The subject of this study is the analytical gap between social-psychological approaches to ideology, which explain why individuals gravitate toward certain ideological poles, and the morphological analysis of ideological systems, which describes the structure of fully formed ideologies. The starting point is Philip Converse’s classic problem of the fragmentation of mass belief systems and the low constraint of political attitudes. The aim of the article is to substantiate the concept of the cognitive-ideological matrix (CIM) as an independent analytical level between psychological dispositions and fully formed ideologies, to systematically demarcate this concept from related theoretical constructs, and to formulate criteria for its falsification. The methodology includes critical literature review, critical conceptual analysis, and theoretical construction. The explanatory capabilities and limitations of the theory of motivated social cognition (J.T. Jost), the dual-process motivational model (J. Duckitt, C.G. Sibley), the Receive-Accept-Sample model (J. Zaller), the domain-general psychology of ideology (L. Zmigrod), and morphological analysis (M. Freeden) are analyzed. It is shown that none of the existing approaches describes the mechanism of transition from disparate psychological dispositions to specific configurations of ideological elements in mass consciousness. The main result is the substantiation of the CIM concept, which describes a pre-reflexive environment for the formation of proto-elements of political ideologies, characterized by tolerance for contradiction, and the presence of flickering and migrating concepts. A demarcation of CIM from functionally similar concepts is conducted: habitus and doxa (P. Bourdieu), Lebenswelt (A. Schutz), cognitive-affective maps, and implicit attitudes. The scientific novelty lies in the systematic positioning of CIM within the landscape of the global debate on ideological thinking, which has not been previously undertaken. Three falsification criteria are formulated, and operational procedures for empirical verification are proposed. The results are applicable to political psychology, the sociology of ideologies, and research on mass political consciousness. Conclusions: CIM enables a reinterpretation of Converse’s problem, integrates motivational, informational, and morphological models of ideology through the concept of an environment preceding decontestation, and opens prospects for empirical testing of hypotheses about the pre-reflexive foundations of ideologies.
Mikhail Sergeevich Konstantinov (Sun,) studied this question.