A Long Hiatus Indeed

I have difficulty believing that just over a year has passed since last I updated this project.  My duties at Mountain View College have prevented me from adding new content, but this does not mean that I have not continued work on the project. 

For my Introductory American Government course, I have developed a presentation that deals with many of the issues which were explored here on this project.  For those who, despite the year-long absence, are still returning to this project to see if any new work has been done, I shall include a link here to the presentation.  Placed in the context of political cultures and ideologies, this presentation includes material on traditionalism, individualism, and moralism (the political cultures associated with order, liberty, and equality)  as well as material on comparative ideological frameworks, including the Spectrum, the Compass, and LEO space.  A visual representation of LEO space is included, and it appears to be much more complicated than I had first conceived. 

With the fullness of time, I may be able to include a discussion of relative centers within political communities or constitutional frameworks.  A major hypothesis of the LEO model is, after all, that perceptions of ideological preferences vary with the relative ideological center of any given community.  But testing this hypothesis will have to wait for now.

Please see the link below:

Political Cultures and Ideologies (PowerPoint Presentation)

Comments

[JimDesu]

I suspect that this framework as laid out would be a good skeleton for a book (aimed at the layman); I suspect that the introduction of the denizens of negative spaces would be interesting: for example: "Are marxists really EO's, or L-EO+'s?" Likewise, I suspect anarchists aren't merely L+'s, but L+O-'s. Could the determinant of the extremes in fact be the inclusion of the negatives?

I also like the TIM triad as well -- something that marks the relationship between TIM scores and LEO scores would be fascinating.

[JimDesu]

BTW, I haven't studied this stuff, but I wonder if an apt descriptor of Nazism might be TI-M+L+OE-.

[Jonathon York]

There is a difficulty in measuring antipositions. To wit: how to separate the negative LEO references from the positive LEO references.

I have also found that, at least from the wider world of normative political theory, there is someone who looked at political ideology in much the same way. His name is Michael Freeden, and he's the director of the Centre for Political Ideologies at Mansfield College in Oxford. I have a copy of his Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford UP 2003), and although I've only met him once a couple years ago and picked up this book about the same time, I think it might behoove me to get in touch with him.

The TIM triad has been around a while, and is pretty standard in most American Government Survey textbooks. I don't remember who came up with it, but I think you're right; it would be interesting to see the linkages between TIM and LEO. Political cultures, after all, are not ideologies, although they spring from the same general source.