The three traditions of ideological analysis and the levels-of-analysis problem

In his chapter, Jonathan Leader Maynard offers an in-depth exploration of the “levels of analysis” problem in the context of three traditions of enquiry, namely the “positivist, critical, and interpretive” approaches to understanding ideologies. Maynard argues that as different modes of enquiry ask different kinds of questions about ideology, they implicitly operate at different levels of analysis. The levels of analysis identified here are the macro, meso, micro and nano. This way of thinking about ideology analysis allows us to form a matrix relating different modes of enquiry to different levels of ideological operation. Yet the tendencies of different approaches to focus on different levels are often “theoretically arbitrary and rooted in disciplinary habits”, which suggests that, if analysts in these traditions were to focus on previously neglected levels, new and potentially fruitful, avenues of enquiry would open.