Scientific Justification

This paper is a strong replication target because it makes broad claims about the coherence of mass ideology and the empirical linkage between neoliberal attitudes, economic conservatism, and system-justifying orientations. Using survey data from the United States and United Kingdom, it argues against a long-standing position that ordinary citizens are “innocent” of ideology and against the claim that free-market attitudes are negatively associated with authoritarianism. Instead, the article reports robust positive associations between economic conservatism / neoliberalism and right-wing authoritarianism, social dominance orientation, and system justification. These are theoretically central claims for political psychology and ideology research, and they bear directly on debates about ideological symmetry, dimensionality, and the psychological organization of elite versus mass belief systems. Because the article challenges prior assumptions and relies on multiple instruments and correlational patterns, it is a good candidate for direct and constructive replication.

Data Location

Data isn't open.

Suggested Robustness Checks

There might be possibility of robustness checks following the below analysis pipeline, if contacting first-author.

Suggested Deviations

A useful deviation would be a replication using different datasets like GSS, Netscape, and other available data, as well as multi-country replication that explicitly compares the article findings (beyond US/UK) and towards other with more diverse political settings and cultures, including global south. Another idea would be to vary it across liberal market economies, coordinated market economies, and less consolidated party systems. This would help determine whether the intertwining of social and economic ideology is a general feature of capitalist societies or is more contingent on Anglo-American political structures, elite discourse, and partisan sorting. Suggested analysis pipeline - Estimate the main associations including operationalizations of economic conservatism, social conservatism, and neoliberal ideology. - Test whether the correlations remain similar across levels of political sophistication, education, and partisan strength. - Apply and discuss critical lenses on the consequences of inferences on political sophistication, education, and partisan strength. - Compare latent-variable versus observed-score approaches (and compare their effect sizes) to ideological structure (to address longstanding criticism of these models in Political Science literature. - Examine whether the reported alignment between social and economic attitudes depends on scale composition. - Examine the psychological nomological network across left-right, and test whether there is (or not) ideological affinities or asymmetries across left/right (and also broken-down by social and economic left-right). - Assess cross-national robustness beyond the United States and United Kingdom, especially in multiparty systems where economic and cultural issue bundles are less tightly aligned.