Ideological Consistency as a Collective Phenomenon

Abstract

Researchers ordinarily consider ideological consistency to be a characteristic of individuals; groups are considered to be ideological only if they are composed of ideologically oriented individuals. We show how a group as a whole can be characterized as exhibiting an ideological basis for its preferences even though many, or even most, of its members have preferences that are inconsistent with the supposed unidimensional ideological continuum. As an illustration, we show that the United States electorate of 1980 had collective preferences among the candidates Kennedy, Carter, Ford, and Reagan as if these preferences reflected an underlying left-right dimension among these candidates, despite the fact that a high proportion of individual voters had preferences among these candidates that did not fit the left-right dimension. In general, we show reasons why collectivities are likely to be more ideologically consistent than are the individuals composing them.