The behavioral study of political ideology and public policy formulation

Political ideology is related to public policy formulation in a scholarly and systematic manner with surprising rarity. This article describes the use of newspaper and journal of opinion editorials as barometers of ideological content and signed digraphs as devices for hypothesis formulation regarding ideological change. Policy formulation for incomes policies in the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administrations and abortion from the 1930s to the present are used to illustrate the utility of these approaches.