A conceptual framework for ideology in online discourse beyond the left and right

Computational social science (CSS) has largely operationalized ideology along a single left/right partisan axis when studying online discourse. This approach obscures how people interpret and engage with more specific ideological formations related to race, climate, gender, and other domains. We introduce a framework that instead conceptualizes ideology as a multi-level socio-cognitive concept network and then explain how this conceptual model of ideology can be linked to the study of online discourse. In doing so, our framework clarifies how ideology manifests in discourse alongside related social processes such as framing, and provides an argument for better understanding of when and why we might study multiple concepts, such as values and beliefs, together in one analysis. More broadly, it bridges methods used to study online discourse with ideology theory, enabling richer analyses of social discourse that benefit both fields. Although primarily theoretical, we provide a concrete operationalization of the framework on a sample of data, allowing us to show one example of how it can be used on real data.