Measuring ideology: Current practices, consequences, and recommendations by Dr Flávio Azevedo

About the speaker

Flávio is a Fulbright Fellow and research associate at Friedrich Schiller University, Germany. His research in Political Psychology focuses on ideology, its measurement & theory, as well as on the psychological roots of ideological endorsement. Flavio is the principal investigator of the PBBS, a series of studies informing psychological explanations of political attitudes, values, voting, and participation. Flavio co-founded and directs FORRT, an award-winning grassroots interdisciplinary international organization aiming to integrate open and reproducible research training into higher education.

About the talk

Political ideologies are foundational to a broad range of social science fields, and when applied to research, scholars have used diverse and wide-ranging approaches to its measurement. We sought to investigate standard practices by conducting an exhaustive literature review of >400 scientific articles, spanning from the 1930s to 2020s. We identified a high proportion of unique, non-validated, on-the-fly measures with little to no content overlap suggesting scholars may not be justified in generalizing findings across studies. We test this empirically by applying different ideological instruments to established & replicated theories to show empirically that results indeed can change as a function of the measure. We then discuss its consequences and recommendations.