چکیده (انگلیسی):

We propose a complex systems approach to the study of political belief systems, to overcome some of the fragmentation in
the current scholarship on ideology . We review relevant work in psychology , sociology , and political science and identify major
cleavages in the literature: the spatial vs. non-spatial divide (ideologies as reducible to a spatially organized set of dimensions
vs. as complex conceptual structures) and the person-group problem (ideologies as driven by psychological needs of individuals
vs. by institutional and power structures of society). We argue that construing ideologies as conceptual networks of
cognitive-affective representations embedded in social networks of people may provide a path for bridging these existing gaps
and epistemological disputes. T ools from cognitive science and computational social science such as cognitive-affective
mapping, connectionist simulations, and agent-based modeling are appropriate methods for a new research program that
substantiates our complex systems perspective on ideology .