Ah, I see you want me to use my own words.
I'll get back to you and define it later today. I'm pooped out from editing my tags and I have things to do today so I'll work on this later today.
Sorry that I took a bit longer than planned to define Idealogy for you. Anyway, here's your defination:
Ideology is quite a board defineation: it describes the shared beliefs that any one group may share - be it a nation;
a religous group, or a group of theorists.
There are a great many idealogies out there. Here's a partial list of political idealogies that pertains to this country:
Conservatism: at it's best, a political idelogy that preserves tradtions and insitutions, prefering gradual development
to abrupt change. People with this idalogy want lower taxes, limited goverenment regulation of business and investing,
strong national defense and individual responsibiltiy for personal needs. At it worst, it can become reactionary when
changes are needed to correct percieved problems.
liberalism:
Liberalism: ok, here's my defination: Liberals have a wide range of views but
most support ideas like consitution, Democracy, free and fair trade, secular society and the
market economy.
many who do not profess to be liberals often accept many of these ideas.
A variant of liberalsim is
classical liberalism is commited to limited government, liberty of individuals ike freedom of speech,
religion, speech etc..
Another variant of this idealogy:
social liberalism which is an idealogy that believes the liberal stats should provide people who should
be able to support themselves with the right to work and to earn a living wage. Social liberals believe that the government
should work with the the economy to provide full employment and social welfare and protection of human rights.
A problem with this social liberal idealogy is that it walks a fine line between regulating when needed and being overley involved and it
can require taxes. People with either of the above idealogies are considered
centralists.
There are other idealogies but I think these will suffice for now.
I'd touch on religious and secular idealogies but I don't want to risk the mods' ire. Let it suffice to say that all the idealogies can influnce on how
one may vote or may not vote.
In thinking about idealogies, I think that the issue I have with Washington is not so much idealogies as the partisanship plauging both parties.
BTW, I stopped voting when I noticed that the
Democrats were taking a corporatist approach years ago.