Theories of Ideology
One of the key strands of research for CSPI concerns understanding the nature of ‘ideology’. The term itself is deeply contested, in terms of its meaning, it scope, and its implications. We look to move away from conceptions of ideology that interpret it either as a form of ‘false consciousness’, consisting in illusions that emanate from class positions, in contrast to some social scientific ‘truth’, or as rigidly doctrinaire and inflexible forms of political thought.
One of the founding directors of CSPI was Professor Michael Freeden, a global authority on ideologies, founding editor of the Journal of Political Ideologies, and a key figure in the development of the ‘new wave’ of ideology studies. Through works such as Ideologies and Political Theory, Liberal Languages, and The Political Theory of Political Thinking Freeden has developed a corpus of deep and subtle ideology analysis, helping us to understand the relationships between political thinking and political practices.
We follow Freeden in understanding ideologies to be mundane and quite ordinary forms of political thinking that enable people to make sense of the world around them. The relationship of any ideology to either truth, or subtlety of understanding, should be an empirical rather than de facto matter. We are at the forefront of a growing interest in ideology research that views its object as 'everyday', vernacular political ideas that flow through, across, and between different historical and social contexts, and which become embodied in concrete forms of life. Within that broad framework of understanding, CSPI engages in, and welcomes, research that focuses on developing our theoretical understanding of the nature of ideology.
Recently or currently running research projects in this strand include:
Mediating between macro, meso, and micro morphologies: adaptation and application in political ideology
In collaboration with the Department of Political Science at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, and the Department of History at the University of Michigan, CSPI developed the ‘Ideological Translations’ project between 2016 and 2019. The project brought together researchers from a variety of disciples and institutions, with workshops in Richmond, Virginia, and Vancouver, to better understand the ways in which political ideologies ‘translate’ between different contexts. This could, for example, be translation across national borders and political cultures, between different linguistic contexts, between elite and mass audiences, or between different political parties.
This outputs of this research argue for the analysis of the flow of ideological discourse within and across three distinct but interrelated levels: (1) the canonically defined, or macro level, (2) the intermediate or meso level of competitive political appeals, political relevant public discourse and cultural criticism, and (3) the everyday or micro level of conceptual use by non-experts. This differentiation among levels of ideological action and influence helps us to clarify the objects and appropriate methods of ideological analysis. Methods applied in specific cases must facilitate an effective focus on phenomena on one of these levels while still allowing recognition of the complex forms of direct and indirect conceptual influence and connection between the levels.
The outputs of this research are a special issue of The Journal of Political Ideologies published in 2019, and two books: Political Ideology in Parties, Policy, and Civil Society: Interdisciplinary Insights edited by David Laycock (UBC Press), and Ideologies in Action: Morphological Adaptation and Political Ideas (Routledge - based on the special issue) edited by Mathew Humphrey, David Laycock, and Maiken Umbach.