were drawn on the basis of survey data collected during one
of the least politically charged periods in recent American
history (Tedin, 1987). But there was always something
paradoxical about touting the end of ideology in a decade
that witnessed McCarthyism and the “Red Scare,” a war in
Korea to stop the threat of communism, ideological conflict
over racial desegregation in American schools, the liberal
Hungarian uprising against the Soviet Union, and many
other politically charged events (see also Aron, 1957/1968,
p. 27). The 1960s would soon find Americans and others
grappling with political assassinations and a number of
polarizing social, economic, and foreign policy issues, as
well as student protests and race riots. The 1970s would
bring an escalation of the Vietnam War (as well as opposition
to it), the Watergate scandal and the subsequent
impeachment of Richard Nixon, the rise of feminism and
gay rights movements, and many other events of genuine
ideological significance. These developments, which
threatened the societal status quo, spurred a conservative
reaction—what Frank (2004) referred to as a “backlash”—
that would take over two decades to peak (if indeed it has
peaked).
Although his New Yorker article was titled “The Unpolitical
Animal,” Menand (2004), too, sensed that the
times had changed:
Polls indicate much less volatility than usual, supporting the view
that the public is divided into starkly antagonistic camps—the
“red state–blue state” paradigm. If this is so, it suggests that we
have at last moved past Converse’s picture of an electoral iceberg,
in which ninety per cent of the population is politically underwater.
(p. 96)
Almost half of the counties in the United States have
become so ideologically stable in recent years that they are
politically uncompetitive in virtually every election, and
not only because of partisan gerrymandering (e.g., see B.
Bishop, 2004). Party loyalty has increased, and so has the
proportion of strict party-line votes in Congress. Ticket
splitting, in which voters cast ballots for Democratic and
Republican candidates simultaneously, has fallen off dramatically.
Political segregation is occurring more rapidly
than racial segregation, and it appears to many that the
nation is currently “in the midst of the most partisan era
since Reconstruction” (Davidson, quoted in B. Bishop,
2004).
Empirical evidence. A large majority of the
American public knows whether they usually prefer liberal
or conservative ideas, and although Converse (1964) was
right that they are far from completely consistent (or loyal),
their political attitudes are meaningful and interpretable.
According to my analyses of ANES data, over two thirds of
respondents since 1972 and over three fourths since 1996
could and did place themselves on a bipolar liberalism–
conservatism scale. In other studies that my colleagues and
I have conducted, over 90% of college students chose to
locate themselves on a liberalism–conservatism dimension,
even when they were provided explicitly with options such
as “don’t know” and “haven’t thought much about it.”
Most of the available evidence suggests that people who
place themselves on such a scale do so with a reasonable
(but not perfect) degree of accuracy, stability, and coherence
(Conover & Feldman, 1981; Evans, Heath, & Lalljee,
1996; Feldman, 2003; Kerlinger, 1984; Knight, 1999; Noelle-Neumann,
1998). Factors such as education, involvement,
expertise, and political sophistication are all known
656 October 2006 ● American Psychologist
to increase the degree of ideological coherence (Jacoby,
1991; Judd, Krosnick, & Milburn, 1981). As educational
levels in the American population have increased, so, too,
has ideological sophistication (Tedin, 1987, p. 83).
Evidence also indicates that individuals’ belief systems
are more tightly constrained around abstract rather
than concrete (Peffley & Hurwitz, 1985) and core rather
than peripheral issues that separate liberals and conservatives,
such as resistance to social change and attitudes
concerning social and economic equality (Jost et al., 2003a,
2003b). Conover and Feldman (1981), for instance, showed
that Americans who evaluated conservatives favorably also
possessed consistently favorable attitudes toward groups
that uphold the status quo, serve social control functions,
and are procapitalist (e.g., Protestants, White men, the
police, the military, and Big Business). Conversely, respondents
who evaluated liberals favorably held more favorable
attitudes toward groups that question the status quo and
seek egalitarian reforms (e.g., radical students, feminists,
civil rights leaders, and minority activists). Feldman (1988)
found that attitudes concerning equality were highly stable
over time and consistently predicted ideological self-placement,
political partisanship, candidate preferences, and
opinions on many specific issues. Evans et al. (1996), too,
recorded impressive levels of ideological stability and consistency
in the British public in two areas: (a) egalitarianism
with respect to income distribution and (b) support for
traditional authorities versus agents of social change.
Disentangling ideology from political sophistication.
Perhaps the biggest problem with using
Converse’s (1964) work to support end-of-ideology conclusions,
however, was underscored by Kerlinger (1984),
who wrote that the “denial of the attitude structure of mass
publics was backed by research that could not bear the full
weight of the conclusions drawn” (p. 218). The fact is that
people can be both highly ideological and generally uninformed,
but this possibility has never been sufficiently
addressed in the political science literature (see also Achen,
1975, pp. 1229–1231). The end-of-ideologists made an
unwarranted assumption that a lack of political sophistication
among the general public should be counted as evidence
for the meaninglessness of left and right. It does not
follow that when citizens struggle to articulate a sophisticated,
coherent ideology, they must be incapable of using
ideology with either sophistication or coherence. Very few
speakers can state precisely the grammatical and syntactical
rules they obey when speaking their native languages,
and yet they use language adeptly (albeit imperfectly).
Furthermore, one of the most notably distinctive features
of ideology, from a psychological perspective, is that
it breeds distortion, oversimplification, and selective processing
of information at least as much as it breeds political
sophistication (Dember, 1974; Glaser, 2005; Lavine,
Lodge, & Freitas, 2005). A wealth of experimental evidence
illustrates the biasing role of ideology with respect to
cognitive processes such as attention, information processing,
encoding, and memory recall (e.g., Ditto & Lopez,
1992; Lodge & Hamill, 1986; Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979;
Pomerantz, Chaiken, & Tordesillas, 1995). There is also
anecdotal and survey evidence that ideological conviction
is associated with decreased rather than increased political
sophistication and knowledge in the general population.
Approximately 25% of American citizens—between 1 and
2 million people per day—have watched ideologically
explicit Fox newscasts in recent years, but surveys show
that these viewers, while politically engaged, are significantly
less informed than others about the Iraq War and
other important political issues (e.g., Janssen, 2003; see
also Barker, 2002; Brock, 2004). Bush supporters, too,
were far more likely than Kerry supporters in 2004 to
falsely believe that (a) Iraq possessed weapons of mass
destruction; (b) most intelligence experts agreed that Iraq
possessed weapons of mass destruction; (c) Iraq provided
assistance to al-Qaeda; (d) the 9/11 Commission concluded
that Iraq provided assistance to al-Qaeda; (e) the majority
of world opinion supported the American invasion of Iraq;
(f) the majority of world opinion favored Bush’s reelection;
(g) the majority of Islamic opinion welcomed American
efforts to fight terrorism; and (h) Bush supported (rather
than opposed) the Kyoto agreement on global warming and
American participation in the International Criminal Court
(see Kull, 2004). The point is not that conservatives are
necessarily more “ideological” than liberals or that they are
alone in their self-deception but that ideology plays an
important role in distorting (as well as organizing) information.
