ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a wider variety of ideological positions than exists in the United States Senate. It explores the interrelation between cognitive style and political ideology in this elite political sample. The chapter also provides the integrative complexity coding system to analyze confidential interviews with 89 members of the British House of Commons. According to the ideologue hypothesis, adherents of movements of the left and right are much more similar to each other in cognitive style than they are to individuals near the center of the political spectrum. One interesting implication of the model is that a reciprocal causal relation exists between cognitive style and political ideology. Differences in the content of left-wing and right-wing belief systems should not be allowed to obscure fundamental similarities in how ideologues organize and process political information. "True believers" are more likely to view issues in rigid, dichotomous terms than are individuals who take less extreme or polarized political positions.
