Ideological Schema Research Articles

Ideology–Driven opinion formation in Europe: The case of attitudes towards the third sector in Sweden

Abstract. This paper uses attitudes towards the third sector in Sweden to test general assumptions about how citizens in West European political systems apply ideological schemas as shortcuts to political preferences. Attitudes towards the third sector are found to be affected by all ideological schemas reflected in the Swedish party system (state–market, Christian traditionalism, and growth–ecology). Contrary to what is implied by findings from America, these effects are very stable across socio–economic groups (especially those of the dominant statemarket schema). Similarly, no interaction effects of political sophistication could be traced, and the relative impact of the schemas remains the same regardless of whether or not the third sector is presented as an alternative to the welfare state. The implications of these findings for the nature of public opinion formation in ideologically clear and structured political systems are discussed.

Perestroika and the October Revolution in Soviet Historiography

The history of the Great October socialist revolution is among one of the more actively investigated topics in Soviet historiography. For more than seventy years a large amount of documentary material has been unearthed, a huge literature has been created that practically redraws the canvas of revolutionary events. Nonetheless, we must admit that, seventy-four years later, we still do not have a genuinely scientific, truthful history of the revolution. There are many reasons for this, but chief among them is the restricting influence, in the words of L. D. Trotsky, of the Stalin school of falsification. The decades-long reign of Stalinist myths and legends that were foisted upon and created by historians, the dogmatic postulates and Procrustean ideological schema, had a pernicious effect on historical research into the October Revolution. Overcoming them is no easy matter, and it will require, judging from everything, a great deal of time and effort. Beginning in 1985, the restructuring of sociopolitical life in the Soviet Union, democratization, and glasnost created fundamentally new working conditions for Soviet historians. Above all, we have encountered an unprecedented explosion of popular interest in our country's history, particularly in the Soviet period. This interest is determined by practical social needs: to explain the historical roots of painful events, which gradually accumulated and led to the current crisis in Soviet society. So far as October 1917 is the point of reference in the modern history of the Soviet Union, to that extent it has become the object of the most intense attention of society. Moreover, it has moved to the center of a sharp ideological and political struggle that is sweeping the country. The October Revolution has ceased to be an event of the past; it has become a contemporary, vital event that has prompted a stream of questions, emotions, arguments and counter-arguments, and conjectures and inventions.

Wisdom and Good Judgment in Politics

The job of the political leader requires, in the view of classical writers, unique sensibilities to assure good political judgment and wisdom. Two characteristics that may define a sui generis nature of political decision making include tasks of: (1) responding to emotional demands of mass publics; (2) dealing with amoral and unusually ambitious people. In addition, the study of political judgment involves two further issues unique to politics: (3) working with people who think in ideological schema; and (4) institutional settings designed to shape outcomes of decisions.

The Breadth, Depth, and Utility of Class, Partisan, and Ideological Schemata

Given the complexity and ambiguity ofthings political, there are many ways to think about government and politics. The authors compare class, partisan, and ideological schemata in terms of cognitive content and utility in discriminating among political policies and President Reagan's positions on the issues. The rich-poor class schema is found to provide most respondents with a mechanism for dealing effectively with type issues, while both the Republican-Democrat partisan schema and the liberal-conservative ideological schema provide sophisticated respondents with an effective cognitive framework for dealing with both spend-save issues and the more abstract noneconomic policies. It is fast becoming an article of faith in the groves of academe that God so loved physicists She gave them all the simple problems, leaving the rest of us with what are called interesting questions, the hallmarks of which are disagreements over concepts, disputes about measures, and counterarguments to every interpretation. Nowhere is the controversial nature of political science more evident than in the literature on belief systems, in particular the role of ideology. Although the conceptual and methodological problems with ideological belief systems are serious enough for Bennett (1977) to have called for a moratorium on empirical research pending the