Thus, the most significant criticism of Converse’s
(1964) work is probably conceptual rather than empirical in
nature: By equating ideology with internal consistency and
internal consistency with political sophistication, he and his
adherents may have mischaracterized the function of ideology
in people’s lives altogether.
Do Ideological Belief Systems Motivate
People to Act?
A second major claim advanced by the end-of-ideologists
was that ideology had lost its capacity to inspire collective
action (e.g., Bell, 1960; Shils, 1958) or, as Lane (1962)
summarized the point, “the transformation of broadly conceived
political ideas into social action is no longer the
center of an exciting struggle” (p. 15). This was widely
regarded as a positive societal development by end-ofideology
proponents, who celebrated the decline of Marxist
ideas in the West (Aron, 1957/1968; Bell, 1960, 1988;
Fukuyama, 1992/2006b). Shils (1958), too, was heartened
by the spirit of moderation he saw in the nascent conservative
movement:
The conservative revival, though genuine, is moderate. People
take Burke in their stride. They have become “natural Burkeans”
without making a noise about it. The National Review, despite its
clamor, is isolated and unnoticed, and the effort to create a
“conservative ideology” which would stand for more than moderation,
reasonableness, and prudence has not been successful. (p.
456)
The end-of-ideologists heralded the “passing of fanaticism”
and welcomed a new era of politics that would be
determined not by ideological enthusiasts but by pragmatic
moderates. In this respect and others, one could argue (with
657October 2006 ● American Psychologist
the benefit of hindsight, of course) that they succumbed to
wishful thinking.
Current political realities. The stunning organizational
success of the conservative movement is one of
the most significant events in American political history
over the last 25 years or so, but it would stretch credulity
beyond bounds to claim that it has been a “revolt of the
moderates” (see, inter alia, Brock, 2004; Dean, 2006;
Frank, 2004). There are many factors that help to explain
how conservatives once inspired by fringe activists such as
William F. Buckley (the founder of the National Review),
Milton Friedman, and Barry Goldwater managed to reach
what Brooks (2003) referred to as the “The Promised
Land” of mainstream governance. These include (a) the
mass defection of White southerners from the Democratic
to the Republican party following liberal civil rights legislation
in the 1960s and 1970s; (b) the development of a
strong coalition involving economic conservatives and religious
fundamentalists beginning in the 1970s; and (c) the
powerful emergence of right-wing think tanks and media
conglomerates, including Fox news and Christian/conservative
talk radio networks (e.g., Barker, 2002; Brock, 2004;
Graetz & Shapiro, 2005; Lakoff, 2004; Lind, 1996).
There are now scores of extraordinarily popular conservative
radio and television personalities—including
Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity,
Joe Scarborough, and Michael Savage, to name just a
few—and their popularity is hardly attributable to the quietude,
moderation, reasonableness, or prudence that Shils
(1958) saw in their predecessors. The ordinarily mildmannered
author Garrison Keillor (2004) detailed some of
the changes vividly:
Something has gone seriously haywire with the Republican Party.
Once, it was the party of pragmatic Main Street businessmen in
steel-rimmed spectacles who decried profligacy and waste, were
devoted to their communities and supported the sort of prosperity
that raises all ships. . . . The party of Lincoln and Liberty was
transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers
and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies
with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists,
misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats,
nihilists in golf pants . . .
Although Keillor’s characterization may be extreme, he is
right that the conservative movement has turned out to be
more self-consciously ideological than even political scientists
had anticipated. To put it bluntly, conservatives
have found ways of capitalizing on ideological passions
that—according to end-of-ideologists—simply did not
exist.
Politically provocative shows by Rush Limbaugh and
Bill O’Reilly draw millions of listeners per week5
(see also
Barker, 2002; Brock, 2004). According to the 2004 National
Election Study, 44% of respondents reported listening
to political talk radio!6
Although liberals are still behind
in the resumption of ideological wars, the battle has
now been joined by Michael Moore, Al Franken, Arianna
Huffington, Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and
Keith Olbermann; they appear to draw their inspiration
from Saul Alinsky’s (1971) motto that “ridicule is man’s
most potent weapon” (p. 128). Converse (1964) and many
others have long assumed that most citizens care little
about political affairs, but this assumption does not fit the
current climate. There are now more than 17,000 political
Web sites maintained by thousands of individual bloggers
and visited by at least 25 million Americans. The top 100
political blogs attract 100,000 American adults each day.7
Public opinion polls show the nation to be sharply
divided along ideological lines, and these lines predict
political outcomes to a remarkable degree (e.g., B. Bishop,
2004). The argument that most of the population is impervious
to the liberal–conservative distinction was probably
never on solid empirical ground, but it seems increasingly
untenable in the current (red state vs. blue state) political
climate, in which formerly latent ideological conflicts are
now more enthusiastically and self-consciously enacted.
The fact that most people (and regions) are probably shades
of purple rather than purely red or blue does not mean that
the citizenry is nonideological. What it means is that people
are capable of warming to ideas of the left, right, or center
(Baker, 2005; Lakoff, 1996), depending on both psychological
needs and social circumstances (Bonanno & Jost, in
press; Jost et al., 2003a, 2003b). I return to a consideration
of both dispositional and situational influences on political
orientation later in the article.
Empirical evidence. The question of whether
ideological commitments motivate important behavioral
outcomes such as voting is one that has haunted researchers
since the end of ideology was declared. Luttbeg and Gant
(1985), for example, found reason to “call into question the
very notion that an ideology structured in liberal/conservative
terms is necessary to linking public preferences to
government action” (p. 91). Similarly, Tedin (1987, pp.
63–64) examined the data from the 1972 election and was
generally unimpressed by the motivational potency of ideology.
At issue is whether people know enough and care
enough about ideological labels such as liberalism and
conservatism to use them reliably in making political
decisions.
In Table 1, I have compiled the percentages of ANES
respondents placing themselves at each point on an ideological
scale who voted for each of the major Democratic
and Republican presidential candidates between 1972 and
2004. The weighted averages, collapsing across the nine
elections and over 7,500 respondents, are illustrated in
Figure 1. The effects of liberalism and conservatism on
voting decisions are powerful indeed; in each case the
correlation exceeds .90! Responses to this single ideological
self-placement item explain 85% of the statistical variance
in self-reported voting behavior over the last 32
5
See, for example, http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle
.asp?IDϭ17774 and http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3
?PageIDϭ833.
6
See http://www.umich.edu/ϳnes/studypages/download/datacenter.htm.
7
For statistics concerning political Web sites, see http://www
.comscore.com/press/release.asp?pressϭ517, http://www.websense.com/
global/en/PressRoom/PressReleases/PressReleaseDetail/?Releaseϭ041018730,
and http://michellemalkin.com/archives/001623.htm.
