Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Assessing Your Political Ideology

Assessing Your Political Ideology

To calculate your political ideology, use the table below:

Statement/Response
Circled 1, 2, or 3
Circled 4
Circled 5, 6, or 7
1
Equality
Ambivalent
Individualism
2
Equality
Ambivalent
Individualism
3
Individualism
Ambivalent
Equality
4
Individualism
Ambivalent
Social Order
5
Social Order
Ambivalent
Individualism
6
Individualism
Ambivalent
Social Order

Using the results from the table above, identify your ideology in the table below:


Liberal=Equality on statements 1, 2,    and 3; Individualism on 4, 5, and 6


Populist=Equality on statements 1, 2, and 3; Social Order on 4, 5, and 6



Libertarian=Individualism on Statements 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6


Conservative=Individualism on statements 1, 2, and 3; Social Order on 4, 5, and 6.
                        

If you have fewer than three “equalities” or “individualisms” on the first three statements, and/or fewer than three “individualisms” or “social orders” on the last three statements, you are not an ideologue. That is, you do not use an ideology to determine your positions on issues because you do not have a consistent set of attitudes about the scope and purpose of government. This is not a bad thing!

People differ in their level of political sophistication—which Professor Robert Luskin, in his 1990 Political Behavior article entitled “Explaining Political Sophistication,” defined as the extent to which a person’s “political cognitions are numerous, cut a wide substantive swath, and are highly organized, or ‘constrained.’” In other words, if a person is politically sophisticated, he or she knows a lot about politics, has knowledge in many areas of politics, and organizes this knowledge so that his or her attitudes are constrained. On the other hand, if a person is unsophisticated politically, he or she thinks about politics viscerally, reacting to each political issue without thinking about how it relates to other issues and the positions that he or she holds on that issue. We might diagram it thus:


Hopefully, you now have an idea of where you are in terms of possessing an ideology and about your level of political sophistication. It’s also a really good time for comments and questions.

1 comment:

  1. I'm not an idealogue! Or, put in a less flattering way, I'm flaky! I scored individualism on 1, 3, 4, 5, and 6 equality on 2.

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