Basic ideological schemas organize political cognition into rational behavior

Evidence

In our estimation, the use of such basic dimensions of judgment as the liberalconservative continuum betokens a contextual grasp of politics that permits a wide range of more specific idea-elements to be organized into more tightly constrained wholes. We feel, furthermore, that there are many crucial consequences of such organization: With it, for example, new political events have more meaning, retention of political information from the past is far more adequate, and political behavior increasingly approximates that of sophisticated “rational” models, which assume relatively full information. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1911

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Converse’s ‘nature of belief systems’ and the broader finding that most citizens lack ideological constraint — here reframed as a prerequisite for rational-model politics.