658 October 2006 ● American Psychologist
years.8
Approximately 80% of respondents who described
themselves as “liberal” or “extremely liberal” reported
voting for Democratic candidates, and 80% of respondents
who described themselves as “conservative” or “extremely
conservative” voted for Republican candidates. I find it
difficult to think of another survey question in the entire
social and behavioral sciences that is as useful and parsimonious
as the liberalism–conservatism self-placement
item for predicting any outcome that is as important as
voting behavior.
Are There Differences in Content Between
Liberalism and Conservatism?
One of the assumptions of the end-of-ideologists and their
followers is that the substantive ideological differences
between the left and the right are few and far between
(Aron, 1957/1968; Giddens, 1998; Lasch, 1991; Lipset,
1960; Shils, 1955/1968b). Shils (1954), for example,
mocked the left–right distinction as “rickety,” “spurious,”
and “obsolete” (pp. 27–28). Lipset (1960) recounted a 1955
conference in Milan that had disappointed its ideologically
heterogeneous audience by degenerating into a hopeless
consensus:
The socialists no longer advocated socialism; they were as concerned
as the conservatives with the danger of an all-powerful
state. The ideological issues dividing left and right had been
8
In separate general linear models, ideological self-placement was a
powerful predictor of self-reported voting for both Democratic, F(1,
61) ϭ 352.89, p Ͻ .001, adjusted R2
ϭ .85, and Republican, F(1, 61) ϭ
424.19, p Ͻ .001, adjusted R2
ϭ .87, candidates. Additional analyses
yielded no significant interactions between ideological self-placement and
election year, indicating that ideology played a consistently strong role
between 1962 and 2004.
Table 1
Percentages of American National Election Studies Survey Respondents Placing Themselves at Each Point on an
Ideological Scale Who Voted for Democratic and Republican Candidates in U.S. Presidential Elections,
1972–2004
Year and candidates
Extremely liberal
(1)
Liberal
(2)
Slightly liberal
(3)
Moderate
(4)
Slightly conservative
(5)
Conservative
(6)
Extremely conservative
(7)
1972
McGovern 83 83 56 31 15 10 5
Nixon 17 17 44 68 84 89 90
1976
Carter 82 81 69 51 25 19 14
Ford 12 15 24 46 70 78 81
1980
Carter 71 71 49 35 27 15 27
Reagan 7 6 33 54 62 81 73
1984
Mondale 91 73 66 44 22 14 23
Reagan 9 25 32 54 76 86 77
1988
Dukakis 90 86 75 51 33 14 17
Bush 5 11 23 48 67 86 80
1992
Clinton 86 82 60 51 30 15 29
Bush 0 3 17 29 46 64 65
1996
Clinton 64 92 82 58 32 16 27
Dole 0 1 9 30 56 80 70
2000
Gore 70 84 75 61 33 13 9
Bush 0 12 17 37 62 86 87
2004
Kerry 89 92 85 54 26 11 7
Bush 0 6 13 42 70 87 93
Unweighted average,
1972–2004
Democrat 80.7 82.7 68.6 48.4 27.0 14.1 17.5
Republican 5.4 10.7 23.6 45.3 65.9 72.0 79.6
Note. Data are from the American National Election Studies (see http://www.umich.edu/ϳnes/studypages/download/datacenter.htm).
659October 2006 ● American Psychologist
reduced to a little more or a little less government ownership and
economic planning. No one seemed to believe that it really made
much difference which political party controlled the domestic
policies of individual nations. (pp. 404–405)
An essential part of the end-of-ideology thesis was that
everything of value in Marxism had already been incorporated
into Western democratic societies and that there was
no continuing need for leftist economic or cultural critique
(Bell, 1960, 1988). Aron (1957/1968, p. 31), for example,
argued that “Western ‘capitalist’ society today comprises a
multitude of socialist institutions,” and Shils (1958, p. 456)
claimed that the “more valid aspirations of the older humanitarian
elements which were absorbed into Marxism
have been more or less fulfilled in capitalist countries.”
Lipset (1960, p. 406) went even further, celebrating the fact
that “the fundamental political problems of the industrial
revolution have been solved: the workers have achieved
industrial and political citizenship; the conservatives have
accepted the welfare state.”
Current political realities. One need only
point to a few well-known facts about political economy to
cast doubt on the notion that the left and right have resolved
their fiscal disputes in the four or five decades since these
statements were made. In 1980, when Ronald Reagan was
elected president, corporate CEOs earned approximately 40
times the salary of the average worker; recent estimates
place the figure at nearly 500 to 1 (Crystal, 2002). As of the
late 1990s, the richest 1% of Americans controlled almost
half of the country’s total financial wealth, and the top 20%
possessed 94% of the nation’s net wealth (Wolff, 1996).
More than 30 million Americans today live below the
poverty line, and the combined net worth of the 400
wealthiest Americans exceeds 1 trillion dollars. By nearly
every metric—including the Gini index of income concentration—the
distribution of wealth in American society has
grown increasingly skewed in favor of the wealthy (e.g.,
Weinberg, 2002). Income inequality increased most
sharply during the 1980s and 1990s in those societies that
most aggressively pursued “neoliberal” (i.e., free market)
economic policies, especially the United States, the United
Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand (Weeks, 2005).
These statistics (and many more) cast doubt on the claim
that Western capitalist institutions in general have internalized
fundamental socialist principles, as the end-of-ideologists
suggested.
The notion that “conservatives have accepted the welfare
state” is particularly hard to accept given how strenuously
the governments of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald
Reagan worked to reduce or eliminate welfare and social
services, albeit with mixed success. Pierson (1994) wrote,
In many countries a conservative resurgence accompanied the
economic turmoil of the late 1970s. Conservative parties gained
strength, and within these parties leadership shifted to those most
critical of the postwar consensus on social and economic policy.
These newly ascendant conservatives viewed the welfare state as
a large part of the problem. They argued that social programs
generated massive inefficiencies, and that financing them required
incentive-sapping levels of taxation and inflationary budget deficits.
In short, conservatives viewed retrenchment not as a necessary
evil but as a necessary good. (p. 1)
Welfare reform was a major objective of Newt Gingrich’s
Republican Revolution of 1994 and the Contract with
America that followed. In 2005, President Bush conducted
a speaking tour (called “60 Stops in 60 Days”) aimed at
persuading the public to privatize the liberal social security
system established by Franklin D. Roosevelt 70 years
earlier.
Empirical evidence. Studies show that there are
substantial differences in the beliefs and values of liberals
and conservatives. The largest and most consistent differences
concern core issues of resistance to change and
attitudes toward equality. For example, people who call
themselves conservatives hold significantly more favorable
attitudes than liberals toward traditional cultural and “family
values,” including religious forms of morality (e.g.,
Altemeyer, 1998; Haidt & Graham, in press; Kerlinger,
1984; Lakoff, 1996). They are also more likely to support
conventional authority figures and to oppose activists who
are seeking to change the status quo, especially if change is
toward greater egalitarianism (e.g., Altemeyer, 1988; Conover
& Feldman, 1981; Erikson et al., 1988; Evans et al., 1996).
