Measuring ideology along one continuum penalizes people who don’t organize attitudes unidimensionally.

Evidence

In particular, a measure of issue orientation based on a series of issue positions aggregated according to their relationship to a liberal/conservative continuum runs the risk of penalizing those respondents who, in fact, do not structure their attitudes along that dimension. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2014

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the broader critique of unidimensional left-right ideology measurement across the political psychology literature.