Ideology research salvaged its concept by shifting to elites, polarized countries, and analytic thinkers.

Evidence

McGuire himself (1985) listed several strategies for salvaging the concept of ideology, including: (a) improving the statistical reliability of attitude measures; (b) sampling involved and educated respondents rather than uninvolved and uneducated respondents; (c) sampling political elites rather than the mass public; (d) conducting studies in countries that are more ideologically polarized and therefore more likely to yield meaningful ideological differences than in the United States; (e) investigating ideology in people of certain personality types, including analytical thinkers, high need for cognition types, political activists, and extremists; (f) focusing more on affect (or emotion) in political ideology; and (g) considering liberalism and conservatism as orthogonal dimensions, as Kerlinger (1984) has advocated. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 125

Categorization

• DEFINE: Lists the concrete methodological rescue strategies for the troubled construct of political ideology.
• XREF: Kerlinger’s orthogonal liberal-conservative dimensions speaks to the two-dimensional political-spectrum discussions common in media commentary. — connects to: Ideological constraint declines sharply and non-elite publics hold disconnected idea clusters. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology: Key Readings, 1875