People who identify themselves as liberals place a
higher priority on achieving social and economic equality
Figure 1
Effects of Ideological Self-Placement on Voting
Behavior, 1972–2004
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
Democratic Candidate Republican Candidate
Liberal Conservative
Note. Data are weighted average percentages of American National Election
Studies survey respondents placing themselves at each point on an ideological
scale who voted for Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, aggregated
across presidential election years between 1972 and 2004 (N ϭ
7,504). Labels for the liberal–conservative self-placement scale were as follows:
1 ϭ extremely liberal; 2 ϭ liberal; 3 ϭ slightly liberal; 4 ϭ moderate/middle
of the road; 5 ϭ slightly conservative; 6 ϭ conservative; and 7 ϭ extremely
conservative. The data are from the American National Election Studies at
http://www.umich.edu/ϳnes/studypages/download/datacenter.htm
660 October 2006 ● American Psychologist
through policies such as welfare, social security, and affirmative
action (Evans et al., 1996; Feldman, 1988; Glaser,
2005; Graetz & Shapiro, 2005; Jacoby, 1991; Noelle-Neumann,
1998; Pierson, 1994). They are also significantly less
likely to hold prejudicial attitudes—at a conscious or unconscious
level—toward racial minorities, homosexuals,
women, and members of other disadvantaged groups (Cunningham,
Nezlek, & Banaji, 2004; Duckitt, 2001; Jost,
Banaji, & Nosek, 2004; Sidanius, Pratto, & Bobo, 1996;
Whitley, 1999). Although a full consideration of the numerous
peripheral (as well as core) differences between the
left and the right is well beyond the scope of this article,
even a cursory glance at recent public opinion research
provides reason enough to reject the end-of-ideology thesis
that meaningful ideological differences have disappeared in
the aftermath of World War II (e.g., Erikson et al., 1988;
Feldman, 1988, 2003; Jacoby, 1991; Kerlinger, 1984;
Knight, 1990; McClosky & Zaller, 1984).
Are There Differences in Psychological
Processes Underlying Liberalism and
Conservatism?
Adorno et al.’s (1950) The Authoritarian Personality is one
of the most influential—and also one of the most badly
caricatured—books in the history of social science. One
Web site claims that Adorno and colleagues “attacked the
‘authoritarian character’ of the American nuclear family,
the ‘problem’ of the American people’s belief in a transcendent
monotheistic God, the underlying ‘fascist’ character
of all forms of American patriotism, and American
culture’s excessive reliance on science, reason, and ‘abstract
ideas.’” Another lists it as one of the “most harmful”
books of the last two centuries.9
Roiser and Willig (2002)
noted that even in academic circles, “The Authoritarian
Personality has been the victim of several determined attempts
at psychological and political assassinations” (p. 89).
Soon after the book’s publication, Shils (1954) accused the
authors of a “narrowness of political imagination” and of
“holding fast to a deforming intellectual tradition” (p. 31).
More recently, Martin (2001) pronounced it “the most
deeply flawed work of prominence in political psychology”
(p. 1) and argued for a “categorical dismissal” of it (p. 24).
The methodological problems associated with research
on authoritarianism as a personality syndrome (including
the problem of acquiescence and other response
biases) were significant, but they have been addressed by
Altemeyer (1988, 1998) and many others (see Jost et al.,
2003a, for a review). There have also been recurrent theoretical
and ideological criticisms of the book’s central
thesis, which is that character rigidity and feelings of threat
are related to the holding of intolerant, right-wing opinions
that were dubbed “pseudo-conservative.” Critics have
claimed that left-wingers can be every bit as dogmatic and
rigid as right-wingers. Shils (1954) and Eysenck (1954/
1999), for example, emphasized that left-wing extremists
(i.e., Communists), especially in the Soviet Union, resembled
right-wing extremists (i.e., Fascists) in certain respects
(e.g., intolerance of ambiguity and tough-mindedness, respectively).
Others have pointed out (quite correctly) that
left-wing movements have sometimes embraced authoritarian
themes and methods. But these historical observations
do not establish that leftists and rightists are equally
dogmatic, rigid, and closed-minded in the general population.
Nevertheless, these examples have sometimes been used
to claim that there are no important or enduring psychological
differences between liberals and conservatives (e.g.,
Greenberg & Jonas, 2003; but see Jost et al., 2003b).
Current political realities. There are signs that
Adorno et al.’s (1950) work is gaining new appreciation, at
least in part because of the current political climate (e.g.,
Lavine et al., 2005; Roiser & Willig, 2002; Stenner, 2005).
Many of the fundamental ideas of the theory of right-wing
authoritarianism have resurfaced in contemporary accounts
of the “culture wars.” Lakoff (1996), for instance, has
analyzed differences in political metaphors and observed
that whereas conservatives adhere to a “strict father” model
of moral discipline, liberals prefer a “nurturing parent”
frame. Baker (2005), too, has noted that increasing “absolutism”
has accompanied the rise in popularity of American
conservatism (pp. 66–71). In an article published in The
Chronicle of Higher Education, Wolfe (2005) wrote,
[W]hen I attended graduate school in the 1960s, The Authoritarian
Personality was treated as a social-science version of the Edsel, a
case study of how to do everything wrong. . . . Yet, despite its flaws,
The Authoritarian Personality deserves a re-evaluation. In many
ways, it is more relevant now than it was in 1950 . . . [M]any of the
prominent politicians successful in today’s conservative political
environment adhere to a distinct style of politics that the authors of
The Authoritarian Personality anticipated.
John Dean (2006), the former Nixon attorney, has
similarly argued that “conservatism has been co-opted by
authoritarians, a most dangerous type of political animal”
(p. xxxix). Wolfe, Dean, and others have noted that rather
than responding in kind, liberals have generally eschewed
dogmatic reactions to 9/11 and its political aftermath. All
of this is consistent with the notion that there are indeed
significant differences of cognitive and motivational style
that characterize people who are drawn to liberal versus
conservative belief systems, much as Adorno and his colleagues
(1950) hypothesized.
Empirical evidence. There is now sufficient evidence
to conclude that Adorno et al. (1950) were correct
that conservatives are, on average, more rigid and closedminded
than liberals. My colleagues and I published a
meta-analysis that identified several psychological variables
that predicted, to varying degrees, adherence to politically
conservative (vs. liberal) opinions (Jost et al., 2003a,
2003b). The original studies, which were conducted over a
44-year period that included the end-of-ideology era, made
use of 88 research samples involving 22,818 individual cases
and were carried out in 12 different countries: Australia,
Canada, England, Germany, Israel, Italy, New Zealand,
Poland, Scotland, South Africa, Sweden, and the United
States. The results, which are summarized in Table 2, show
9
See http://www.schillerinstitute.org/strategic/2004/AFF.html and
http://www.humanevents.com/sarticle.php?id ϭ 7591, respectively.
