ideology
Definition
Ideology refers to a collective framework that defines enemies, selects targets, legitimises tactics, and supplies the narrative within which personal grievances acquire political meaning. It is not synonymous with motivation: individual actors may arrive at violence through a mix of grievance, belonging, and conviction while still acting in service of a specific ideological vision, as evidenced by patterns of target selection among perpetrators of political violence. Ostensibly new formations are better understood as re-customisations of older traditions whose stable core, including anti-egalitarianism, conspiracism, and the dehumanisation of out-groups, persists beneath rotating aesthetics and vocabularies. Ideologies also function as objects of self-classification: in cross-sectional survey data from UK and Greek adolescents aged 16 to 21, future anxiety was associated with right-conservative ideological self-placement among young men, a pattern replicated across both national samples. The designation of ideological content as mixed or unclear frequently measures the limited literacy of the classifier rather than genuine incoherence in the subject, given the field's declining engagement with the comparative and historical study of violent movements.
Sources: Perliger (2026), Horgan & Shayler (2026), Borghi et al. (2025)
Related Terms
- adolescence (1 shared article)
- emotion regulation (1 shared article)
- future anxiety (1 shared article)
- political attitudes (1 shared article)
- salad bar (1 shared article)
- terrorism (1 shared article)
- extremism (1 shared article)
- violence (1 shared article)
- far-right extremism (1 shared article)
- manifestos (1 shared article)
- political violence (1 shared article)
- violent extremism (1 shared article)
Applications
Ideology and Future Anxiety
Future anxiety, characterised by feelings of pessimism and uncertainty about what lies ahead, is associated with shifts in ideological self-placement among young people. In pre-registered analyses of 988 UK adolescents, and in conceptual replications with 997 Greek adolescents, future anxiety predicted more right-conservative ideological self-classification, but only among young men, with effect sizes of approximately beta = .17 in both countries.
Sources: Borghi et al. (2025)
Ideology and Radicalization
The apparent rise of mixed or incoherent ideological profiles among radicalised individuals has generated over nineteen competing classificatory terms, yet the empirical basis for treating these as genuinely new phenomena remains thin. Rising counts may reflect changes in practitioner classification rather than a true shift in ideological patterns.
Sources: Horgan & Shayler (2026)
Ideology and Political Violence
The inference from motivational heterogeneity at the individual level to ideological absence at the level of the phenomenon is an analytic error with direct consequences for how political violence is classified and responded to. Attackers who select targets consistent with a recognisable ideological framework are not acting randomly, and migration between ideological frameworks over time is evidence of searching rather than evidence that no framework governs conduct.
Sources: Perliger (2026)
