the place of ideology

I have been approached

by a publisher about the idea of writing a popular guide to politics for new voters,

in time for the 2004 campaign season. I don’t know if this idea will come to pass,

but it’s interesting.

Perhaps the "ideal citizen" would make an

independent and informed judgment about each issue and also each candidate, and

then vote accordingly. But none of us has the time or energy to do this. Instead,

we use shortcuts to make our voting choices. The most common shortcut, I believe,

is to choose a political identity for oneself: for example, "liberal"

or "conservative," or something somewhat more complicated, like "pro-choice

conservative" or "social liberal/fiscal conservative." We then

learn how to identify the candidates who fit this label, based on clues in their

rhetoric and a few issues that serve as proxies. If we are better-than-average

citizens, then we choose an ideology in a provisional way, trying to stay open-minded

and to understand the merits of alternative views. But we still use ideology as

a cue. CIRCLE surveys show that people

who cannot place themselves on an ideological scale or identify the differences

between Democrats and Republicans also do not vote.

Thus I may propose

to write a book that begins with a quiz, designed to identify the reader’s starting

ideology or political identity. If a reader chooses "don’t know" as

an answer to any question, he or she will be sent to pages in the book that introduce

the relevant issue. Once the reader has completed the quiz and identified a provisional

ideology, the rest of the book will help him or her to (a) think critically about

the pros and cons of this ideology and (b) learn how to identify candidates who

espouse it.

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