661October 2006 ● American Psychologist
a clear tendency for conservatives to score higher on measures
of dogmatism, intolerance of ambiguity, needs for
order, structure, and closure and to be lower in openness to
experience and integrative complexity than moderates and
liberals. Several studies demonstrate that in a variety of
perceptual and aesthetic domains, conservatism is associated
with preferences for relatively simple, unambiguous,
and familiar stimuli, whether they are paintings, poems, or
songs (see also Wilson, 1973).
There are other psychological differences between
liberals and conservatives as well. Conservatives are, on
average, more likely than liberals to perceive the world as
a dangerous place (Altemeyer, 1998; Duckitt, 2001) and to
fear crime, terrorism, and death (e.g., Jost et al., 2003a;
Wilson, 1973). They are also more likely to make purely
internal attributions for the causes of others’ behaviors
(e.g., Skitka, Mullen, Griffin, Hutchinson, & Chamberlin,
2002) and to engage in moral condemnation of others,
especially in sexual domains (Haidt & Hersh, 2001). As
Adorno et al. (1950) noted long ago, conservatives tend to
hold more prejudicial attitudes than liberals toward members
of deviant or stigmatized groups, at least in part
because of chronically elevated levels of threat and rigidity
(e.g., Altemeyer, 1988, 1998; Cunningham et al., 2004;
Duckitt, 2001; Sidanius et al., 1996; Whitley, 1999).
What about authoritarianism of the left? Are extremists
of the left and right equally likely to be closed-minded?
Some studies, especially those comparing multiple political
parties in Europe, allow researchers to pit the (linear)
rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis against the (quadratic) extremity
hypothesis that increasing ideological extremity in
either direction (left or right) should be associated with
increased dogmatism and rigidity. The existing data provide
very consistent support for the rigidity-of-the-right
hypothesis, no support for the extremity hypothesis in
isolation, and some support for the notion that both linear
and quadratic effects are present in combination (see Jost et
al., 2003b, pp. 388–390). In summary, then, much evidence
upholds the Adorno et al. (1950) rigidity-of-the-right
hypothesis (see Table 2) and contradicts persistent claims
that liberals and conservatives are equally rigid and dogmatic
(e.g., Greenberg & Jonas, 2003). The important point
is not that Adorno and colleagues bested their critics; it is
that psychologists are finally returning to the kinds of
questions raised by The Authoritarian Personality after
many years of neglect during the end-of-ideology era.
An Emerging Psychological Paradigm
for the Study of Ideology
The reticence of sociologists and political scientists to take
ideology seriously in recent decades has created opportunities
for psychologists not only to describe ideological
differences in theory but also to explain them in practice.
Social and personality psychologists have made relatively
rapid progress in identifying a set of situational and dispositional
factors that are linked to the motivational underpinnings
of political orientation. There is now the possibility
of explaining ideological differences between right and
left in terms of underlying psychological needs for stability
versus change, order versus complexity, familiarity versus
novelty, conformity versus creativity, and loyalty versus
rebellion. These and other dimensions of personal and
social significance are the basic building blocks of an
emerging psychological paradigm that has already begun to
shed light on why ideology (and, unfortunately, ideological
conflict) are always likely to be with us.
Table 2
Effect Size Estimates and Confidence Intervals for Relations Between Psychological Variables and Ideological
Orientation
Psychological variable
Effect
size
95% CI
No. of
tests Countries tested Total (unique) NLL UL
Fear of death/mortality salience .50 .43 .57 8 USA, Israel 479
System instability/threat .47 .46 .49 9 USA 10,639
Dogmatism/ambiguity intolerance .34 .30 .37 20 USA, Israel, England, Sweden 2,173
Openness to experience Ϫ.32 Ϫ.28 Ϫ.35 21 USA, Australia 2,606
Uncertainty avoidance .27 .21 .34 13 USA, Scotland, East Germany 763
Needs for order/structure/closure .26 .22 .29 20 USA, Germany, Poland, Italy,
Canada, New Zealand
2,548
Integrative complexity Ϫ.20 Ϫ.13 Ϫ.26 21 USA, England, Sweden, Canada 879
Fear of threat and loss .18 .15 .22 22 USA, England, Canada, New
Zealand, South Africa
3,371
Self-esteem Ϫ.09 Ϫ.04 Ϫ.13 17 USA, Canada, New Zealand 1,558
Note. Effect size estimates are weighted mean rs. All effect sizes are statistically reliable, p Ͻ .001. CI ϭ confidence interval; LL ϭ lower limit (absolute value); UL ϭ
upper limit (absolute value). Ideological orientation is coded so that higher numbers are associated with conservatism and lower numbers with liberalism. Total
(unique) N refers to both individual participants and cases (including, with regard to system instability/threat, years). Data are from Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, and
Sulloway (2003a, 2003b).
662 October 2006 ● American Psychologist
Situational Factors
As former President Bill Clinton observed in a 2003 interview,
“The psychological setting after 9/11 helped [conservatives]”
because “we all wanted to see things in black
and white for a while” (Tomasky, 2003, p. 29). Much as the
Great Depression precipitated rightward shifts in Germany,
Italy, Spain, Austria, Hungary, Romania, Japan, and other
nations, heightened perceptions of uncertainty and threat in
the aftermath of September 11, 2001, generally increased
the appeal of conservative leaders and opinions (see, e.g.,
Jones, 2003). My colleagues and I found that the two
largest effect sizes obtained in our meta-analysis of psychological
predictors of conservatism were system threat
and fear of death (see Table 2), both of which were elicited
by the events of 9/11 (Jost et al., 2003a, 2003b).
Since the publication of our meta-analysis, several
additional studies have demonstrated that reminders of
death and terrorism increase the attractiveness of conservative
leaders and opinions. Willer (2004), for instance,
conducted time-series analyses and showed that President
Bush’s approval ratings increased each time his administration
raised the terror alert levels between 2001 and 2004.
Landau et al. (2004) demonstrated that subliminal and
supraliminal 9/11 and death primes led college students (a
relatively liberal population) to show increased support for
President Bush and his counterterrorism policies and decreased
support for the liberal challenger John Kerry.
These effects were replicated by Cohen et al. (2005) immediately
prior to the Bush–Kerry election in 2004. A
Spanish study found that in the aftermath of the Madrid
terrorist attacks of March 11, 2004, survey respondents
scored higher on measures of authoritarianism and prejudice
and were more likely to endorse conservative values
and less likely to endorse liberal values, compared with
baseline levels calculated prior to the attacks (Echebarria &
Ferna´ndez, 2006).
An experimental study by Jost, Fitzsimons, and Kay
(2004) demonstrated that priming people with images
evoking death (e.g., images of a funeral hearse, a “Dead
End” street sign, and a chalk outline of a human body) led
liberals and moderates as well as conservatives to more
strongly endorse politically conservative opinions on issues
such as taxation, same-sex marriage, and stem cell research,
compared with a standard control condition in
which participants were primed with images evoking pain
(e.g., a dentist’s chair, a bandaged arm, and a bee sting
removal). This finding is particularly important because it
demonstrates that death reminders increase support for
conservative opinions as well as leaders and therefore rules
out charismatic leadership as an alternative explanation for
the results (see Cohen et al., 2005). The results of these
post–9/11 studies, especially when taken in conjunction,
appear to overturn an earlier conclusion—based primarily
on a nonsignificant result obtained by Greenberg et al.
