Ability, Motivation, and the Use of Ideology

The 'left versus right' ideological dimension plays a key role in the organization of attitudes toward political issues and actors by allowing citizens to adopt attitudes that are in ideological agreement with one another, i.e., consistently liberal or consistent conservative across targets. In turn, the organization of multiple opinions into an ideologically-consistent framework may provide those opinions with greater strength and stability. The left-right ideological dimension provides a general conceptual framework for understanding and evaluation: if a citizen understands and identifies with an ideological viewpoint in a informed way (i.e., one that reflects a real understanding of liberalism or conservatism), he/she will have a ready-made set of criteria for judgments about a wide variety of issues and actors. Despite these benefits, research suggests that most individuals do not use ideology when forming and organizing their opinions. However, research also suggests that political expertise, or factual political knowledge, increases the likelihood that individuals will make effective use of ideology. As such, expertise -- which can be thought of as a type of ability -- has been at the center of most perspectives on the use of ideology. In contrast, this project argues that even citizens who possess the expertise needed to understand the left-right continuum and place themselves on it in an informed way may not use ideology to form strong, ideologically consistent attitudes unless they are also motivated to evaluate the things they encounter.

Preliminary tests of this hypothesis have been supportive, revealing that experts are more likely to display ideologically consistent attitudes when they are also high in a personality characteristic known as the need to evaluate, or the degree to which one habitually desires to evaluate things as good or bad. This research project builds on these results using a national survey of American adults. Specifically, the proposed research project has three objectives. The first objective will be to determine whether expertise and evaluative motivation combine to increase the use of ideology by increasing the extent to which citizens' ideological identifications are salient to them. That is, if an expert with a high level of evaluative motivation is more likely to use ideology, is it because her combination of high expertise and high evaluative motivation makes her more aware of her own ideological commitments? The second objective will be to examine outcomes secondarily related to the use of ideology, like issue-attitude crystallization. In other words, do expertise and evaluative motivation also combine to make citizens' attitudes toward particular issues and political figures stronger, more stable, and less resistant to change? Finally, the third objective will be to determine whether other variables related to evaluative motivation -- such as one's level of personal involvement in the political domain -- strengthen the relationship between expertise and the use of ideology the same way that the need to evaluate does.

By examining the role of evaluative motivation, this study will contribute to the literature on ideology, by providing a richer model of how political attitudes attain consistency and stability -- one that accounts for how ability and motivation combine to determine the use of ideas that facilitate the formation of coherent, well-organized political attitudes. Moreover, insofar as the effective use of ideology helps citizens grasp the framework that organizes the bulk of political debate -- and the framework in which the most powerful actors in the political world are likely to conduct their business -- this study will shed light on an important antecedent of citizen empowerment. Besides these societal benefits, this project will furnish important teaching and learning experiences for graduate and undergraduate students working with the researcher.