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Political Expertise, Social Worldviews, and Ideology: Translating “Competitive Jungles” and “Dangerous Worlds” into Ideological Reality

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Abstract

The psychological bases of ideology have received renewed attention amid growing political polarization. Nevertheless, little research has examined how one’s understanding of political ideas might moderate the relationship between “pre-political” psychological variables and ideology. In this paper, we fill this gap by exploring how expertise influences citizens’ ability to select ideological orientations that match their psychologically rooted worldviews. We find that expertise strengthens the relationship between two basic social worldviews—competitive-jungle beliefs and dangerous-world beliefs and left–right self-placement. Moreover, expertise strengthens these relationships by boosting the impact of the worldviews on two intervening ideological attitude systems—social dominance orientation and right-wing authoritarianism. These results go beyond previous work on expertise and ideology, suggesting that expertise strengthens not only relationships between explicitly political attitudes but also the relationship between political attitudes and their psychological antecedents.

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Notes

  1. In the competitive-jungle/SDO analysis, the predictors in the final equation containing SDO accounted for a significant proportion of variance in left–right self-placement, F(5, 279) = 13.59, p < .001, with adjusted R 2 = .173.

  2. All bootstrap analyses used 5000 replications to estimate indirect effects.

  3. In the dangerous-world/RWA analysis, the predictors in the final equation containing RWA accounted for a significant proportion of variance in left–right self-placement, F(5, 279) = 32.65, p < .001, with adjusted R 2 = .305.

  4. Duckitt and Sibley (2009) have argued that the competitive-jungle/SDO path should have its strongest effects on economic issues, while the dangerous-world/RWA path should have its strongest effects on social issues. Given the high correlation between our economic and social ideology indicators (r = .58, p < .001), we use a composite of the two. However, when the competitive-jungle/SDO analyses in Table 2, Model 2 of Table 4, and Fig. 1 are replicated using the economic ideology item as the sole dependent measure, all results remain the same. Similarly, when the dangerous-world/RWA analyses in Table 3, Model 3 of Table 4, and Fig. 2 are replicated using the social ideology item only as the dependent measure, the results also remain the same.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Minnesota, 75 East River Road, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA

    Christopher M. Federico, Corrie V. Hunt & Damla Ergun

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  1. Christopher M. Federico
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  2. Corrie V. Hunt
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Correspondence to Christopher M. Federico.

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Federico, C.M., Hunt, C.V. & Ergun, D. Political Expertise, Social Worldviews, and Ideology: Translating “Competitive Jungles” and “Dangerous Worlds” into Ideological Reality. Soc Just Res 22, 259–279 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11211-009-0097-0

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