Construct · 6 fields · 10 citations
One name. Different field. Different construct. One map.
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A configuration of political attitudes bound together by constraint: knowing one position lets you predict the others. Converse fixed this in 1964 and found that most mass publics show little of it, which made "ideology" in this field a property of elites and of a minority of sophisticated citizens. Jost, Federico, and Napier's review keeps the left–right dimension but adds motivation: people adopt an ideology partly because it satisfies epistemic, existential, and relational needs. The unit is a person's attitude structure, and the construct is neutral about whether the beliefs are true.[1][2]
A shared mental model that lets people decide and cooperate without paying to gather information every time. North treated ideology as part of the informal institutional structure that economizes on transaction costs and explains why people follow rules when shirking would pay. Hinich and Munger made it a formal object: a low-dimensional map from ideological position to expected policy that voters use because learning each candidate's platform is too expensive. Here ideology is an instrument of rational choice, valued for what it saves rather than what it claims.[3][4]
A relatively coherent set of beliefs that bind people together and explain their world in terms of cause and effect, which organizations use to justify and guide decisions. Beyer's handbook chapter set the definition for organization theory: ideologies supply the premises for choices that the formal structure leaves open, and different ideologies inside one organization predict conflict over how to decide. The referent is a collectivity (a firm, a profession, a department) and the ideology can concern quality, growth, or safety as readily as anything political.[5]
Any set of beliefs about language that speakers articulate as a rationalization or justification of how language is structured and used, Silverstein's 1979 definition, which launched a subfield. Woolard and Schieffelin's review widened it to the shared ideas that link language to social identity, morality, and authority, and showed that these ideas shape language change itself. The object is not politics but language, and the point is that speakers' theories about their own language are consequential, whether or not they are accurate.[6][7]
Mannheim distinguished the particular conception (an opponent's ideas dismissed as self-serving) from the total conception, in which every group's whole way of thinking, including the analyst's, is shaped by its social position. Ideologies are the ideas that defend an existing order; utopias are the ideas that transcend it. His move was to generalize the Marxist diagnosis to all parties, which turned ideology from an accusation into a method for relating thought to its social base.[8]
The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas: ideology is the inverted picture of social relations that presents a particular class's interests as universal. Marx and Engels fixed the pejorative meaning in The German Ideology. Althusser made it structural rather than mistaken, ideology is the lived relation of individuals to their real conditions, reproduced through institutions such as schools and churches that "interpellate" people as subjects. On this reading no one stands outside ideology, and the concept explains how an order reproduces itself without force.[9][10]
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