Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Two fundamental aspects of political life in advanced industrial democracies the world over are people's ideological preferences and their economic orientations. The interaction between these two factors helps organize citizens' value orientations and issue beliefs since there are several different ideological perspectives that people can have about the appropriate role for the involvement of government in managing a nation's economy. These distinctive ideological impulses range from extremely liberal (or “left”) preferences favoring equality through more state control over the production, distribution, and pricing of a society's goods to extremely conservative (or “right”) beliefs preferring individual freedom through allowing the market to control the production, distribution, and price decisions in a society. The relationship between ideological preferences and economic orientations is important because they inform citizens' political choices and behavior. In order to understand how the dynamic and varying ways these concepts have been integrated in modern democracies, it is necessary to (1) define ideology and explain the general beliefs that make up important ideological perspectives; (2) define economy and describe various prominent economic systems; (3) illustrate the ways in which ideological preferences and economic orientations have commingled; (4) describe how issue preferences, ... log in or subscribe to read full text