phD Thesis

Ideologies, Ideological Asymmetries, and the Psychological Roots of Political Behavior

Summary

Since the 60s, political science research has consistently painted ordinary citizens’ ideological beliefs in an unfavorable light, defending political views as unstable, uninformed, inconsistent, and lacking ideological content and coherence. This view, thought to be as true today as it was decades ago, has taken on the status of conventional wisdom among many scholars of political behavior in the United States and beyond. The persistence of this view is surprising in an increasingly polarized political environment wherein a growing share of the public supports parties and candidates fervidly, and ideological ideas become progressively more embedded in citizens' lives and society's culture. In this thesis, we argue that (a) the long-held ideological innocence hypothesis does not fully capture the nature of public opinion in today's political landscape; (b) ordinary citizens are more ideologically committed than the published literature assumes. We propose that a more careful and nuanced inspection of ideological thinking—and its psychology—in the electorate can bring about novel insights into the role of ideology, its psychological roots, and how we understand the electorate's political convictions and behavior. Specifically, we studied the role of individual differences in one's psychology, such as social dominance orientation, right-wing authoritarianism, justice sensitivity, conspiracy mentality, and system justification, shaping individuals' proclivities toward some ideologies---and not others. We also examined the ideological basis of political attitudes, such as anti-scientific, populist, and immigration attitudes. The thesis is organized into six chapters, each focusing on a specific aspect of ideology and its psychology.

In Chapter 1, we provide an introduction to the study of ideology, its definitions, and a review of the various approaches used to analyze it. We zero in on the quantitative approaches, focusing on comparing and contrasting the epistemic and empirical foundations of the most prominent political science and social psychology approaches. In Chapter 2, we show the political belief systems of ordinary citizens are coherently organized around support for versus opposition to both social and economic forms of inequality in capitalist societies. In Chapter 3, we show that supporters of Donald Trump in 2016, who had been seen by many pundits as motivated by a repudiation of the social and economic status quo, were, in fact, committed to a traditional social order, strongly justifying both economic and gender-based disparities in American society. In Chapter 4, we show that individuals' self- vs. other-oriented justice concerns undergird preferences for populist right-wing actors in the US and Germany. In Chapter 5, we show that anti-scientific attitudes are underpinned by ideology in the US (i.e., conservatism), and its psychological profile was uncovered. Finally, in Chapter 6, we show that—consistent with Hofstadter's account of the paranoid style in American politics—conservatives were not only more likely than liberals to endorse specific conspiracy theories, but they were also more likely to espouse conspiratorial worldviews in general.

Together, these chapters contribute to the study of ideology by providing new insights into the origins and dynamics of ideological beliefs. Through diverse methodological approaches and rich empirical data, these chapters shed light on the political and psychological factors that shape individuals' ideological attitudes and how these influence political behavior, preferences, and decision-making. The findings from this thesis—in line with the theory of political ideology as motivated social cognition—offer a psychologically driven perspective on ideology in contemporary politics, demonstrating that one's psychology is pivotal to one's ideological dispositions and view of the socio-political world.

Open Access

This work is fully open access and can be freely accessed directly from the University of Cologne’s Ph.D. thesis repository or Thesis Commons. The BibTex or other export options for citation are available on the respective websites.

Suggested citation: Azevedo, F. (2023). Ideologies, Ideological Asymmetries, and the Psychological Roots of Political Behavior. [Doctoral thesis, Universität zu Köln.]. Universität zu Köln. https://kups.ub.uni-koeln.de/70958/