Proposed definition of ideology

One of the things we've been struggling with is an operationalization of the term "ideology." I've reviewed some materials this morning, and I'd like to suggest a definition used by Teun van Dijk, who has been doing work in this area for several years.

Van Dijk sees ideology as playing an important role in the social representations shared by members of a group (1998, p. 8). According to van Dijk, ideology is not necessarily a person’s individual beliefs, but instead makes up “socially shared, general beliefs” (1998, p. 32). It is important to note that van Dijk says these are basic social beliefs, but that they are actually “rooted in the general beliefs of whole societies or cultures” (1998, p. 314). He says that discourse has an important role in the reproduction of ideology — which is good for us as we'll be looking at mass media messages. He also says that ideologies regulate and organize the knowledge and attitudes of a group. Once again, this could be useful in our research. (More on the discussed theoretical aspects later.)

Van Dijk says that "ideologies form the basis of belief systems or social representations of specific groups." This definition would work well for out study, as we are looking at specific groups — Democrat and Republican parties — and their espoused ideologies.

I propose that we all three read van Dijk's latest publication about this. It's really not a difficult read, and quite applicable to our subject. Here's the cite: van Dijk, T. (2001). Discourse, Ideology and Context. Folia Linguistica, Vol. 35, Issue 1/2, p. 11 (30). There is a full text copy available.

I'm still working through the articles that Pete collected and sent to me yesterday. I'll comment on those as soon as I can.