Creative Synthesis: A Model of Peer Review, Reflective Equilibrium and Ideology Formation ∗ Hans Noel Associate Professor Georgetown University
[email protected] Department of Government Intercultural Center 681 Washington, D.C. 20057 August 24, 2015 Abstract The formation of ideology can be modeled as a communication game that combines actors' psychological predispositions and their rational self-interest. I argue that we can explain ideo- logical development by modeling the way in which political thinkers reason from first principles, and how they fail to ignore their own psychological and interest-based biases. I begin with a distributive model to provide a structure for people's interests and their psychological traits, and add in a model of reason (Rawls, 2001) to explain how those interests and traits will shape the development of ideology. The model develops the framework, based on the practice of peer review. This framework creates a tournament of potential ideologies and traces whether such a mechanism can explain the development of multiple competing ideologies. ∗Paper prepared for the American Political Science Association's Annual Meeting in San Francisco, Calif., Sept. 3-6, 2015. I would like to thank Kathleen Bawn, Sean Gailmard, Alexander Hirsch, Ethan Kaplan, Ken Kollman, Jeff Lewis, Skip Lupia, Chlo´eYelena Miller, John Patty, Tom Schwartz, Brian Walker, John Zaller and seminar participants at the University of Michigan and Georgetown University for useful advice and comments on earlier versions of this project. \[T]he shaping of belief systems of any range into apparently logical wholes that are credible to large numbers of people is an act of creative synthesis characteristic of only a miniscule proportion of any population." { Philip Converse, The Nature of Belief Systems in Mass Publics, 1964, p.