Political partisans, who know a lot about politics, tend to be so, well, one dimensional in their thinking. That's because they are.

From The dimensionality of politics by Emil O. W. Kirkegaard.  The subheading is It's a big mess.

Kirkegaard makes me a little nervous sometimes because you never quite know where he will end up.  Ultimately, though, that is a good thing.  He broadly follows the evidence within the context of solid reasoning.

And sometimes he tackles something that really bothers me and brings some clarity.  In this case the mono-dimensional interpretation of politics on a Left - Right continuum (or Liberal versus Conservative or Democrat versus Republicans.)  It is such a useless distillation of great complexity.

He cites Carmines, E. G., Ensley, M. J., & Wagner, M. W. (2012, October). Political ideology in American politics: one, two, or none?. In The Forum (Vol. 10, No. 3). De Gruyter.  Go to Kirkegaard's article for all the links).

Are Americans ideological, and if so, what are the foundations of their ideology? According to Converse’s seminal view, whatever the case in other western democracies and despite its centrality to traditional versions of textbook democracy, the American public is distinctly non-ideological. Our objective is to compare the standard and by far most widely used measure of political ideology—a measure that presumes ideology is one-dimensional—to a more recent measure that allows for a multi-dimensional conception and measurement. This measure demonstrates that while American political elites compete across a single dimension of conflict, the American people organize their policy attitudes around two distinct dimensions, one economic and one social. After explaining how we derived the measure and how it can be used to develop five separate ideological groups, we show how these groups differ politically and why it is not possible to map their preferences onto a one-dimensional measure of ideology.

Kirkegaard has many other citations, so read the whole thing.  

Conclusions

Political ideology cannot generally be reduced to 1 dimension without massive loss of information and probably substantial chance of misinterpretation.

Political ideology doesn't even work the same way, as in, have the same structure across countries.

Correlates of political ideology don't work the same way across countries either, such as fondness of protesting.

Political knowledge influences ideology structure so that it becomes more 1 dimensional. This is why political partisans, who know a lot about politics, tend to be so, well, one dimensional in their thinking. That's because they are.

This also suggests that studying people who defy this trend might be very interesting. That's the radical center or resolute center, higher political knowledge yet not so 1 dimensional.

Trying to predict the politics of people who are not interested in it will be mostly futile as their policy preferences are highly random (low correlations to each other).

Theories of political action and actors based on a 1 dimensional model are somewhat suspect. 

 

Much of this discussion ties to another thing which demonstrates impoverished thinking - the conviction that every person has an identity and that that is a racial identity.  It is strikingly errant nonsense and one of that class of ideas so well characterized by George Orwell, "There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them."  

Or, alternatively, the idea characterized by Wolfgang Pauli, "That is not only not right; it is not even wrong."

When it comes to identities, we are all students of Walt Whitman, "I am large, I contain multitudes." 

Some people may identify by race (more likely ethnicity) but far more weighty identities are parenthood, marriage status, profession, education, part of country, hobby, religion, neighborhood, etc.  We can, and do, identify serially and intermittently by many different identities and to single out a single continuum is an error (as is choosing race as the only relevant identity) just as the single continuum political models are profoundly wrong.