Political Ideology Research

I recently finished reading an intriguing article summing up social science research on political ideology. The direct link is here, but you can also access it by going to NYU Professor John Jost's webpage here and scrolling down until you find this item:

Jost, J.T., Federico, C.M. & Napier, J.L. (2009). Political ideology: Its structure, functions, and elective affinities. Annual Review of Psychology, 60, 307-333.

The benefit of going to his page is that you can see the many other papers he's authored or co-authored on this and related subjects, including a number of more recent efforts. While this article was from 2009, I found it extremely useful as a recap and evaluation of the major research on political ideology. I had read news articles about some of these studies, but certainly not most of them. (It does cite Bob Altemeyer's useful book, The Authoritarians.) The bibliography is extensive if you're looking for further reading. The article is written for a professional journal versus for a lay person, so the authors take it for granted that certain terms are well understood, but I thought it was pretty readable for all that. While some of the findings are intuitive, it's always good to have actual research to confirm and quantify those notions, and challenging false conceptions is even more valuable.

Hat tip to bradjshannon for passing it on.

The Social Contract is Broken

Dave Johnson has a new post up at Campaign for America's Future, "Tax Cuts are Theft." In it, he visualizes the Social Contract as a cycle, as seen above:

A beneficial cycle: We invest in infrastructure and public structures that create the conditions for enterprise to form and prosper. We prepare the ground for business to thrive. When enterprise prospers we share the bounty, with good wages and benefits for the people who work in the businesses and taxes that provide for the general welfare and for reinvestment in the infrastructure and public structures that keep the system going.

But as he explains, under Reaganomics, and our current trickle-down system:

... The social contract is broken. Instead of providing good wages and benefits and paying taxes to provide for the general welfare and reinvestment in infrastructure and public structures, the bounty of our democracy is being diverted to a wealthy few.

Head on over to read the whole post, and see his modified graphic for the Social Contract after Reaganomics. (An earlier post of his, "Reagan Revolution Home To Roost - In Charts," is also well worth a look.)

I wrote about these issues fairly recently in "Attack of the Plutocrats" and "The Social Contract," which have their own diagrams, but I like Dave's graphic of the economic social contract as a cycle.

Update: Sara Robinson has a good follow-up post to Dave's.