If an ‘ideology’, in its broadest sense, is ‘a system of ideas’, semiotics, the study of sign systems, is predestined to make essential contributions to the study of ideologies. The semiotic approach to the study of ideology begins with an investigation of the concept itself, which has changed considerably in the course of its history. Theoretical semiotics has studied signs of ideologies and i...

Scholars have long debated the nature and basis of political power in complex societies, and ideology has figured prominently in their debates as a force explaining and actively validating the social order. "An ideology tells the members of a group who they are and explains their relations to one another, to people outside the group, to the past and future, to nature, and to the cosmos" (Conrad...

• We examined the relation between political ideology and racial categorization. • People categorized morphed faces that ranged from 100% Black to 100% White. • Conservatism (vs. liberalism) was associated with the tendency to categorize racially ambiguous faces as Black. • Relation between ideology and categorization was mediated by opposition to equality. • This research helps to explain the ...

This article focuses on the consolidation of naval hygiene practices during the Victorian era, a period of profound medical change that coincided with the fleet's transition from sail to steam. The ironclads of the mid- to late- nineteenth century offered ample opportunities to improve preventive medicine at sea, and surgeons capitalised on new steam technologies to provide cleaner, dryer, and ...

Do mundane daily choices, such as what brands people buy in a supermarket, reflect aspects of values and ideologies? This article presents a large-scale field study performed to determine whether traits associated with a conservative ideology, as measured by voting behavior and religiosity, are manifested in consumers' routine, seemingly inconsequential product choices. Our analysis of market s...

We develop a dynamic, 2-party citizen-candidate model in which candidates are distinguished by both their ideology and their valence. We provide sufficient conditions under which (i) the median voter is decisive and (ii) there exists a unique symmetric, stage-undominated, stationary perfect Bayesian equilibrium. In our dynamic setting, reputational concerns endogenize incentives to compromise. ...