Commentary on Gries, Muller and Jost’s “The Market for Belief Systems: A Formal Model of Ideological Choice”

In the wake of increasing political polarization in the American body politic, and the rise of populist and authoritarian leaders more generally around the world, there has been a great deal of renewed attention to the nature and function of political ideology. Particularly in light of the recent insurrection in the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021, and the precipitating and ensuing public debate surrounding the big lie espoused by many Republicans arguing that Trump won the 2020 election, political pundits and academics are increasingly asking how we can make politics less polarized and conflictual. The subtext in much of this discussion revolves around how best to persuade people to change their ideology to allow the possibility for greater political and social compromise. Into this fraught public and academic debate, Greis et al. offer a formalized model of ideological choice drawing on methods from economics in an effort to increase our understanding of how people decide which ideologies are best suited to their psychological and consumption needs, couched in terms of both supply and demand. This approach strives to combine psychological factors as well as economic principles to create a cohesive model of choice. In this way, Greis et al. explicitly approach the problem of how people select an ideology as a problem of decision making under conditions of uncertainty. This draws upon, and expands, earlier theoretical and empirical work by Jost and colleagues (Jost, Federico, & Napier, 2009; Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloway, 2003; Jost, van der Linden, Panagopoulos, & Hardin, 2018) that explored the effects of uncertainty on the development of conservative political beliefs in particular. There is much to applaud about this paper. As with any formal model, the challenge, of course, lies in the empirical accuracy of the assumptions posited. These challenges, to employ the authors’ categories, fall into both demand and supply side categories. What is noteworthy in the current model is not so much what is included as what is left out. Notably, much of this model seems readily applicable to the recent Trump phenomena, but it remains unclear how well it generalizes beyond seeking to explain the nature of his support. Finally, it is worth considering at least one obvious addition, if not alternative, to the nature of ideological choice that derives from the critical nature of community for both physical and emotional survival. This consideration can be incorporated in light of a different weighting for multi attribute choice. This brief commentary proceeds along these lines.