Noel - Political Ideologies and Political Parties in America

I have been working on this book for a very long time.

I think it may have started when I was a high school senior at Gresham Union High School, and I refused to write an assigned paper on the grounds that it assumed an exogenous, unidimensional policy space.

The teacher, Bill Tattam, did not use that jargon, of course. Neither did I. But the assignment asked us to consider two specific issues, and then, with the aid of political magazines arrayed from left to right across the back of the classroom, discuss the positions taken by communists, socialists, liberals, conservatives, reactionaries, and fascists on each of those issues. I didnt think this should be done because I felt that ideology was socially constructed (again, without the jargon) and ultimately an inaccurate way to understand political opinions. I instead wrote an essay explaining why this meant the entire project was a sham.

My position on the nature of ideology has evolved a lot since high school. I no longer think that it is inappropriate to ask what liberals or conservatives believe on issues. Indeed, it is critical to ask, and to ask carefully. Once I arrived at that conclusion, this project was under way. That makes Mr. Tattam the first person to have influenced this project.

The last has to be my wife, Chloe Yelena Miller, who has been my most enthusiastic supporter, even when I found the project frustratingly incomplete. Chloe has dutifully read every chapter, with the eye of a poet, not a social scientist. It is a clich to say that one could not have completed a project without ones spouse. Fortunately, as I am not a poet, I have license to use clichs.

I have been working on this book in many different places.

Between starting the project while in graduate school at UCLA and completing it as an assistant professor at Georgetown University, I have logged time at the Center for the Study of Democratic Politics at Princeton University and as a Robert Wood Johnson Scholar in Health Policy Research at the University of Michigan. My time at the CSDP was perhaps the most rewarding in terms of working on this project, and perhaps of all my career. At Michigan, this project was both advanced and delayed by my time spent as an RWJ Fellow. Advanced because this project was my primary task at the time, but delayed because much of my time was spent opening up new lines of research that I still have not yet fully explored.

Over that time, and in all those places, I have been working on this book with the guidance and support of many different people, only some of whom I can mention here. All remaining errors and limitations are of course my own.