(1992, p. 214)—that mortality salience would lead liberals
to cling more strongly to liberal beliefs and values (see also
Greenberg & Jonas, 2003).
A recently conducted study of the political attitudes of
World Trade Center survivors provides further support for
the notion that threat precipitates “conservative shift” even
among people who were not initially conservative (Bonanno
& Jost, in press). Survivors in New York City were
asked 18 months after 9/11 whether they had grown “more
liberal, more conservative, or stayed the same” since the
terrorist attacks. Results revealed that 38% of the sample
overall reported that they had become more conservative in
the 18 months following 9/11, which was almost three
times as many people (13%) who reported that they had
grown more liberal, ␹2
(1, N ϭ 45) ϭ 5.26, p Ͻ .05.
Conservative shifts were more common than liberal shifts
not only among Republicans (50% vs. 0%) but also among
Independents (50% vs. 0%) and Democrats (35% vs. 23%)
and even among people who reported voting for Clinton in
1992 (32% vs. 16%) and 1996 (34% vs. 16%) and Gore in
2000 (40% vs. 12%). There was no evidence in this sample,
however, that embracing conservatism following 9/11 was
associated with improved well-being as measured either in
terms of survivors’ mental health symptoms or peer ratings
of their psychological adjustment. On the contrary, chronic
symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder and depression
(measured at 7 months and again at 18 months after 9/11)
were positively correlated with political conservatism, conservative
shift, and especially right-wing authoritarianism
(see Table 3), suggesting that, as Adorno et al. (1950)
proposed, there may be long-term (as well as short-term)
differences in distress and coping style that covary with
political orientation.
Dispositional Factors
In addition to situational factors, there is strong evidence
that chronic dispositional factors contribute to liberal versus
conservative political orientations. With respect to the
Big Five taxonomy of personality traits, Carney, Jost, Gosling,
Niederhoffer, and Potter (2006) found that two of the
five traits are consistently linked to political orientation in
the United States, and the other three are not (see also
Stenner, 2005, pp. 171–172). Carney et al.’s results, aggregated
across five samples involving a total of 19,248 research
participants, are summarized in Figure 2. Consistent
with Tomkins’s (1963) observation that leftists are more
motivated by excitement seeking, novelty, and creativity
for its own sake, liberals tend to score significantly higher
than do conservatives on self-report questionnaire items
tapping openness to new experiences (Gosling, Rentfrow,
& Swann, 2003; McCrae, 1996). In one of Carney et al.’s
five samples, it was possible to inspect correlations between
individuals’ scores on specific facets of the NEO
Personality Inventory–Revised and ideological self-placement
on a liberalism–conservatism scale (n ϭ 85). Results
revealed that all six of the openness facets were associated
with liberalism rather than conservatism: openness values
(r ϭ Ϫ.48), aesthetics (r ϭ Ϫ.32), actions (r ϭ Ϫ.27),
ideas (r ϭ Ϫ.24), feelings (r ϭ Ϫ.24), and fantasy (r ϭ
663October 2006 ● American Psychologist
Ϫ.19).10
These findings add to a growing body of evidence
suggesting that open-mindedness/closed-mindedness is a
fundamental psychological variable that helps us to understand
ideological asymmetries between the left and the
right (Jost et al., 2003a, 2003b; Kruglanski, 2004).
Tomkins (1963) was also correct in observing that
conservatives are more motivated than liberals by norm
attainment, rule following, and orderliness. In particular,
Carney et al. (2006) found that conservatives scored somewhat
higher than liberals on the Big Five dimension of
conscientiousness (see Figure 2), although reliable differences
emerged for only two of the facets, achievementstriving
(r ϭ .24) and order (r ϭ .21). These results, too,
are consistent with Jost et al.’s (2003a) meta-analytic finding
that conservatism is positively associated with personal
needs for order, structure, and closure (see Table 2). There
is even some behavioral evidence suggesting that conservatives’
living and working spaces may be better organized
and tidier, on average, than those of liberals! My colleagues
and I discovered, for example, that the bedrooms of conservatives
were significantly more likely to contain organizational
supplies such as calendars, postage stamps, and
laundry baskets, whereas the bedrooms of liberals were
more likely to contain art supplies, books, CDs, maps, and
travel documents (see Table 4). Results such as these imply
that left–right ideological differences permeate nearly every
aspect of our public and private lives. As a general rule,
liberals are more open-minded in their pursuit of creativity,
novelty, and diversity, whereas conservatives tend to pursue
lives that are more orderly, conventional, and better
organized (see Carney et al., 2006).
A longitudinal study conducted by Block and Block
(in press) suggests that personality differences between
liberals and conservatives may begin early in childhood,
long before people define themselves in terms of political
orientation. They found that preschool children who were
described by their teachers as energetic, emotionally ex-
10
Although Carney et al. (2006) found that conservatives scored
slightly higher than liberals on agreeableness in the two largest samples
contributing to the data summarized in Figure 2 (but not in the other three
samples), there was also some evidence that liberals scored higher than
conservatives on the tender-mindedness facet of the agreeableness subscale
(r ϭ –.27). This latter result (and others summarized in Table 2)
casts doubt on Eysenck’s (1954/1999) suggestion that tough-mindedness/
tender-mindedness is a dimension of personality that is truly orthogonal to
political orientation.
Figure 2
Correlations Between Big Five Personality Scores and
Ideological Self-Placement of Individuals
Note. Data are from Carney, Jost, Gosling, Niederhoffer, and Potter (2006,
Study 1). Effect size estimates are weighted mean correlations (rs), aggregating
results across five samples (total N ϭ 19,248). Each Big Five dimension was
correlated with ideological self-placement as measured using a single-item
5-point ideological self-placement scale, with higher numbers indicating more
conservatism and lower numbers indicating more liberalism. Asterisks are used
to denote those personality dimensions that were significant correlates in the
meta-analytic calculation: * p Ͻ .05 (two-tailed).*** p Ͻ .001 (two-tailed).
Table 3
Correlations Between Mental Health Symptoms and Right-Wing Authoritarianism, Political Conservatism, and
Conservative Shift in a Sample of World Trade Center Survivors
Symptoms following 9/11
Right-wing
authoritarianism Liberalism–conservatism Conservative shift
Posttraumatic stress disorder (7 months) .46*** .29* .25*
Posttraumatic stress disorder (18 months) .38** .29* .32*
Depression (7 months) .46*** .29* .28*
Depression (18 months) .26* .15 .31*
Note. Entries are bivariate correlations for analyses involving a sample of World Trade Center survivors (N ϭ 45). Mental health symptoms were measured using
self-report instruments on two occasions: once at 7 months and once at 18 months post–9/11. Ideological variables were measured once at 18 months post–9/11.
