What Ideology Means and What It Does: Citizen Conceptualization of, and Physiological Response to, Ideological Terms
Year: 2014
Type: preprint
Abstract: Scholars have long argued that ideology has an affective component as well as a cognitive one. Most studies seeking to identify the emotional aspects of ideology have done so indirectly, by asking individuals to provide self-reports of their feelings. Recently, however, scholars have employed direct measures of emotion (i.e., measures of autonomic nervous system response) in order to explore the connections between affect and ideology. This paper relies upon such measures but differs from previous work by not priming an emotional response in subjects. Instead, we measure subjects’ affective responses to what appears to be an entirely cognitive process, namely, defining ideological terms. Our results suggest, among other things, that simply invoking ideological terms elicits a significant emotional response in subjects. Furthermore, political interest and political knowledge play important roles in moderating affect in ideological self-identifiers. Interest increases affective reactions while knowledge calms them.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Institutions: Franklin & Marshall College, Reed College
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2352140474