Political Information, Political Involvement, and Reliance on Ideology in Political Evaluation

Abstract

Many studies have focused on the relationship between political information and the use of ideology. However, recent work suggests that the magnitude of this relationship may depend on whether citizens are motivated to evaluate objects they encounter. Expanding on previous work, we argue that (1) general investment of the self in politics and (2) extremity of partisanship can serve as domain-specific sources of evaluative motivation. Specifically, we use data from two recent national surveys to test whether the possession of information is more strongly associated with a tendency to approach politics in an “ideological” fashion among individuals high in both types of evaluative motivation. Results supported this hypothesis, revealing that information was more strongly associated with ideological consistency among those with high scores on two measures of investment of the self in politics—general political interest and centrality of politics to the self—and those with more extreme partisan identifications. As such, this study provides a theoretical account and empirical evidence for the argument that political information and involvement should not simply be considered as constructs that independently affect how people use ideology, but as variables that condition each other’s effects.