Gaining a deeper understanding of political beliefs with Cognitive Mapping (& R-package)

There is a growing acknowledgement in political science that beliefs play a crucial role in political culture, political decision making and therefore are key to understanding political and policy outcomes. However, studying beliefs is ‘notoriously difficult’ (Kay 2009). This may be partly due to the fact that few methodological techniques are available that were specifically designed to explore political beliefs. The proposed paper will address this issue and take inspiration from political psychology and organisational studies to present the method of Cognitive Mapping (CM) as a valuable addition to the toolbox of political scientists interested in beliefs and their role in politics. CM starts from the premise that belief systems are best conceived as semantic networks that consist of causal and normative relations between ideas (Axelrod 1976; Young 1996; Yang and González-Bailón 2017). Using visualisation techniques as well as graph theory, CM may help scholars gain a deeper understanding of beliefs by revealing the argumentation underlying belief systems as well as establish the centrality, saliency and complexity of beliefs (Van Esch and Snellens online first). Moreover, the technique allows scholars to study the belief systems of political actors in a qualitative and quantitative, deductive and inductive manner and is thus suitable to use in many different types of research projects. Finally, the CM technique can be used to study beliefs at-a-distance - by deriving them from texts or speech acts - as well as be used as a survey tool to query respondents directly (Van Esch, Joosen, and Van Zuydam 2016). To illustrate the various ways in which the technique of Cognitive Mapping may be used to compare, and gain a deeper understanding of political actors’ beliefs, the paper will draw upon a database of cognitive maps of European political and financial leaders and citizens from nine EU member states regarding the Eurozone crisis. Moreover, the paper is accompanied by a newly developed R-package to help scholars to adopt, and use the cognitive mapping technique more easily in their own research. Axelrod, R. (1976) Structure of decision: The cognitive maps of political elites, Princeton: Princeton university press. Kay, A. (2009) 'Understanding policy change as a hermeneutic problem'. Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis 11(1):47-63. Van Esch, F.A.W.J., Joosen, R., and Van Zuydam, S. (2016) 'Responsive to the people? Comparing the European cognitive maps of Dutch political leaders and their followers'. Politics and Governance 4(2):54-67. Van Esch, F.A.W.J. and Snellens, J.F.A. (online first) 'How to ‘measure’ Ideas. Introducing the method of cognitive mapping to the domain of ideational policy studies'. Journal of European Public Policy. Yang, S. and González-Bailón, S. (2017) 'Semantic networks and applications in public opinion research'. The Oxford handbook of political networks:327-53. Young, M.D. (1996) 'Cognitive mapping meets semantic networks'. Journal of Conflict Resolution 40(3):395-414.