COLLECTIVE ACTION, SOCIAL DILEMMAS AND IDEOLOGY

Despite their diversity, political ideologies divide along a limited n umber of fault lines, including individualism versus collectivism, and authoritarianism versus democracy. Drawing on contemporary theories o f collective action and game theory, this paper proposes a theoretic a ccount of ideology that is based on the hypothesis that ideologies ser ve primarily to reconcile potential conflicts between individual and c ollective interests that arise in the course of collective action and other forms of social cooperation. The analysis concludes that five ty pes of ideology are fundamental, each of which corresponds to a distin ct form of social dilemma.