Right-wing authoritarianism was measured with 6 items drawn from Altemeyer’s (1988) scale. Liberalism–conservatism was measured with a single-item 7-point
ideological self-placement scale, with higher numbers indicating more conservatism and lower numbers indicating more liberalism. Conservative shift was a
dichotomous variable that distinguished participants who reported that they had “become more conservative” (n ϭ 17) in terms of political attitudes in the 18 months
following 9/11 from participants who reported that they did not (n ϭ 28). One-tailed tests were used to assess directional hypotheses because of the small sample
size. Data are from Bonanno and Jost (in press).
* p Ͻ .05. ** p Ͻ .01. *** p Ͻ .001.
664 October 2006 ● American Psychologist
pressive, gregarious, self-reliant, resilient, and impulsive
were more likely to identify themselves as politically liberal
as adults. Children who were seen by teachers as
relatively inhibited, indecisive, fearful, rigid, vulnerable,
and overcontrolled were more likely to identify themselves
as conservative adults. Although it would be impossible to
control for all of the factors that could influence both
personality and political orientation over a 20-year period,
the Block and Block findings largely mirror adult personality
differences (e.g., Jost et al., 2003a; Wilson, 1973) and
suggest that personality predispositions and interpersonal
relationships may affect one’s ideological preferences later
in life.
Studies comparing the social and political attitudes of
monozygotic and dizygotic twins reared apart reveal that
identical twins have more similar attitudes than fraternal
twins (e.g., Alford, Funk, & Hibbing, 2005; Bouchard,
Segal, Tellegen, & Krueger, 2003). This research suggests
that there is a substantial heritable component of political
attitudes, although it does not mean that there is a gene for
political orientation per se. A more likely explanation is
that there are basic cognitive and motivational predispositions,
including orientations toward uncertainty and threat
(e.g., Block & Block, in press; Jost et al., 2003a, 2003b;
Wilson, 1973), and that these predispositions have a heritable
component and lead to preferences for liberal versus
conservative ideas. It is therefore increasingly plausible
that differences in underlying psychological characteristics
(or processes) will eventually help to explain differences
between the left and the right at the level of ideological
content (i.e., resistance to change and acceptance of
inequality).
Implications for Understanding the
Red-State/Blue-State Divide
Research on psychological variables underlying political
ideology has led to a fruitful analysis of the current political
divide between “red states” and “blue states” in terms of
differences in “regional personality.” Specifically, my colleagues
and I theorized that differences in modal personality
styles at the state level could influence ideological
commitments and therefore voting patterns in at least two
ways (Rentfrow, Jost, Gosling, & Potter, 2006). First, there
is the possibility of self-selection in migration patterns.
People may be more likely to move to places where others
tend to share their personality characteristics and political
values; for instance, those who are especially high on
openness may disproportionately relocate to major coastal
or urban centers that are high on stimulation and cultural
diversity and that also tend to be very liberal. Second, there
is the prospect of social influence through interaction, so
that people are affected by their neighbors’ traits and political
orientations over time, thereby increasing the local
concentration of certain personality types and political
ideologies.
To investigate patterns of regional ideology, my
colleagues and I conducted an Internet survey in which
we obtained Big Five personality scores from hundreds
of thousands of American respondents and analyzed
their data on a state-by-state basis (Rentfrow et al.,
2006). We used these state-level personality estimates to
predict the percentage of votes for Democratic versus
Republican candidates in the 1996–2004 presidential
elections on the assumption that voting behavior is related
to ideology (see Table 1). Consistent with results at
the individual level of analysis (e.g., Carney et al., 2006;
McCrae, 1996), openness to new experiences was the
Table 4
Correlations Between Bedroom Cues and Ideological
Self-Placement of Occupant
Bedroom cue Liberalism-conservatism
Event calendar .31***
Postage stamps .30**
Presence of string/thread .29**
Iron and/or ironing board .28**
Laundry basket .25**
General calendar .23*
Any type of flag (including U.S. flag) .23*
Alcohol bottles/containers .23*
U.S. flag .21*
Well-lit (vs. dark) .20*
Organized (vs. disorganized) stationery .18*
Fresh (vs. stale) .17†
Neat (vs. messy) .16†
Clean (vs. dirty) .15†
Varied (vs. homogeneous) CDs Ϫ.19*
Books about travel Ϫ.21*
Classic rock CDs Ϫ.22*
Modern rock CDs Ϫ.22*
Reggae music CDs Ϫ.22*
Cultural memorabilia (e.g., trinkets from
vacation) Ϫ.22*
Tickets for/from travel Ϫ.22*
Many (vs. few) CDs Ϫ.23*
Books about ethnic matters Ϫ.24*
Folk music CDs Ϫ.24*
Movie tickets Ϫ.25**
Books about feminist topics Ϫ.25**
International maps (maps of countries
other than the United States) Ϫ.25**
Many (vs. few) books Ϫ.25**
Many (vs. few) items of stationery Ϫ.26**
World music CDs Ϫ.26**
Art supplies Ϫ.27**
Variety of music Ϫ.27**
Varied (vs. homogeneous) books Ϫ.34***
Note. Entries are bivariate correlations for analyses involving a sample of
college students and recent graduates (N ϭ 83). Room cues were coded by
research assistants who were unaware of the occupants’ political orientation,
which was measured separately using a single-item 5-point ideological selfplacement
scale, with higher numbers indicating more conservatism and lower
numbers indicating more liberalism. One-tailed tests were used to assess directional
hypotheses because of the small sample size. Data are from Carney, Jost,
Gosling, Niederhoffer, and Potter (2006, Study 4).
† p Ͻ .10. * p Ͻ .05. ** p Ͻ .01. *** p Ͻ .001.
665October 2006 ● American Psychologist
strongest regional personality predictor of the percentage
of the statewide vote cast for Democratic versus
Republican candidates in the three most recent presidential
elections (see Figure 3). That is, states with higher
mean-level openness scores were significantly more
likely to have cast votes for Clinton, Gore, and Kerry in
these elections and significantly less likely to have cast
votes for Dole or Bush. Remarkably, state-level openness
remained a significant predictor even after we adjusted
for demographic and other political variables,
including population density, percentage of minority
population, average income, voter turnout, and percentage
of the vote cast for the same-party candidate in the
previous election (see Rentfrow et al., 2006).
Although the effect sizes were not quite as large,
conscientiousness also proved to be a reasonably strong
and unique predictor of voting patterns. States that were
higher in mean-level conscientiousness were significantly
more likely to have cast votes for Dole and Bush in the last
three elections and less likely to have cast votes for Clinton,
Gore, or Kerry (see Figure 3). There was also some
evidence that states that were higher in mean-level extraversion
were more likely to favor liberal over conservative
candidates, but these results should be interpreted with
caution because they are contrary to those obtained by
Caprara, Barbaranelli, Consiglio, Picconi, and Zimbardo
(2003) in Italy. Altogether, we found that the Big Five
dimensions accounted for 40% of the statistical variance in
voting percentages across the three elections (Rentfrow et
al., 2006). These results suggest that a psychological analysis,
in addition to the kinds of demographic and institutional
analyses offered by sociologists and political scientists
(Erikson, Wright, & McIver, 1993), may be extremely
useful for understanding the American political divide.
