In this study, the relations among political ideology, exploratory behavior, and the formation of attitudes toward novel stimuli were explored. Participants played a computer game that required learning whether these stimuli produced positive or negative outcomes. Learning was dependent on participants’ decisions to sample novel stimuli and discover the associated valence. Political ideology co...

Many studies have focused on the relationship between political information and the use of ideology. Here, we argue that two ‘‘evaluative motivations’’— general investment of the self in politics and extremity of partisanship—serve as moderators of this relationship. Specifically, we use data from two recent national surveys to test whether the possession of information is more strongly associa...

Machine learning techniques have become very popular for a number of text classification tasks, from spam filters to sentiment analysis to topic classification. In this paper, we will apply a number of machine learning techniques to classifying text by the political ideology of the speaker (i.e. Republican or Democrat). This is a potentially useful application of text classification, as when re...

Presenting an impressive model based on a large body of evidence, J. T. Jost, J. Glaser, A.W. Kruglanski, and F. J. Sulloway (2003) proposed that political conservatism uniquely serves epistemic, existential, and ideological needs driven by fears and uncertainties. The authors offer an alternative view based on conceptual considerations, historical events, features of communist ideology and pra...

There is considerable irony in the current search for the causes of the rapid political changes sweeping the communist world after 1988. In retrospect, it is not hard to single out a number of macrosocietal trends that led eventually to regime change: economic stagnation and consumer deprivation, deeply eroded commitment to official ideology and the growth of widespread cynicism, the corruption...

In this research we demonstrate the powerful role of ingroup favoritism, rather than hostility, in American intergroup biases. Specifically, we take a novel perspective to understanding the relationship between political ideology and discrimination against ethnic-minority Americans by focusing on the role of patriotism. Across three studies, we show that political ideology is a strong predictor...

Ecological economics is built on a value-commitment to study environmental issues and to contribute constructively to a more sustainable development path. However, many ecological economists still hesitate, it appears, to depart too much from other scholars by openly addressing issues of values and ideology. In this essay, the role of the scholar’s orientation with respect to values and ideolog...

Scholars have long argued over the dimensionality of legislative voting. Using scores from ten groups, this paper shows that analysis of even basically unidimensional voting can benefit from consideration of domain specific ideology. Although correlations between interest group scores and NOMINATE, the most widely used measure of congressional ideology, are generally high, this paper finds seve...

This research sought to investigate the validity of Rokeach's two-dimensional model of political ideology. In two separate studies, samples of Australian adults and university students were asked to complete the Social Values Inventory, a newly derived instrument designed to provide a more detailed coverage of the political ideology domain. Factor analyses of each set of data revealed a basic t...

The Critical Discourse Analysis is often applied to analyze political discourse including the public speech, in which the speaker wins favorite response from the audience. This paper, based on Critical Discourse Analysis theory and Systematic Functional Linguistics, analyzes Barack Obama’s presidential speeches mainly from the point of transitivity and modality, in which we can learn the langua...