Concluding Remarks
The late Italian political theorist Norberto Bobbio (1996)
pointed out that at one time or another it was in the political
interest of nearly everyone to deny the enduring relevance
of ideology insofar as “undermining the left/right distinction
becomes an obvious expedient for hiding one’s own
weakness” (p. 14). In other words, blurring ideological
boundaries is a rhetorical strategy that helps a sidelined
minority party to refashion its image. For example, thirdparty
candidate Ralph Nader claimed11
during the 2000
political campaign that “there are few major differences”
between the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates,
but he has had to explain and justify this remark in
11
See http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?resϭ9C03EFD81
43FF931A2575BC0A9669C8B63.
Figure 3
Statewide Big Five Personality Scores Predict Voting Patterns in U.S. Presidential Elections, 1996–2004
**
**
*
**
**
*
-1
-0.5
0
0.5
1
Openness Extraversion Neuroticism
CorrelationswithVotingPercentages
Democratic Candidates
Republican Candidates
Conscientiousness Agreeableness
Note. Data are from Rentfrow, Jost, Gosling, and Potter (2006). Entries are standardized regression coefficients for a model in which state-level means for all Big
Five dimensions were used simultaneously to predict the percentage of the statewide vote cast for Democratic (Clinton, Gore, and Kerry) and Republican (Dole and
Bush) candidates, aggregating across the 1996, 2000, and 2004 presidential elections. Asterisks are used to denote those regional personality dimensions that
emerged as significant predictors in all three elections: * p Ͻ .05 (two-tailed). ** p Ͻ .01 (two-tailed).
666 October 2006 ● American Psychologist
the wake of 9/11, the Bush presidency, and a controversial
military occupation of Iraq.12
The end-of-ideology thesis originated with neoconservatives
such as Bell (1960), Shils (1955/1968b), and Fukuyama
(1996/2006b); their work helped to marginalize the radical left
and to give neoconservatives a fresh start. D’Souza (1995)
wielded the end-of-ideology excuse to distance conservative
policies from unpopular legacies such as racism. Soon thereafter,
it was liberals who, following the collapse of socialism
in Eastern Europe, abandoned their commitment to robust
social welfare programs and professed the need for a “third
way” (Giddens, 1998) to defeat the heirs of Thatcher and
Reagan. The strategy worked for Bill Clinton and Tony
Blair—but arguably at the cost of taking historically leftist
concerns such as exploitation, egalitarianism, and social and
economic justice off the political bargaining table.
Lefebvre (1968) was among the first to diagnose the
short-sighted, obfuscatory, and (ironically) ideological nature
of the end-of-ideology thesis (see also Mills, 1960/
1968). He noted that “extreme ideologizing is accompanied
by a certain conviction that the ‘end of ideology’ has been
reached” (p. 87) and predicted that “ideology is not so
easily eliminated; to the contrary, it is marked by sudden
flare-ups and makes surprising comebacks” (p. 87). The
evidence that I have assembled in this article suggest that
Lefebvre was right. There is a degree of political division
in the United States and elsewhere that would have been
unfathomable to the end-of-ideologists, and it shows no
signs of abating. Even Fukuyama (2006a), one of the chief
architects of the neoconservative movement, has acknowledged
that “the legacy of the Bush first-term foreign policy
and its neo-conservative supporters has been so polarizing
that it is going to be hard to appropriately balance American
ideals and interests in the coming years” (p. 67).
It is probably no coincidence that the ideological
struggle was renewed by the right wing rather than the left
wing. Tedin (1987) reported data from 1980 indicating that
more than three times as many conservatives as liberals
satisfied Converse’s (1964) criteria for being true “ideologues.”
And, as we have seen, a large body of evidence
supports the (asymmetrical) rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis
over the (symmetrical) ideologue-as-extremist hypothesis
(Jost et al., 2003a, 2003b). Research suggests that
conservatives are often prone to expedient, closed-minded,
and authoritarian solutions (e.g., Altemeyer, 1988, 1998;
Kruglanski, 2004; Sidanius et al., 1996). Liberals, on the
other hand, may be too quick to defy authority, flout
conventions, and slay the “sacred cows” of others (e.g., see
Haidt & Graham, in press). There are almost surely necessary,
self-correcting historical swings in both left-wing and
right-wing directions, as Tomkins (1965) noted in the epigraph
I selected for this article. It may well be that the
future of humanity depends on each side’s ability to learn
from and avoid repeating past mistakes.
My own conclusion is similar to that of Lane (1962)
and Kerlinger (1984), which is that although ordinary people
by no means pass the strictest tests imaginable for
ideological sophistication, most of them do think, feel, and
behave in ideologically meaningful and interpretable terms.
As I have shown, millions of Americans now actively seek
out ideologically charged talk radio, televised news programs,
and political blog sites. Between two thirds and
three quarters of the American population currently locate
their political attitudes on a liberalism–conservatism dimension,
and I have shown that these attitudes do reliably
predict voting intentions and many other important outcomes,
including beliefs, opinions, values, traits, behaviors,
and perhaps even mental health characteristics. Many
other discoveries concerning the causes and consequences
of left–right ideological differences await psychologists
and other social and behavioral scientists but only if we
accept that the differences exist and can be studied
scientifically.
In looking back on the end-of-ideology thesis that he
helped to promulgate, Shils (1968a) himself admitted that
“the potentiality for ideology seems to be a permanent part
of the human constitution” (p. 75). It is a good thing, then,
that psychologists have finally returned to the topic after so
many years of neglect. There are many important questions
for which we lack solid empirical answers, in large part
because of “end of ideology” pronouncements. In this
article, I have taken a distinctively psychological approach
to political ideology, highlighting the social, cognitive, and
motivational underpinnings of liberalism and conservatism;
similarly fruitful analyses could be undertaken with
respect to religious and other belief systems as well. Because
ideologies and other belief systems grow out of an
attempt to satisfy the epistemic, existential, and relational
needs of our species, it may be ascertained that ideology is
a “natural” part of our psychological functioning and will
always be present in one form or another. Core ideological
beliefs concerning attitudes toward equality and traditionalism
possess relatively enduring dispositional and situational
antecedents, and they exert at least some degree of
influence or constraint over the individual’s other thoughts,
feelings, and behaviors. There is reason to assume that
human beings have required and will continue to require
the characteristics that are associated with the political left
as well as the political right. We need tradition, order,
structure, closure, discipline, and conscientiousness, to be
sure, but if the human race is to continue to survive new
challenges, we will also just as surely need creativity,
curiosity, tolerance, diversity, and open-mindedness.
12
See, for example, Remnick (2006, p. 48) and http://www
.seacoastonline.com/2000news/7_12_e1.htm. The point here is not to suggest
that there are no similarities between Democrats and Republicans (or,
more precisely, between liberals and conservatives), but that there are
substantial political and psychological differences.
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